11/15/2023
The Self-Regulated Therapist
Trauma healing is not just one technique that will magically transform the suffering of the trauma survivor.
Most of the time trauma clients have experienced a trauma-life, meaning their original trauma has caused many other issues impacting not only their emotional life, but also their ability to function at their best.
Effective therapists are not just empathic and caring professionals, they do something very specific: they regulate the trauma state of their client.
They recognize it as a state of consciousness and are able to shift the client out of it to a more balanced emotional and physical, as well as resourced place.
A compassionate, self-regulated therapist who is able to help to transform the client’s inner trauma states is crucial.
The therapist needs to “become” the regulator for the client’s dysregulated states.
Attunement starts internally with therapists nurturing their mindful attention to themselves.
Using mindfulness awareness cultivates calm inner states so the therapist can effectively see and then intervene sensitively helping the client regulate.
Like a mother who is able to regulate her baby’s fussyness by breathing calmly into her own belly or smiling despite her baby’s frown, she is able to transcend the physical cues and invite the infant into her world of calmness and love.
It’s a combination of the three keys (psycho-education, mindfulness, and a safe, therapeutic relationship) that allows the client to modulate their trauma states to create new emotional connections of well-being.
This combination involves a highly trained and attuned inner state of the therapist, the capacity to sensitively read body cues correctly without being triggered, and confident interventions for the dysregulated system—all wrapped in compassion, care, and critical thinking.
~Manuela Mischke-Reeds, MFT, is a somatic psychotherapist who specializes in integrating mindfulness-based somatic psychotherapy with trauma, attachment and movement therapy.
This article appeared in the September/October 2011 issue of The Therapist, from the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT)
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