Bad Therapy Step 8: Encourage kids to share their “trauma.”
"Really good trauma-informed work does not mean that you get people to talk about it," physician and mental health specialist Richard Byng told me. "Quite the opposite."
Byng helps ex-convicts in Plymouth, England, habituate to life on the outside. Many of these former prisoners endured unspeakable abuse as children and young adults. And yet, Byng says, the solution for them often includes not talking about their traumas.
One of the most significant failings of psychotherapy, Byng says, is its refusal to acknowledge that not everyone is helped by talking about their problems. Many patients, he says, are harmed by it.
"If you know that someone's been traumatized, what I tend to do is just acknowledge it very lightly," Byng told me. "Very lightly just acknowledge that, yeah, part of why you're like this is because some bad stuff’s happened. And we'll put it aside. But I'm trying to talk about what's going on in the present."
Not every kid who's experienced serious adversity will be helped by "sharing" their traumas? The act of talking about your past pain does not necessarily relieve it? Discussing a traumatic experience, even with a trained therapist, can sometimes increase suffering? This is my shocked face.
If only schools knew the reality of true counseling and dealing with trauma:
But many teachers, counselors, and therapists today presume the opposite: Kids cannot possibly get on with their lives until they have thoroughly examined and disgorged their pain. In the Academy Award-winning film Good Will Hunting, the protagonist (played by Matt Damon) can escape his traumatic past and get the girl only after he has thoroughly explored his history of child abuse with his therapist (played by Robin Williams).
In packed theaters across the country, hearts swelled, tears rained down, and the American mind renewed its faith in the curative miracle of talk therapy. Outside of Hollywood, rehashing sad memories often creates more problems than it solves.
There are therapies, like dialectical behavior therapy, that take a better approach than the model that insists that you can only be cured if you are compelled to "talk about it." This better approach, in Byng's view, involves "accepting you've been harmed and acknowledging that only you can make a difference," without pressing people to talk about their pain. But he admits "that's quite difficult to pull off."
And yet it's often what's best for patients. A dose of repression again appears to be a fairly useful psychological tool for getting on with life— even for the significantly traumatized among us.
Rarely do we grant kids that allowance. Instead, we demand that they locate any dark feelings and share them. We may already be seeing the fruits: a generation of kids who can never ignore any pain, no matter how trivial.
There is a huge example of this type of mentality in the Seerah of the Prophet ﷺ, specifically the incident of Ta’if. This was one of the worst incidents of the Prophet’s life ﷺ, yet he downplayed what happened to him. He didn’t want to make a spectacle of all the trouble and physical and emotional abuse he went through, but he simply stated to Ayesha RA that the leaders of Ta’if didn’t respond to him the way he would have liked. He didn’t go through every traumatic detail, seeking pity from Ayesha RA or any of the sahaba.
Even in this narration, the Prophet ﷺ is only discussing it because his wife is asking him in private, and even then he keeps it vague.
The experts say, “accept you have been harmed and acknowledge that only you can make a difference” is the way forward, but we can modify that slightly:
“Accept you have been harmed, and acknowledge that you can make a difference by asking Allah for assistance, and putting in the effort.”
The Prophet ﷺ accepted that he was harmed, but he made a very long du’a to Allah to complain in humility, and also to gain Allah’s help and forgiveness.
Do we teach our kids, or do we ourselves go to Allah when we are in tough situations? Once again, not everything needs to be discussed with people, but you can always tell your griefs to Allah and make du’a for His help and strength to get you through any situation.
Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up