Do I Have To Talk About It?

Experiencing sexual abuse in childhood, or in fact at any time, can have such a wide range of impacts on people. While many people feel they can relate to others who have been through similar things to them, it remains deeply personal. People react and process in different ways.

Some people really need to talk about what happened to them, and some really, really don’t want to. Both are completely reasonable and, for want of a better word, ‘normal’ responses. 

If you are coming to therapy following CSA, you do not need to talk about the experience itself. Sometimes it can help to remember and reframe the experience and sometimes it can feel liberating to be able to share it, but if that doesn’t feel right for you, then it's good to know that this is not the only way.

Therapy is less about what happened to you, though that is of course important, and more about how it impacted you. The vast majority of my time is not spent going over the detail of traumatic events, but is rather about building relationship and helping people to discover who they are and how they want to live. Sometimes that is about creating a new normal, assimilating the changes experienced and learning how to live as the new version of you. Sometimes it can be about recapturing something that has been lost, learning that you are still you no matter what. It can also be about recognising some deep-seated beliefs that may have been planted, understanding where those beliefs have come from, challenging and reframing them, and creating new core beliefs to move forward with.

Whatever it looks like for you, you do not have to be afraid that you will need to confront difficult memories as soon as you begin. Even if you do become ready to discuss the detail of what happened, which some people do work towards and find helpful in time, this will not be straight away.

Although, you are the expert on your own needs and will be free to talk about whatever you wish to.

Therapy begins with the building of the relationship between you and the therapist. This is fundamental to all the work and is why finding the right therapist for you is the number one priority. Therapists will usually do some kind of initial meeting or assessment to ensure they can meet your needs, and it is good to signal your experience at this point to help you find the best fit therapist for you, but that does not mean digging into the experience itself. A simple ‘I was assaulted’ or ‘I was abused’ or whichever language you prefer will suffice. As I said earlier, you can then talk more about the impact than the event.

The type of therapy that I offer is often referred to as ‘bottom up’. This is because we are working with your nervous system and the lower part of your brain first. The part of your brain that deals with safety, that is responsible for keeping you alive, that provides warning signals when you are in danger, and is therefore impacted by threat. This therapy recognises that you cannot simply think your way out of trauma when your whole body is living in fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode. It is a therapy that begins by building safety and stability, so that you can feel secure before you begin working with difficult thoughts and feelings. We work on calming your nervous system to gently support your brain to turn off the alarm signals when they are no longer necessary, and we do this through the relationship that we build together. Sometimes we will talk about your life and what you have been thinking and feeling, sometimes we will talk about your past and how you have come to be who you are now, but sometimes we might talk about the movie you’re excited to see, or the thing you really want to buy, or that advert that made you laugh out loud. All of these things are a part of who you are, and when you are able to recognise that you can bring all of who you are and every part is fully accepted, that can be transformative. The magic of therapy has already begun and you can move forward into more difficult territory knowing that you are anchored by the stability of the therapeutic relationship that you have built.