How to Tell if Therapy is Working for You
Is Therapy Helping? Insights from a Trauma Therapist in Baltimore
Is Therapy Helping? Insights from a Trauma Therapist
As a trauma therapist in Baltimore specializing in Brainspotting, EMDR, and Parts Work/IFS, I understand that starting therapy can feel overwhelming, especially when you're unsure about the progress you're making. The following is intended to help you understand what effective trauma therapy feels like, and how you can gauge your progress throughout your healing journey.
Whether you’re new to trauma therapy or have been in treatment for a while, it’s important to know what to look for to feel reassured about your progress - which sometimes can feel hard to measure in therapy.
However, there are distinct signs that show therapy is having a positive impact. If you're unsure about your therapy experience, reading this guide will help you recognize when things are moving in the right direction.
How Do You Feel After a Therapy Session?
After a therapy session, you may feel lighter, heavier, more aware of your body or self aware. You may feel more capable, less anxious, or more at ease. You may even feel exhausted. These emotional shifts, whether immediate or over time, are key indicators of progress.
Do you have a sense of hope in your ability to heal? Do you continue to feel connected and understood by the therapist? Do you feel comfortable sharing your feedback? Do you look forward to next session? Answers to these questions post session can be helpful guideposts to your progress.
Being with your emotional experience, being present and connected to your body and processing trauma take time, and sometimes the changes are subtle. Trauma therapy can often feel like drops in a bucket and sometimes we can have feelings towards the pace of healing. Its unpredictable what each individual’s watershed moment may look and feel like.
Are You Developing New Coping Skills?
Therapy can look different for each person and with each provider but generally you should be able point to the development of new skills. These skills might be tangible emotional regulation skills for handling distress in the moment. Perhaps these skills have been explicitly taught or learned experientially in session. Maybe you and your therapist have reviewed past coping skills and encouraged you to use them and reduce barriers to implementing. When you’re overwhelmed do you feel like you have tools in your toolbox? If not, this is a great topic to discuss in your next therapy session.
Different trauma therapy modalities can also support new coping:
Parts Work/ IFS can help individuals better understand and integrate different aspects of themselves, leading to healthier emotional regulation and coping skills. You can learn how to harness strengths of parts while easing burdens they carry.
Nervous system/ Polyvagal Theory can be supportive to help explain why certain strategies work for certain states or emotional experiences.
EMDR offers an early emphasis on resourcing and skill building to support future reprocessing work.
Are You Seeing Changes in Your Relationships?
Attachment focused trauma therapy can have a positive impact on relationships by helping clients communicate better, set boundaries, and relate to others from a place of healing. Parts Work/IFS fosters improved self-awareness, allowing clients to engage in healthier, more connected relationships with their parts. Relational work also takes place between the client and therapist with respect to past attachment templates and how unique parts connect. This allows for disconfirming experiences for the individual and over time the potential to update how we communicate needs and and the possibility of them to be met by other people.
If you’re not sure if you’re seeing changes, ask the people in your life for feedback and what they’ve noticed since you’ve started therapy.
Are You Becoming More Present in Your Life?
For some folks, being present can feel so loaded - so let’s break it down. This progress in being more present could like many things: Increased awareness of your breath or body, identifying needs and emotions more often, greater tolerance for feelings, increased self care and ability to respond to your needs, increased frustration around unmet needs, more assertiveness and willingness to ask others to help meet our needs. This could also look like greater comfort in stillness or silence.
Are You Feeling More Confident in Your Decision-Making?
This may also look like increasing exposure to awareness of needs, making choices and tolerating the outcome - starting small and working your way up to bigger decisions.
Parts work/ IFS can be critical in helping client’s connect with and fortify their internal sense of self, allowing them to make decisions that align with their true values and needs. Resolving past trauma can deeply support how we view ourselves and have hope for our future and capacity to trust ourselves and our capacity to handle the outcomes of decisions.
Key signs of therapy working, including emotional shifts, coping skills development, better relationships, increased presence, and capacity for decision-making. I also recognize that each person’s human experience is inherently unique and honor that healing would be too.
And I believe we are all capable of healing from the worst that has happened to us.
If you're feeling overwhelmed and don't know feel like therapy is working for you, give me a call at (443) 274-5495. I know it can feel like a big step to contact a therapist, especially if it feels like past therapy hasn’t fully met your needs. We’ll spend 15 minutes on the phone, I’ll answer your questions and I’ll let you know how or if I can help.
