ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on trauma. It describes mistakes made earlier in the author’s career in over-emphasising the importance of helping to bear pain and suffering. It was learnt that focusing on traumatic incidents too quickly could be profoundly unhelpful, re-triggering PTSD, dissociation and flashbacks. Recent trauma theory teaches the importance of facilitating a sense of safety before processing traumas. The cases here show how easy it is to get this wrong, but also how genuine change takes place when we get it right. The thinking of van der Kolk is introduced on the importance of body awareness in trauma work. Attention is paid to autonomic nervous system states, and in particular of developing ventral vagal capacities and reducing sympathetic nervous system activity and dorsal vagal shutdown.
