Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship

by Laurence Heller

Paradoxically, the more we try to change ourselves, the more we prevent change from occurring. On the other hand, the more we allow ourselves to fully experience who we are, the greater the possibility of change.

Clients will inevitably be disappointed because the therapist cannot live up to all of their expectations, and it is important to let them know that they have a right to express their needs even if these needs cannot be met.

As a result, they easily feel put upon and secretly resentful, particularly in intimate relationships, where they often feel trapped.

These individuals need to see that as long as they continue to choose to please others at their own expense, they will be trapped.

There is only a felt-sense experience of devastation, shame, and badness, often with no clear story. It is therefore important, with the help of the attuned presence of the therapist, to allow sufficient time for the sensations to surface and to give them sufficient time to organize into a coherent narrative.

Take some time to write down all the external resources you have had in your life. Notice what you feel emotionally and physically as you remember the people, places, activities, pets, or organizations that have supported and helped you.

Make a list of all your internal resources (tenacity, capacity for friendship, curiosity, openness, etc.). Track your emotional and physiological responses as you recognize the positive aspects of who you are. Notice how you feel as you acknowledge your strengths.

Agency is seeing what we do to ourselves as adults, how we have internalized and continue to re-create the environmental failures we have experienced.

Unless we can see how we turn against and abandon ourselves by rejecting our core needs and emotions, we have a tendency to feel like victims.

What was the it that opened in both of us at the same time, I wondered. The it that cannot be forced, that cannot be made to open except in its own time, that knows when the right sequence of subtle movements has unfolded, when the progression has reached its culmination, and suddenly, as a key turns in a lock, opens a door, dissolves a wall, sends an impulse moving through what had been rigid and immovable.