Traditional talk therapy needs words. But trauma healing needs more than just words.

When training as a therapist, I was encouraged to let my client ‘take the lead’ in talking. It was my job to listen and pay attention to their feelings and experiences.

I soon discovered that this approach is all wrong when working with trauma.

Get comfy and keep reading to discover more about why traditional talk therapy can be counterproductive in healing trauma, why this is, and why a different approach is needed.

Talking about trauma

If we focus on just listening or encourage a client to recount a traumatic experience, it can make the issue worse.

After surviving a car accident, Emily – a fictional client – struggled with panic attacks, nightmares, and a constant sense of danger. Encouraged by friends, she started talk therapy. The therapist encouraged her to ‘process’ her experience by sharing the details of what happened. But Emily found herself shutting down, feeling agitated, panicky and unable to think clearly. Instead of relief, each session made her feel worse. She was either flooded with emotions or disconnected, the nightmares and flashbacks continued. Emily felt like she was failing at therapy. Eventually, she stopped going.

What you may have noticed is that Emily was asked to describe the traumatic events.

I already mentioned that many therapists are trained to ‘listen’. And to make matters worse, trauma-informed therapy doesn't feature in most counselling training courses.

It also used to be thought that trauma could be healed by just talking about it.

To understand more about why talk therapy didn’t work for Emily, we need to know more about how the brain responds to traumatic events.

The brain’s response to trauma

Talking requires thinking. And if you’ve experienced trauma, being asked to talk about it can feel so frightening and threatening that this part of the brain can literally ‘shut down’.

The reason is that research of brain scans shows that trauma impacts the prefrontal cortex, a region responsible for many cognitive functions. It shuts down as a survival mechanism, because in the face of threat there’s no time for thinking! It’s time to act.

Perceived threats trigger the amygdala – the brain’s fear centre – to switch off the pre-frontal cortex and ready the body for action. The amygdala becomes more active after trauma, amplifying the triggering of stress responses to stimuli perceived as threats.

Because these are instinctive, physical responses that don’t require rational thought, it’s difficult to approach trauma healing from a place of ‘thinking’.

So, in a nutshell, being asked to talk about trauma is a reminder of it, which can mimic the traumatic experience and exacerbate the symptoms.

Beyond talking

As an alternative to traditional talk therapy, I work in ways that prioritise safety and stabilisation by working with clients to regulate nervous system responses that are triggered by reminders of trauma. This is a necessary precursor processing the traumatic experience later in therapy.

So, in early trauma therapy the emphasis would be on addressing traumatic symptoms such flashbacks, nightmares or panic attacks as these can make you feel unstable and frightened.

Emotional regulation

One aim is to help clients widen the Window of Tolerance (WoT). This is your emotional bandwidth – a state in which you can tolerate emotions and still engage in everyday life. As you can see from the diagram, when in this window your nervous system is balanced and well regulated, and the pre-frontal cortex is online.

Trauma dysregulates the nervous system because it alters the perception of danger. This narrows the Window of Tolerance making hyper-arousal (anxiety, panic, anger) or hypo-arousal (numbness, dissociation, withdrawal) more likely.

Helping clients to recognise when they feel too much (hyper-arousal) or too little (hypo-arousal) – which happens outside the WoT – is a critical aspect of stabilisation. I ask my clients to tell me how they might get a better sense of this by noticing physical signs like rapid breathing, muscle tension, or lack of eye contact.

How can you know when you are moving outside this window i.e. what are the early signs for you?

Learning about trauma

Another key aspect of my trauma therapy practice is helping clients to learn that the symptoms of trauma make perfect sense as a response to a traumatic experience.

E.g. flashbacks indicate that a memory of trauma as been triggered by something in the present. And hypervigilance – another common symptom of PTSD – happens because you learned that you may need to protect yourself from other traumatic experiences.

You can learn more about trauma here:

A Guide to Trauma: PTSD, Complex PTSD & How I Help Clients to Heal

So, I am hoping that what you learned reading this blog is that traditional talk therapy – while valuable in later trauma therapy – falls short in early trauma therapy.

Trauma impacts the brain in ways that make verbal processing difficult in the initial stages of healing. Asking clients to recount their trauma can inadvertently re-trigger distressing symptoms rather than alleviate them.

Instead, effective trauma therapy prioritises nervous system regulation and emotional stabilisation. And by understanding that symptoms were caused due to ‘surviving’ the trauma. With education to promote awareness and tools to develop safety in the present, therapy can be a process of empowerment rather than re-experiencing.

I want to say that if talk therapy hasn’t worked for you – it’s not because you’ve failed. It’s because trauma healing needs more than just talking. If you’re ready to explore a trauma-informed approach that prioritises safety, regulation, and true healing, I invite you to take the next step. Please get in touch with me using the contact details below