You Were Not Responsible for the Trauma You Experienced

As human beings, we want to believe that we’re in control of what happens to us. It follows, then, that if someone is traumatized, they might come to believe, consciously or unconsciously, that if they had done something differently, they could have changed or prevented what happened.

This is even more true when a child experiences trauma, because children believe that everything that happens in their world happens because of them. It doesn’t matter that they had little or no power or agency; they still think that they caused what happened to them, and that if they could have figured out the magic words, or actions, or whatever, they could have fixed things and saved themselves.

Not only do people who have experienced trauma tend to believe they should have rescued themselves; if they also witnessed other people being traumatized, there’s a good chance that they believe they should have saved those other people, too.

IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapy teaches us that every person is made up of many parts. People who have experienced trauma have parts who are capable of understanding that, logically, it doesn’t make sense to feel responsible for traumas that they were unable to prevent or stop.

If I were working with one of these logical parts of a client, I would suggest that they imagine someone in the same position they were in when the trauma happened, then decide whether that person could reasonably be expected to stop the trauma. If they were a child when the trauma happened, I would invite them to observe a child of the same age they were, then ask themselves if they would expect that child to get out of the situation on their own. If they had kids, I would ask them to imagine expecting that of their child(ren).

Put that way, it’s easy to see that a person who was traumatized was not, in fact, responsible for what happened. But that only helps the logical part; it doesn’t convince the traumatized part.

I became an EMDR therapist years ago because I wasn’t satisfied with the level of healing that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) made possible. CBT helped my clients to logically understand that they deserved to exist, that they were worthy of love, that they were enough, and that their needs weren’t too much.  The problem was that they still didn’t truly believe those things. The logic couldn’t touch the parts of their brains where the trauma was stored.

CBT takes a top-down approach. My therapeutic specialties (EMDR, IFS, Brainspotting, and sandtray therapy), on the other hand, are bottom-up approaches. Bottom-up approaches make true healing possible because all parts of the brain, not just the prefrontal cortex, get the memo.