Heal from your pain.
Trauma Counselling for Men
You can’t change the past and what’s happened but you can learn to hold it in a different way to support your healing and growth. Trauma comes in many shapes and sizes. Whether it’s from your childhood or from your adult life, or whether it’s Complex (happening in repeated instances; think childhood neglect, abuse, etc) or Acute (happening in one big instance; think a big car accident, witnessing a murder, etc), trauma happens to the majority of humans.
When it comes to Complex Trauma, much of our pain & trauma leads back to our childhood. And most of the trauma that has been experienced is often not as easily recognizable, such as physical abuse or emotional abuse. When we’re a child, our world resolves around us, meaning that whatever happens in our environment we make a direct correlation back to it meaning something about us. Let’s say for example is my Mom was angry, I would make it mean something about me, that I must be doing something to make my mom angry, that I’m not loveable, because the pain of feeling I have an unloveable parent/caregiver is too intense for a child to experience. This type of Trauma is often discrete in Men’s lives and goes hidden for far too long until Men experience a breaking point, maybe it’s their marriage is ending, getting fired from numerous jobs, or just can’t seem to get a handle of their emotions.
When it comes to healing our Trauma, we want to create a space for ourselves to feel safe and trusting so that we can start to feel safe within our own body to begin to sit with our internal experience. Most times when we’ve experienced Trauma in our life, the body tends to be in overdrive and we develop survival strategies to cope and get through life. These strategies can lead to addictions, overwork, pushing love away, aggression/violence, and putting up walls around ourselves. So it may take time for our body and mind to feel safe enough to slow down and trust that it will be okay to go within, it’s very normal for the pace to be slower at the beginning of our trauma healing as more layers start to get uncovered. The pace is set by yourself in counselling, and supported by the counsellor.
