In order to recover, does the initial trauma matters?

[Slavik]

Hi, I tend to get confused a lot when looking into my past.  Ill give few brief examples.  Traumas I have

1) A childhood trauma which in modern world people get PTSD from (a bit vague sorry, dont want to go into details)

2) Constant abuse from peers sibling parent.  Physical and psychological

3) As a child, living in a constant state of fear (about 80% of the time)

And the rest are physical and emotional side effects that resulted from all of this.

 

My question is this: Does it matter which traumas I suffered?  Isnt psychological treatment is the same?  Or are they all different in the sence that they are all treated differently?  

 

And last question is this: Does anyone have any programs on self help they can point me to.  I want to start the process of healing (as of now self help stuff only, I have barely any funds for books, so psychotherapy is the future goal)

 

Thank you 

[Wesley]

Hi, I tend to get confused a lot when looking into my past.  Ill give few brief examples.  Traumas I have

1) A childhood trauma which in modern world people get PTSD from (a bit vague sorry, dont want to go into details)

2) Constant abuse from peers sibling parent.  Physical and psychological

3) As a child, living in a constant state of fear (about 80% of the time)

And the rest are physical and emotional side effects that resulted from all of this.

 

My question is this: Does it matter which traumas I suffered?  Isnt psychological treatment is the same?  Or are they all different in the sence that they are all treated differently?  

 

And last question is this: Does anyone have any programs on self help they can point me to.  I want to start the process of healing (as of now self help stuff only, I have barely any funds for books, so psychotherapy is the future goal)

 

Thank you 

I know there are workbooks by Nathaniel Brandon and John Bradshaw. Alice Miller is great to read. I am sure others will be able to provide many more resources.

 

Psychological treatment is very much an individualized process. Everyone experiences different traumas, and even if you did experience the same traumas, multiple people will still react differently to them. There are a lot of similarities, analogies, and categories, but the process of discovery and healing is very, very individual.

 

The best thing you can do is to start journaling. Record your dreams, record your thoughts, record anything you can think of. Set aside time every day for as much journaling as you can consistently do. It will do wonders in helping you find things as well as making therapy quicker and easier once you go as you will have already mapped things out in your mind pretty well. Journaling can be amazingly helpful to develop as a habit if you want to work on self knowledge.

[MysterionMuffles]

Check out John Bradshaw's Homecoming. It's about how you have to grieve your traumatic experienced, let your adult self feel what your inner child has felt. Then there's a Championing process a little after half of the 10 episode series, and that I think has been quite helpful to me. Hopefully it is for you.

Oh yeah thanks for that mention Wesley,I cannot believe I forgot about how powerful journalling could be. You need to let yourself feel comfortable with having a dialogue with yourself, sit down, and write as much as you can that comes to mind. It will help you relieve some of the mental clutter that is caused by trauma, especially when you directly think about it for great periods of time. Writing really helps put those events into a structured more visible manner (even if the chronology is scattered on the page it still beats letting your mind race all the time). And of course you're able to validate yourself if you throw in comments about how those events made you feel.