Is recovery possible? I’d say it is … based not just on my own personal experience, but on the fact that it’s how our bodies and brains are designed by default. Often when people don’t recover, it’s a problem with the therapy or the ‘treatment’, rather than a problem with a person. In this thought-provoking podcast, I bring hope for healing.

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 – ‘Recovery is possible’.

So if you’ve read anything I’ve written you’ll have clocked on pretty quickly to the fact that I’m very strong on the fact that people can recover from trauma – from even the most appalling suffering. Firstly, because I’ve seen that change in my life. It’s been unbelievable – complete transformation. I’m not sorted, but I am transformed. And I know that I’m not anything special, the therapy I received wasn’t anything special, and so if I can do it, anybody can. And secondly, because I think our default as human beings is to heal. It’s this amazing miracle that we’re alive in the first place – it’s against all odds. And then if you look at the level of the cell, at all the incredibly complex things that go on every single second of every single day to keep us alive and functioning, it’s remarkable. There’s so much healing going on in our cells all the time – whole systems and procedures for clearing out the gunk, repairing damage, renewing our bodies. So when we talk about recovery from trauma, healing from it, we’re not talking about a concept that is alien to nature. In fact, it’s endemic to it. If we didn’t have a healing thing going on by default, we’d all be dead. So that gives me a lot of hope.

Of course, though, I recognise that there are a lot of people who have been traumatised who don’t ever achieve a significant level of recovery. And I wouldn’t want to make recovery sound easy. It’s an enormous task, especially when we’re talking about the levels and types of trauma that have led to a dissociative disorder. But just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

I think what we’ve been finding over the last twenty years or so is that the way we’ve approached healing trauma hasn’t been helpful. We’ve basically had one of two models: firstly, a medication approach, which does nothing to heal the trauma, as it just suppresses the symptoms; and secondly, talking therapies. And we’re really only at the beginning of understanding how to use talking therapies to resolve trauma. A lot of the way we’ve approached it to date hasn’t been hugely effective and in some cases it has made things worse.

We’ve tended to think, based on Freud, that we need to talk about what happened to us and we need a big catharsis of emotion. We’ve taken on board the concepts of suppression and repression and we’ve thought that the problem is that we haven’t felt our feelings, and we haven’t talked about our trauma. And that’s partly right. But to do that is also like pouring petrol on a fire when it comes to trauma. And so people haven’t made progress and in many cases they’ve become worse.

Now that doesn’t mean that people can’t recover. It just means that we haven’t got our approach right. And I think that’s an important distinction to make, between the treatment and the person. If we think that this person cannot recover, then we’re in trouble. But if we think, no this approach isn’t very