How can we foster resilience in clients who have experienced trauma?
A person’s response to trauma is often to lock away the parts that were wounded by their experience.
But that can leave them feeling protective and fragile – and fearful about being triggered again.
In the video below, Richard Schwartz, PhD shows how working with a client’s inner parts can strengthen their resilience. Take a look – it’s less than 5 minutes.
What are some ways you’ve helped clients work with the parts of themselves that have been hurt by trauma?
Please leave a comment below.
For me, helping a client understand the effect of their trauma on their belief system, coupled with understanding and processing the underlying emotion and linguistic associations to their trauma. The reactive part of themselves I find, often comes from the hurt child, and the repeated negative/limiting belief they hold as adults, simply is there because of repetition. Helping them understand this, also empowers them to heal that younger version of themselves, which allows the present self to challenge limiting beliefs or even false beliefs of themselves.
EMDR, naming the trauma, journaling, positive regard, verbal scripts, unlocking strengths from the “pieces in exile”. PTG
I am not a Dr. I am an English woman in the u.s. who has lived fifteen years with an extremely alcoholic..that I managed to heal from physical drinking.Realizing that the main reason for his fallng from corporate into drinking was caused by extreme child abandonment/ physical child abuse…that he has never recovered from.creating a false self that has left him scared and inunauthentic.
I would so like to communicate more on this incredible subject.
In my opinion, enhancing vitamin means to do with individual data is without a doubt sooner or later as many as the actual to bring a.
I like the phrase “brittle resilience” as I see it often. Not exiling the vulnerable parts but embracing them with love is “real resilience”.
As parent and a therapist I feel the need to show others how these parts can be held and healed so they can revive the playful loving parts in themselves.
There’s such a fear of reliving the trauma and even being contagious with it.
But the shut down states are also so life limiting.
Thanks, I enjoyed this.
EMDR. Chair work. Light trance.
I agree with Dr. Swartz’ approach. Yet, I have patients who are resistent to this kind of perspective and have great difficulty implementing it. Some deeply wounded patients are very disconnected from their bodies and their emotions because they have done a good job in doing so, that to connect in this way seems difficult if not impossible.
The video was very good and i was able to reflect on two particular clients where play and fun have been used. I have used desk top toys, sand tray, teaching positive play with their children and positive affirations given when the person has tryed something new i.e. mountain biking, playing with sex toy alone etc. The power to engage and find ‘self’ is rewarding on so many levels to enrich their lives.
I absolutely LOVE IFS parts work with my clients. It’s a non-pathological model that embraces not labels that what one might think is a “bad, destructive part” … but embraces all parts of the system. They started inherently pure and good, but through trauma that enters the system may shift a role of a part to a ‘mean protector” that is “protecting” a very wounded and traumatize parts (an exile).
I am also a certified EMDR therapist and I love how these two models work so smoothly together.
The other part of IFS that I respect, it calls upon the clinician to do their own IFS work to allow them to step aside and be there present, moment by moment, with the client and his/her parts.
Thank you. Resilience is so important and it’s interesting to hear Richard’s take on parts. Structural dissociation is also another way to look at parts that I find helpful.
Richard’s words again remind me that it’s often / usually MY ‘Parts’ that restricts loving and effective therapy.. His mantra “…would you [a bandwidth hogging part] be willing to step aside so I can be present” is more and more useful to me – and, I’m beginning to notice, my clients.
So, this is one very important way I help clients hurt by trauma – by becoming present first, during and at the closing of a session.
Please contact Tian Dayton PhD. She is an EXCPTIONAL PSYCHODRAMATIST.. has written many books and has videos on Psychodrama – the ORIGINAL parts therapy.
I would love to see Psychodrama honored for the place it plays in Parts Therapy, Group Psychotherapy, Sociodrama – the drama of the group or community, Gestalt, empty chair etc.
I help people work with their parts though projective identification and dramatic exploration. ( Bessel wasn’t the first to use drama!)
I am a psychodramatist in New Zealand and I work with deeply traumatised people both individually and in a group using psychodrama which has its basis in Role Theory and the idea that everyone has inside them a Creative Genius. Dr J L Moreno was working with these ideas of “parts” therapy starting in 1920’s. I too would love to see psychodrama honoured and acknowledged for being the foundation of many therapeutic methods.
Ali
The Moreno effect. He developed so many new and innovated ways of working and many people borrowed them and developed them further. Some respected where their developments came from. Others claimed it , sadly. My training in the 80’s embraced his work and I feel respect for how it keeps helping open things up when things get tough. Along with so many of the early developers and adventurers in this world of the unconscious
I am often aware of the trauma of toxic shame and. How crippling it can be.
Thank you Ruth and Richard. May I mention the interconnectedness of the loss of a loved one, or a situation, with self health recovery? It was this basic insight, over forty years ago, arising from linking the perspectives of my career in mechanical engineering and vacuum atomic physics, and a coincidental familiarity with Tibetan meditational breathing (a.k.a. pranayama) that enabled me to cure forever my own so-called incurable and persistent (trauma induced?) back pain without pills and manipulations; and incidentally transcend the sceptical ridicule that (still) persecutes serious mind-body researchers. I am now preparing another monograph – not about vacuum physics, but about self health practices at the boundaries of science and spirituality, as a travel-free way of sharing these insights. Just imagine how happy, wealthy and wise, one can be by following the practices of mind-body self health care? Is this the future – with pills as alternative medicine?
If I can help my clients find the child that was wounded in them and love that child for all the creative ways they attempted to control their universe there is movement. Recognizing that their creativity and survival was a gift for a season but it no longer works. Like an old pair of shoes that was comfortable and protected their feet at the time but they no longer fit no matter how much they loved them. So put them on the shelf and remember their comfort but seek to try on new ones that may be more functional now. Some will give blisters and maybe not work, some are too high or not enough support, but with persistence and support there will be a good fit. And one size does not fit all! Word pictures seem to work well with men especially.
I have tried to help them understand that bad things happen to everyone; that what happened to them was not visited upon them because they, somehow, invited it. I encourage them to “lick their wounds” for a period of time, but them go about the business of trying to recover the essence of who they were before the trauma. I have them start with showing compassion and kindness to themselves, recognizing that they survived the trauma (which demonstrates the strength that still resides in them), and then start back doing things that they enjoy and are good at. I, also, encourage them to remember that they are loved by family and friends and that if they are feeling isolated that they might be the ones doing the isolating, ….so go to the person who loves them the most and seek comfort and reassurance of the love and then extend out to others in their lives. I do remind them that they may not recover 100% of who they were, but with love, self-compassion and work they can become 100% of the wonderful person they will be.
Thank you for posting this brief interview of Dr. Schwartz… Just work in so many ways is so very similar and complementary to the work of matrix we in printing, and energy psychology approach that works directly with these parts, although in this work and they are known as ECHOs… going back and finding those traumatized, dissociated parts that occurred during adverse and Trumatic events, using imagination, dissociation, and regulation of that part via somatic topic and then discovering the attitudes and decisions that were made at the time, then working with creating a juxtaposition experience to engage the memory consolidation process are integral part of the MR work. Through a variety of ways of resourcing that the younger inner part, can we get words that needed to happen said but never were at Cetera and allowing for a regaining of the beautiful characteristics which Dr. Schwartz spoke of that that younger self had them hidden away from us, Like beauty and joy and spontaneity etc. all with the attempt of protecting us from the memories and feelings of the trauma. Thank you Dr. Schwartz for your work and thank you NICABM for bringing this work to the mainstream.
Spot on, Dr. Schwartz. Survivors often call that essence that lies underneath the parts the “Truth teller.” The One who knows all of the truths, sees all of it, and can help heal the parts. That Truth teller can become the foundation for a recovering and developing adult part/personality and reach out to the parts to hear the pain of their story, help them heal, and, in effect, re-parent those parts. Accessing the parts, experiencing the emotions of each part and then seeking out that part to rescue and restore that child to safety are critical. The developing adult part/personality is better able to reframe what happened and make conscious choices about the schemas the parts embraced.
I think what stalls most survivors in recovery is that therapists too often view their clients as somehow broken and ultimately unfixable. Unfortunately, that is all about them, not their client, but that belief bleeds into their clients. These survivors are the strongest known quantity in the Universe – they survived as children. We must reach out to the Truth teller and assist her/him/it to own its own power and strength. For some clients, that has meant visualizing the Truth Teller as “Warrior Woman” or “the Hulk” or whatever strikes their imaginative fancy.
Keep up the great work!
Transactional Analysis calls these parts “ego states” and we recognise fixated (rigid) ego states caused by trauma. Someone with a repressed traumatic experience with the accompanying emotions and beliefs can be assisted to access that ego state in the safety of a strong therapeutic relationship and to reframe the traumatizing experience. This process allows new decisions to be made about that precious, vulnerable ego state (part) so that it can be owned, loved and re-integrated within the whole self.
I read Richard Schwartz’s book many years ago. I believe that “Parts work” is an essential tool for healing. I don’t use any one tool with all clients, even traumatized clients. However, having a variety of tools has proven invaluable and I highly recommend using this approach not only with many traumatized clients but also with those who feel pulled in different directions.