A call to therapists- we need to be more direct.
What clients crave is guidance and direction. They want actual advice. They usually welcome honest feedback and suggestions of how they could approach things differently. Providing a listening space is important, but it’s only a slice of the pie. Clients are paying their therapists for a service. When we strip it down like this, it is transactional. They expect (as they should) to see results from this service.
Why I decided to become a trauma therapist…
When I think about my earlier years in the field, I have so much empathy for the clients I worked with. They had so much collective pain and such little reprieve. I don’t think people understand this depth of human suffering unless they’ve worked with people in the trenches. I know that me and my colleagues tried really hard to help them, and it wasn’t our fault that we couldn’t always find a cure. But what I see now is we actually didn’t have the tools. We weren’t properly trained to deal with the severity of injury in the brain, body, and nervous system that happens when people are traumatized.