An Unhealed Cut and Psychotherapy

Patients often wonder how revisiting old painful issues may be of benefit in psychotherapy.  They’re right to wonder about this, because doing so often evokes painful emotions.  First of all, it’s never wise to do trauma work if a person has severe instability in their life at the time.  Trauma work requires a relatively stable personal environment.

Once it has been ascertained that the environment is stable enough and that the patient is functioning well enough to handle increased distress, I will often begin explaining how it may be helpful to re-visit the traumatic episode.

Imagine that you have a severe cut on your arm.  The cut also has some dirt in it.  What would happen if you just put a bandage over it and ignored it because it would be painful to apply the treatment?

The patient typically responds that it would likely become infected and would not heal.

That’s exactly right.  The body has built in healing processes that are designed into it; however, there are some injuries that are severe enough to require that the wound receive treatment before the body’s natural processes can take over in the healing.  When a wound is washed out, antiseptic is applied, and the wound is closed, a person will experience increased pain.  There is no way around that pain.  In applying the treatment, the body’s natural processes can take over to heal that wound.  The same thing applies to severe emotional wounds.  The mind also has processes designed in that allow for automatic healing of emotional wounds.  But some emotional wounds are so severe that they must be revisited to release the emotions associated with it and to allow the mind to begin to assimilate just what took place.  And in the safe environment of treatment, one can begin to see aspects of what happened in a new light, the light of today’s understanding.  After enough of these issues have been addressed, the mind’s natural healing processes can begin to take over and continue the healing process.