Is recovery from trauma and abuse – resulting in dissociation and even a dissociative disorder – possible? That’s the subject of this podcast where I talk about the vulnerability of hoping for good things, the difference between correlation and causation, and the difference between hoping for and planning for.

Transcript Hi there! I’m Carolyn Spring and welcome to my podcast where I talk about all things trauma. I dig into the nuts and bolts of trauma, how we can recover, what blocks us, and all things neuroscience-y – what actually goes on in the body and brain during and after trauma, especially from the perspective of evolutionary neurobiology. This podcast is for anyone who’s experienced trauma, or knows someone who has, which is pretty much everyone. For more podcasts, blogposts, books and training check out my website at carolynspring.com.

Welcome to this episode – ‘Can we heal?’

So over the years I’ve received hundreds if not thousands of emails from survivors of trauma and a lot of them are, understandably, looking for help. It’s always struck me that people don’t know, firstly, if they can recover from trauma, and secondly, if that is possible, they don’t know how. Or people say, ‘Can I heal?’ They want to know – and they’re desperate – they want to know if recovery is really possible for them.

And what I find interesting is that it’s put out there often in these very vague, nebulous terms: ‘Can I recover? Can I heal?’ What does that mean? What does that look like? And how can I answer that question? How can I peer into the future of this complete stranger and discern whether their future will be any better than their past? I don’t know anything about them, so of course, I can’t. And whether someone will recover or not depends on a lot of variables. It’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. So I always think, ‘What is this person, right here, right now, what are they really asking me?’

And sometimes I think they’re looking for permission to recover. Like deep down they know it must be possible, but they don’t know if they’re allowed. Like, they’re thinking, ‘Is this my lot in life?’, ‘Is this what I deserve?’, ‘Is this as good as it gets?’ And, of course, they deserve better than the sheer misery and hell that is life after trauma. Of course they do! But sometimes it’s like they need to hear that from someone else. They need permission to be allowed to believe that things can get better. They need to know that it’s okay to hope, without things automatically getting worse just because they’re hoping.

And what I mean by this is that, very often, when you’ve been abused, you’ve hoped for good things. You’ve hoped for the abuse to stop. You’ve hoped that tonight it won’t happen. You’ve hoped that mummy will love you. You’ve hoped that you won’t get into trouble. And then that hasn’t happened. And so it’s hard to keep a hold of hope when it’s continually being dashed. You live off disappointment. So it’s a natural thing, when that happens a lot, it’s a natural thing for us to protect ourselves from the hurt and the emotional turmoil of that, by stopping hoping. We close down, we resign ourselves to bad stuff.

And so when someone asks me, ‘Can I heal?’ sometimes they’re not asking, ‘Is it technically possible?’ because they’ve often read what I’ve written and know that I’ll say yes, it is possible – and actually, in my writing, I try to show how as well. It’s not just some nebulous