How long does therapy for childhood trauma take?
Hi I’m Sarah! I’m a Manchester psychotherapist, working worldwide via Zoom.
When I trained and we used to ask my trainer these kind of questions he used to smile and say ‘how long is a piece of string?’ (I know, we used to find it annoying too.)
Childhood trauma
The problem with childhood trauma is that it can contaminate everything without you knowing. It’s like being slowly poisoned by carbon monoxide - you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it and all of a sudden you’re really sick (or worse) but you don’t know why and it’s an emergency. Worse still other people might thing you’re exaggerating or making things up or tell you ‘you look fine’. Not every traumatised person is unable to work or go out; most of my clients have jobs and friends many have partners. Childhood trauma is insidious and it can affect everything on a day to day basis. Often people wonder what’s wrong with them and how everyone else manages fine when it feels like they are struggling for air.
The effect of childhood trauma on adults
You might have:
Depression
Anxiety
Low self esteem
Panic attacks
Flashbacks
Relationship problems
Self hatred
Childhood trauma therapy
I find that most clients want someone that gets childhood trauma and who has effective strategies to deal with their problems. Many have already suffered through ‘listening therapy’ that left them feeling more alone and didn’t solve their problems.
How long does therapy take?
Some clients are in therapy with me for years.
You can great understanding fairly quickly. However to deal with the many layers of effects of your childhood trauma might take many years.
Some people do not want or need long term therapy, but for some people, there are so many little things for them to sort through (such as cumulative trauma or C-PTSD/CPTSD or complex traumatic stress disorder), so many triggers that they need to reprocess on a weekly basis (or sometimes more.) I think of this as emotional dialysis.
How does childhood trauma therapy work?
Understanding your emotions
In an ideal world, clients learn to recognise, process and tolerate emotions at a young age. When there are attachment issues (as is often the case with childhood trauma) people don’t learn these skills. Their emotions (if they haven’t shut themselves off from them) are overwhelming and scream at them for hours or sometimes days or weeks often over little things. They cannot turn them down because they don’t know how. If they are not coming weekly, how do they deal with these emotions? They might self harm, eat too much or too little, take drugs - anything to try and numb out or escape the things that follow them around.
When they come on a long term basis, we can not only process the day to day issues, but as they learn to trust me we can process the underlying hurts. It can take years for people who have been very badly traumatised to trust a therapist. It is also surprising what can come up that clients were not aware of or did not consider to be problematic. In a short term therapy there is simply no time for this ‘idling’ and waiting for something to happen.
I feel like my childhood trauma was my fault
It can be disheartening for clients to learn that therapy may not be a quick fix solution. They may feel shame either from themselves or others that they are not fixed after such a long time. Ideally the client learns to internalise the therapist as an attachment figure (this means that they hear or visualise the therapist when they are in need of comfort or guidance) or finds other reliable attachment figures (such as friends or a partner or maybe their church or community). If this happens then the need for the therapist may diminish.
What does healing from childhood trauma look like?
We can’t undo what happened to you.
What we can do, is help you to make sense of it, help you to acknowledge the damage it did and be honest about this to your self and others.
There may still be bad days and bad triggers but with work and time they become less frequent, less catastrophic and they fade sooner.
It is possible to learn to trust, to learn how to communicate and have healthy relationships, to recognise, express and tolerate emotions, to calm yourself down and to feel better about yourself.
Find out how I can help by booking a free 15 minute call here