Do you ever get the feeling that something isn’t quite right?

On paper your life looks great: partner, job, hobbies you enjoy, good friends, family, and yet you have a sense of dissatisfaction, unease, confusion or an inability to properly relax and enjoy the present.

Often these feelings can be connected to experiences from our past. Trauma-informed therapy is an approach to counselling that recognises how experiences of trauma can affect the way we think, feel, behave and respond to situations in the present.

Trauma isn’t always caused by one obvious or dramatic event. It can also develop over time, particularly when events cause us to feel unable to escape, protect ourselves or make sense of what is happening.

When we experience something threatening, our body’s natural response is to protect us. Our nervous system may activate a fight, flight or freeze response, preparing us to deal with danger. Some of us are really good at restoring the balance, calming down our nervous systems, and stashing the memories into the ‘processed’ part of our brains. But for some of us the traumatic feelings stay forefront in our minds, and our nervous systems stay primed ready for action.

You might find yourself constantly on edge, worrying that something will go wrong, struggling to relax, becoming overwhelmed by criticism, or reacting emotionally before you’ve had time to think things through.

How Can Trauma Affect Us in Everyday Life?

One of the difficult things about trauma is that you don’t always consciously know what is causing your reaction. You might understand logically that you are safe, while your body seems to be telling you something completely different. A particular comment from your partner, for example, might leave you feeling ashamed or panicked. You may know intellectually that they weren’t attacking you, but your body reacts as though you are under threat.

These reactions can be understood as emotional flashbacks: intense feelings and body responses fuelled by earlier experiences, even when you aren’t consciously remembering the original event.

An Example: How Trauma Shows Up

Let’s use ‘Jake’ as an example. He has a job he enjoys, a wife, two children and a dog. This is the life he always wanted, but he isn’t happy. He constantly feels that he isn’t doing enough. There is a persistent fear that he could lose everything overnight, and this leaves him feeling anxious and unable to relax. During counselling, Jake begins to uncover some of the messages he received during childhood.

His father frequently told him that he wasn’t trying hard enough. He said if Jake didn’t get good grades at school, he wouldn’t get a good job, wouldn’t earn enough money and then nobody would want to marry him. He also remembers the pressure he experienced at school, where anything less than an A felt like failure. As a child, whenever his father was angry or disappointed with him, Jake experienced a strong physical response. He tensed up, held his breath, tried to disappear and felt overwhelmed by shame. At school he frequently felt like this, whenever he didn’t achieve an ‘A’. So his body carried this trauma and continued to respond in this way when triggered by other sources too. Even though he got the grades, the job and the wife, he is still wired to feel like he is failing.

If his wife says something like ‘gah… this kitchen is such a mess’, Jake instantly feels that it is his fault, he didn’t try hard enough and has failed as a husband. He goes to a place of shame, fuelled by the memories still active from his childhood. Through therapy, he can gain the awareness he needs to understand those feelings for what they are: emotional flashbacks, not feelings related to the present day. The therapy has brought the memories into his awareness, but contained them in the counselling room so he has not had to face them alone, allowing him to explore them and perhaps reject the messages that he no longer needs to carry with him: that he doesn’t try hard enough and is destined to fail.

He has found ways to cope with the shame so that it doesn’t ruin his day, and he has an understanding which gives him a choice as to how he now deals with the feelings when they arrive unbidden.

The added bonus is that the counselling has affected those around him too. He is careful not to put pressure on his children to achieve good grades, and he is able to step back and hear his wife complain about the state of the kitchen without feeling responsible or like it is all his fault. He can stay grounded and provide an adult solution to the problem, ‘oh yes it has got into a mess, we can tackle it together when the children are in bed’, rather than his old defensive reaction. The situation hasn’t changed. But Jake’s relationship with his emotional response has.

What Happens in Trauma-Informed Therapy?

There isn’t one single type of trauma-informed therapy. Instead, trauma-informed therapy describes an approach that takes the effects of trauma into account.

A trauma-informed therapist will consider your individual history, boundaries, sense of safety and readiness to explore difficult experiences.

This means you don’t necessarily have to talk about traumatic experiences in detail straight away, or at all.

Therapy may help you:

• Understand your emotional and physical responses.
• Recognise triggers and patterns.
• Develop ways to manage difficult emotions.
• Understand how past experiences may be affecting your present life.
• Explore difficult experiences at a manageable pace.
• Challenge beliefs or messages that you no longer want to carry.
• Develop greater awareness and choice in how you respond.

The aim isn’t simply to uncover painful memories. It is to help you understand yourself and make changes that support the life you want to live now.

Could Trauma-Informed Therapy Help You?

Perhaps you find yourself constantly worrying, struggling to relax, feeling disproportionately affected by criticism, experiencing intense shame, or repeating patterns that you don’t fully understand.

Perhaps your life looks fine from the outside, but internally you don’t feel that way.

At You Me Us Counselling, we offer counselling and psychotherapy in Heworth and Copmanthorpe in York, as well as online, providing a confidential space to explore your life at your own pace.

If you would like to find out more, you can read more about our trauma-informed therapy or book an introductory consultation.