Psychotherapy really is a great process of truly understanding yourself, how you adapted yourself as a child and how these patterns may have played out in adult life. It highlights, your early conditioning and any defence mechanisms that were adapted as coping strategies to help you survive. These may have been helpful to you back then but maybe not so much now. It helps you to understand your 'script of life' and what role you have been playing. Its an opportunity to update that script and bring it more in-line with who you are now, whats important to you and how you want to live your life. Its a journey of getting to know yourself. Learning to have compassion and a deeper understanding of how you processed experiences and feelings as a child, what that meant to you and how you may have brought this into adult life.
Using the model Transnational Analysis (T/A) can help you understand the different ego states we go in and out of in difference situations, with different people. It helps you to observe when you are in your child state. parent state or adult state. Sometimes the work can focus on your 'inner child'. Here tends to be where the trauma was experienced, parts were developed, defense mechanisms established, coping strategies learned. Understanding what happened to us as a child can help us to view things through the eyes of the adult you are today.
This kind of therapy tends to be more regular in frequency, as the work goes deeper the process takes longer. This work can be extremely powerful in the sense that you get to know all parts of yourself, why they are there and what role they play. Clarity begins when the work begins to separate these parts and you can acknowledge, accept and understand them, which results in you having a better relationship with yourself.
Trauma presents itself in many ways. Traumatic events that have impacted your life can be debilitating and can sometimes stop you from moving on in life. Emotional trauma can impact your ability to regulate emotions and process things in a helpful way. Emotional trauma is an event that has been so stressful or upsetting - it doesn't have to be a major event. Often it can be something that has hurt or upset you really deeply. This unprocessed or unexplored trauma tends to come to the surface in certain situation's making us feel exactly as we did back then.
