9 ways I processed my own trauma without psychiatry
Dr Jess answers a personal question from a follower about her own techniques to process lifelong trauma
This question was submitted by a follower recently, and I am pleased to be able to write about this in my diary this week.
“What techniques have you used to process all your own trauma, if you don’t use psychiatry?”
Processing trauma is a highly individual journey. There is no magic bullet. There is no cure for all. We are all completely individual in our minds, bodies and spirits - and our traumas were all individual too. This means there are literally millions of combinations of ways our traumas could impact us and manifest for us.
I am going to list 9 of the ways I processed so much trauma, and then I’m going to rate them based on how difficult they were to use, and how effective they were, out of 5.
Difficulty:
0 - not at all difficult
5 - extremely difficult
Effectiveness:
0 - did not work at all
5 - worked exceptionally well
The 9 techniques I am going to discuss in this article are:
Therapy
Writing
Confrontation
Reading and learning
Music
Exposure
Logical reasoning
Blaming the perpetrator
Letting go
My techniques
Therapy
Difficulty: 2/5
Effectiveness: 3/5
I’ve had lots of different forms of therapy over the years. The last time I had any personal therapy was around 2019, I think. I’m not frightened of therapy in any form, so I access it when I know I need it. It doesn’t feel like a scary ‘going to therapy’ for me, it just feels like I want the space to offload or process something privately with someone, so I go and pay for that space to do so.
That said, on reflection, I’m not sure therapy has been that effective for me, personally. I can think of a few things that really clicked into place with the words of an experienced therapist nudging me towards a realisation, but I’ve also had some pretty terrible therapy too. I’ve had therapists I would never see again, and would never recommend to a living soul.
I think we need therapy in different ways and at different points - and I think lots of us don’t need traditional therapy at all. We are just told we do, and we believe it. I definitely needed therapy when I was much younger because I genuinely needed the space to work through some big feelings that I didn’t understand yet.
However, I realised later down the line that I didn’t get anything positive from reliving or retelling traumatic stories to a therapist who sort of sits there and nods sympathetically and asks me how I feel about it. It didn’t even feel like cathartic release. It just felt like torture.
I did train as a CBT therapist when I was 25, and I don’t use my qualification to practice, but I did find some of that interesting to use on myself. I wasn’t hugely impressed by the theory or the approaches, which is one of the reasons I never went into practical work as a clinician. I also explored solution focussed therapies when I was working frontline with men, and found that could be very successful with people who were more solution focussed in their thinking about problems. I certainly can be like that at times, so that has worked for me too.
I think overall, it’s been a mixed experience. Therapy has helped in some ways, but in others I found it to be annoying, invalidating and unhelpful. I think that will be the same for everyone - it’s hit and miss - sometimes because the therapist is totally incompetent; and sometimes because it just doesn’t suit you as a way to process your trauma and we can’t shove everyone into the same mould and hope that works.
Writing
Difficulty: 1/5
Effectiveness: 4/5
Writing has come in all shapes and forms for me over the years, and has been central to me processing hundreds of traumas. I started writing as a way to express myself when I was around 8-9 years old. I wrote poetry at that point. By the time I was around 11, I had started writing plans for my future, letters to myself, daily diary entries, and lots more poetry. By 15, I was writing long poetry, symbolic and metaphorical essays, letters to myself and others that I would never send, diary entries almost every day, and a few short stories.
When I escaped years of sexual and physical abuse at 18 years old and one of the perpetrators was arrested, I bought a journal with the sole purpose of writing down every single thing that ever happened to me in the abuse, just so I could plot it out and see it in real life. I decided that each incident or experience would have its own page in the book, almost to honour it as it’s own trauma. I did this for about 2 years on and off, until I was around 20. The book quickly filled with hundreds of traumas, rapes, assaults, emotional abuse, violence, loss, betrayal, lies, car crashes, near death experiences and all sorts of things I could remember. There was something important for me about writing it all out. I sometimes dated when each one happened too, so I could see a timeline.
Later on, I wrote my first full story of my experience of being abused and the way I spiralled out of control into drinking and drugs as a kid. It was around 70,000 words and I wrote it as a book.
I was still writing constantly. Poems. Ideas. Blogs. Stories. Essays. Letters. I’ve never really stopped.
Every time I get stuck with a trauma, memory, problem, or even a person I am struggling to communicate with - I write. I very often write letters to the person or to myself that I never send. They are important ways that I can express myself safely, and I have noticed that when I write, my true feelings and thoughts come out better. This then helps me to read it all back, and understand myself or a situation better.
One of the most powerful techniques I use is called ‘free writing’ but in some ways I probably lean more towards ‘automatic writing’. I certainly use free writing every single day in my work and to write my books and articles - I’m free writing this right now - but I use automatic writing personally, I think. I don’t think about my writing, I just write. I just let anything flow. But in order to do that, I need a pen and paper - I can’t do it on technology because it just doesn’t work for some reason.
Over the years then, I’ve found writing to be one of the most important ways to process my own trauma. It’s easy and cheap to do, there are no rules or ways of doing it, and it has helped me reflect and understand myself and the world to a limitless extent. I don’t know where I would be without writing to process trauma.
Confrontation
Difficulty: 5/5
Effectiveness: 2/5
Ooh, this one is complicated. I gave it a 5/5 for difficulty level because it’s just horrible - but I had to include it in this blog because I know that confrontation has been a huge part of me processing my trauma.
Has it been nice? No.
Has it been effective? Not really.
But did I need to do it at one point in time? Yes.
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