Seeking Treatment: Part Two

In a previous post, I included an excerpt from Trauma: Healing the Hidden Epidemic on the topic of seeking treatment. Perhaps you’ve occasionally wondered if something painful from your own past, which you can’t quite let go of, could indicate that you carry unresolved trauma. In this post, I will further address some of the challenges of seeking treatment.

“Treatment can help you move past painful and traumatic experiences that have troubled you all your life. It can illuminate the connection between your current struggles—emotional, physical, spiritual, or otherwise—and a distant, even repressed, event that occurred years or decades earlier. Treatment is a way to heal emotional wounds just as you would nurse a physical wound back to health. It gives you the opportunity to move beyond your traumatic experiences instead of allowing them to define you.

“If there is so much to be gained from psychological treatment, why is it that so many shy away from it? Treatment, therapist, shrink, and disorder are scary words in our society. No one wants to appear to be mentally unstable or ‘crazy’; people fear that seeking treatment is an indication of that. Many also feel shame around traumatic experiences. They feel a cultural obligation to be strong, and they fear that if they are troubled by these experiences, they are weak. Unfortunately, the stigma of mental and emotional wounding keeps millions of people in need out of treatment.

“People are afraid of being judged by employers, friends, and family members. Expectations and codes of conduct operate just underneath the surface of our consciousness. As a result, innumerable people, including soldiers, nurses, paramedics, firefighters, police officers, and civilians, are in denial about their own need for treatment.

“Some traumatized individuals are ashamed of things they’ve done—or things that have been done to them—to the point that they cannot imagine sharing the details with anyone, not even a trained therapist. Sometimes they are even afraid of what might change in their own emotional state if they finally fully acknowledge those experiences. They fear that the cap containing their unresolved, stored energy and emotion will break its seal, and they will lose control of their lives as a result.

“Trained, experienced therapists hear shocking, tragic, even horrific stories from their patients. Through it all, their responsibility is to listen to a patient and help if possible, never judging. Good therapists have a unique insight into the human condition that those in other professions don’t always have; they understand why people behave in certain ways and what motivates them to do the things they do. When you know that unresolved pain motivates a person’s actions, judgment doesn’t come so easily.”

                        From Chapter 6: Seeking Treatment