When Therapy Helps

My apologies to those following this series for going so long without writing. It's been a very busy few weeks for me. I got hired full time at my job, had to deal with a kid with a flu, got sick myself, got injured, and just had a broken tooth removed. Haven't had much time for writing.

So let's get started. This post discusses chapters 9 and 21 of Johann Hari's book Lost Connections. These chapters discuss childhood trauma. And let me do the content warning that we leftists like to do: Child abuse, rape (although if you're a victim of either, this post might help as well. Feel free to make your own decision on reading).

I don't know too many people without childhood trauma. The world is fucked up like that I guess.

Johann Hari was abused by an adult in his life that wasn't his parents. He names one example of the abuse. He was strangled with an electrical cord. And for most of his life, he thought it was his fault. He was being punished for being bad, and he went most of his life thinking it was his fault that a grown ass adult strangled him. To quote:

Why do so many people who experience violence in childhood feel the same way? Why does it lead many of them to self-destructive behavior, like obesity, or hardcore addiction, or suicide? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. When you're a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can't move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you're powerless-that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there's simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it's your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power-at least in your own mind. If it's your fault, then there's something you can do that might make it different. You aren't a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You're the person controlling the machine."

When I decided to start this series, I mentioned that I stopped seeing a therapist because they couldn't help me. Even they knew it. I went through two therapists in a year, and after a few months, both of them asked me point blank, "What do you get out of this?" Which is therapist speak for, "Why are you still coming here? I can't fix you." And they were right. They couldn't fix me because I had very good reasons for being depressed. I had real world problems that they weren't capable of solving.

But this is one of those times when therapy actually does help.

Studies were done on the subject, and it was found that when you talk about childhood trauma with a therapist, it definitely helps. Therapists are trained to be kind and compassionate when you talk about trauma, and that's what helps to make things better. To quote the book again:

"In a smaller pilot study, after being asked these questions [about childhood trauma], the patients were given the options of discussing what had happened in a session with a psychoanalyst. Those patients were 50 percent less likely to come back to the doctor saying they felt physically ill, or seeking drugs, in the following year.

So it appeared that they were visiting the doctor less because they were actually getting less anxious, and less unwell. These were startling results. How could that be? The answer, Vincent [the doctor that performed the experiment on talking about trauma] suspects, has to do with shame. "In that very brief process," he told me, "one person tells somebody else who's important to them...something (they regard as) deeply shameful about themselves, typically for the first time in their life. And they come out of that with the realization-"I still seems to be accepted by this person". It's potentially transformative.

What this suggests is it's not just the childhood trauma in itself that causes these problems, including depression and anxiety-it's hiding away the childhood trauma. It's not telling anyone because you're ashamed. When you lock it away in your mind, it festers, and the sense of shame grows. As a doctor, Vincent can't (alas) invent time machines to go back and prevent the abuse. But he can help his patients to stop hiding, and to stop feeling ashamed."

So therapy helps if you have childhood trauma. Speaking to someone who is kind and empathetic to what happened to you helps to alleviate your depression.

If you have past trauma in this matter, please make an appointment to see a therapist. They can help you.

I still have to put up a photo to draw in folks on my Facebook feed. So here's someone that faced some hardcore childhood depression. Motherfucking Arya Stark!