Hey Trauma Therapist! Be Human, Not Armored

Being a helper means being human

This is perhaps even more relevant for us trauma therapists - when we aren’t ourselves in session, we are doing a disservice to the profound work our clients deserve.

I know I’m asking a lot here - your training taught you to be a blank slate, to keep your “true” self outside of the therapy room. So, when I ask that part of you to step in, all your clinical cells are screaming - 

And you know what? Good on them! They’re doing exactly what they were taught to do!

But what if our training is setting us up for vicarious trauma?

I know how protective it can feel to put on your therapist hat, don your trusty cardigan, and say those cliche yet necessary words, “and how did that make you feel?”

If you look like a duck and quack like a duck, you must be a duck, right…?

Perhaps. 

But what if we acknowledged the ways these practices end up becoming heavy armor that we have to put on each day, armor that weighs us down without offering any real protection.

What if all our therapeutic self-defense skills are actually backfiring and confirming to our brain that we are under attack in our jobs?

Think about it from a treatment perspective - every single evidence-based treatment for trauma and PTSD asks clients to approach their trauma history and stop using avoidance-based coping mechanisms.

Why is that? Because every time someone avoids the things that remind them of their trauma, they are proving to their brain that they are still under threat, that they are still in danger. 

Isn’t that exactly what we’re doing as trauma therapists when we armor up before, during, and after our sessions?!

Armoring ourselves as trauma therapists is teaching our brain that our work is dangerous.

So how is being human going to help me?!

Great question! 😉 Let me first give a little backstory to why I’m even writing this blog post. 

This week in The BRAVE Trauma Therapist Collective, we were so fortunate to have a guest expert training with Guy Macpherson, PhD, of The Trauma Therapist Podcast. 

His talk was titled What Does It Mean to Help?

I don’t know about anyone else, but going into it, I was ready to learn some skills to add to my trusty toolbox of trauma therapy interventions!

That didn’t happen, and I’m so glad.

Instead, Guy invited us into his own experiences of armoring up, shepherding us through his clinical stumbles and pitfalls of hiding behind his training, and ultimately guiding us towards this other option of just showing up as humans in our work.

At first, my nervous system went on high alert - 

⚠️Danger! Danger! There is no armor here!! ⚠️

Once I realized my brain was going into survival mode, I had the opportunity to make a choice - am I going to keep this experience at arms length or dive in?

Can you guess what I did…?

Yep! I did everything I could to stay dry, but I eventually fell in anyway! 

And I’m so glad I did because once I let go, once I allowed myself to show up with my fellow trauma therapists in The BRAVE Collective, my nervous system began to regulate! 

Next Steps

I’m making some BIG asks of you here, and doing that without a whole lot of guidance. 

Let’s break it down here at the end so you can start to dip your toe in the deep end of being your whole self both in and out of session.

• Make a list of all the ways you armor up in your work as a trauma therapist. This is going to be the hardest part of this process because our armor can feel so natural over time.

  • Do you rely on your training and education to “heal” your clients’ pain?

  • Do you put all your focus on adherence to protocols?

  • Do you use your “therapist voice” instead of your own?

Quick Reminder: I am not saying the above things are bad. The goal of this exercise is to help you better understand the strong skills you have so you can make informed choices of when and how to use them vs. relying on them for constant protection

• Pick ONE thing from your list and challenge yourself to pay close attention to it for the next week. At first, it might be tricky to spot, but once you do you won’t be able to unsee it.

• As you are noticing the ways you use, for example, your therapist voice, just be aware of your physical and emotional reactions

• Does your body tense up?

• Do you feel forced in your interactions?

• Is it taking a lot of energy to maintain?

• Do some journaling or take a walk and allow yourself to reflect on subtle ways you can turn down the volume on this armor. Give yourself permission to take intentional steps towards disarming yourself as a trauma therapist and human.

Allow this to be a gradual process - it’s not realistic or helpful to remove all our armor at once, nor do we ever need to get rid of our modes of protection altogether. 

The goal here is to become more aware of the ways you armor up while empowering you to choose if the armor is helpful in any given moment. 

After you have been gradually and subtly removing your armor for a while, do a conscious check-in on your experience as a trauma therapist. 

A great tool to use is my free Vicarious Trauma Tracker, which can help you better understand how VT is or is not showing up for you!