Am I Fully Healed Yet?
Many people, myself included, initially come to therapy with what is called a “medical model” of what therapy is all about. The basic premise is something like this:
If you are suffering from your thoughts, feelings, or behaviors then you have a medical condition and you need to see a doctor who will fix that medical condition and then you will be fully healthy again.
Seems simple enough, and it aligns with our vision for how physiological health works too. There are strengths to this view of psychotherapy and ways that it can be a useful way to think about the therapeutic process, however, there are also some serious shortcomings and unintended negative consequences.
Don’t Go to Court
A common and distressing outcome for people who are in recovery from chronic childhood trauma is the sense that we have a hard time feeling confident about our interpretations of own experiences without validation from someone else. For example, maybe we had to give a presentation to a group of people about a topic in which we have experience, or perhaps we are assigned some kind of project or piece of work to complete that we know how to do, but we might feel very anxious about our performance afterwards and, despite our experience and capability, have a hard time believing that we did a good job without reassurance from the people around us that we were successful (and even then maybe still doubt it!).
Self Care is a Revolutionary Act for Child Trauma Survivors
For adult survivors of neglectful, abusive or otherwise harmful parenting, one of the messages we likely received in our childhood experience is that our feelings and needs do not matter.
Healing the Inner Child
Inner child healing, reparenting, gentle parenting, soul wounds…we hear these terms thrown around nearly daily by therapists, life coaches, yogis, the cashier at Starbucks…but what does any of it actually mean? Who is the inner child and why does it need reparenting?