When Help Keeps You Stuck

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Most of us trust that when someone is hurting or being harmed, the people meant to help them will say so clearly. We'll name what's happening, we'll name them find their way out, but what really happens when the very space designed for healing quietly teaches someone to stay in the harm's way? What happens when the burden of adapting to something cruel falls on the person being hurt? And right's conversation would ask a difficult question about the state of mental health care and what it actually means to help someone who is suffering.

Meet A Trauma Therapist Survivor

SPEAKER_00 0:50

A licensed clinical social worker, trauma-informed psychotherapist, certified coach, hypnotherapist, and ordained interfaith minister with over three decades of clinical experience in New York City. Now based in Montreal. She specializes in complex trauma, CPTSD, and narcissist abuse syndrome, and she is herself a survivor who has walked this road and come through the other side. She's also the author of Clinic Clinician's Journey from Complex Trauma to Thriving, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Half Post, Reader's Digest, and Beyond. So, Sherry, I think that's a lot of things in the intro right there. So I'm really glad that you're here tonight. And I think this is gonna be a brilliant conversation.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Oh, thank you, Cyan. I appreciate your having me here.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Thanks, Sherry. Likewise. Um, and just a little disclaimer for all the listeners here. Some statements may reflect personal belief and experiences, and I present it as individual views and not medical advice. Listeners should consult qualified professionals for medical conditions. So, Sherry, before we get into any kind of clinical or ethical territory that you have worked with, I want to firstly acknowledge something. Uh, since you are both a clinician of three decades plus um experience and a survivor of uh you know this complex trauma yourself. So I think that dual perspective is rare and uh I think it also shapes everything about how you see this particular work. So, can you tell us a little about what that personal journey has really meant for you, how how you show up as a therapist, and if it indeed um I would say made you know a decision in your life that you need to do this work because uh there are people that really need you.

A Life Shaped By Complex Trauma

SPEAKER_01 2:45

Okay. Um well, because I was born into a family of generational mental illness, schizophrenia, cluster B pathology, I was always uh intrigued by the human condition and wanted to, I guess, get a sense of mastery by understanding human nature. And so I early on, I either kind of was torn between did I want to be a writer or a clinician. Of course, I was very fragmented and splintered and needed to start therapy very young. And I also started living on my own as a young woman, uh, put myself to college and graduate school. So intellectually, I guess that was um the developmental milestone that was a part of my personality that I was able to kind of cling to. But other than that, I was pretty uh broken. Uh, but I did know that I wanted to pursue academia either through I was interested in journalism or I was interested in psychology. And the pathway for me into complex trauma was very difficult because at the time complex trauma was not even a diagnosis.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Um, right, it was first diagnosed really, I think, in 1994 by a doctor Judith Herman. So I pursued therapy because I knew that I had I was afflicted. Um, I with tremendous despair, suicidal ideation, process addictions. And the pathway, what it taught me, my recovery process, was that this is a journey that is comprehensive, extensive, and requires a level of commitment and effort that spans, if not many years, sometimes decades for some, depending on the enormity of traumatic abuse they endured. So I started working out in the addiction field where I met women who were sex trafficked. I worked with people who were um a forensic population who had gone through the prison system, and that's where I really first encountered uh traumatic abuse that in some ways it was different than mine, but in many ways replicated what I had been through. And that started informing, I think, my clinical orientation and a deeper understanding of what was involved in recovery. Um, it also illuminated for me, I think, a lot of what you're bringing up, which is that often victims are not believed. And so that contextually, I think, relates to um how therapy can actually become a place that is re-traumatizing as opposed to being reparative.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

Well, I think um that is indeed uh shaped by a lot of early experience, uh, like you said, Sherry. And uh yeah, I I think trauma is something that uh I personally think it just lives beyond decades, right? It's something that um lives for pretty much throughout your whole life until it's really treated the right way. Um so uh we while we would definitely talk about uh that aspect, but uh the concern that you have really raised for this conversation is I think one that I think many people in difficult relationships or harmful situations might recognize, right?

When Therapy Teaches Adaptation

SPEAKER_00 6:33

That this experience of going to therapy for help and coming away with tools to cope with something rather than question it, right? Leave it uh without naming any specific approach or method. Yeah. So can I perhaps describe in uh very broad terms what this pattern looks like from a client's experience?

SPEAKER_01 6:56

Uh from a client's experience, I think it's very shaming, but it comes across as being helpful. The idea that one should adapt or find um effective tools to accommodate abusive behavior, uh, to even I think it could be in the form of a spiritual bypass, the idea that if you're a good person, then it's a moral imperative to accommodate um all kinds of egregious behavior and to find common ground, even with people who are malignant. Now, there are some clinicians who will scoff at notions of human evil, you know, and so that becomes very confusing for a victim who has been on the receiving end of the most heinous kind of abuse. Um, I even had a client years back who her uh she was as a child by her brother, and she was violated, and it turns out he, as they grew into early adulthood, he was exhibiting sociopathic, psychopathic behavior, but she was not believed by her parents, and a clinician framed it as exploration as play. So by the time she and I started working together, we had to really start looking at instinctually um the level of terror that she had experienced throughout her life, which obviously is not indicative of play. Right. Um, it's very simple. The body knows what the mind is not able to reconcile with. Um, but she was not believed, right? She was she carried with her the premise that she was exaggerating. Um and she had all kinds of somatic disorders that she was grappling with as a result. So um how it feels for for the clients is that it is re-traumatizing, it's confusing, uh demoralizing, um and shaming. Uh eventually, what I have found is um many of my clients end up leaving that form of treatment because they feel they're they're just not seeing themselves evolve, heal, grow. And so that's when they decide to leave that kind of treatment model and pursue something different.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

Okay, and and I think you're right. Um, you know, it it it makes a lot more sense because I think that confusion uh itself is part of what really makes this whole process so difficult to navigate. I mean, um, and and people find it really hard to really articulate it from the inside out because it's it's having this sense that you're being helped and that someone is really caring for you and yet something is still isn't right. So I think that confusion really becomes a challenge uh to you know uh make them believe and uh steer away the confusion.

Why Ethical Care Names Abuse

SPEAKER_00 10:15

And uh Shari, you you have written that uh at the ethical core of therapy, the work should not, I mean, um the work should disrupt harm, in other words. So uh not accommodated to some degree, I would say. So I think that's a really interesting and a powerful statement. So uh what do you really believe healthy and ethical and therapeutic support actually looks like in a harmful situation? Uh you know, what should they uh experience in that moment, in that room?

SPEAKER_01 10:50

I think that clinicians, particularly in trauma-informed uh work, first of all, need to take an ethical stance, not just a neutral stance. Um we are witnesses to stories of traumatic abuse. And as witnesses, we need to name the abuse that the survivor has to trivialize, minimize, even wall off in order to stay psychologically tethered, right? Because it's so can be so psychologically annihilating to have to accept these harsh realities. Um, so I do feel it's a moral imperative for therapists to name malignant behavior, sadistic behavior, uh, to not minimize it, uh, particularly when it's parental. That's where I think it gets very sanitized. Uh, because we want to hold on to, I think, these fictitious narratives that um parents mean the best. Anecdotally, I always hear, well, they did the best they could. It's like, well, if that's the best they could, I mean, that's really horrifying. Um so when we hear of criminal behavior, um behavior that crosses a line between what is into moral depravity, we need to hold that space and bring evil to a level of consciousness where it can be worked through and assimilated so that the survivor can heal. Because they need to grieve what was done to them and what they were robbed of.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Yeah, I think that's um an important distinction because I think it it really distinguishes between a space that helps you survive something and a space that um I would say really helps you see it clearly enough to make real choices. And I think for a lot of people, they don't really realize that they're allowed to ask these kind of questions. They assume that the therapist is always uh, you know, um he or she knows the best. And what you're saying right now is that your own instincts and p perceptions deserves to be part of that conversation. So um one thing that um I I also find it very interesting that you've spoken about the importance of helping people trust their own perception. So I I want to continue um and

Self-Trust And Nervous System Repair

SPEAKER_00 13:34

build on that. So for someone who has been in kind of a harmful dynamic for a long, long time, um, that sense of trusting themselves can be one of the first things to really go. So, why is self-trust, Shari, so central to real recovery and what does it actually do to your you know inner system?

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Uh, you mean in terms of uh having lost contact with self-trust or your own perceptions? Because I think that's really what happens initially. People don't come in to therapy after uh traumatic abuse and have access to their instinctual awareness. Uh, that has to go underground in order to survive. Um, otherwise, one would just implode from a deluge of adrenal hormones. You know, we'd be saturated with some of cortisol, which happens anyway. I mean, people um have lucid moments, of course, and then lapse into dissociative states. Uh, reclaiming instinctual awareness is one of the therapeutic uh goals in treatment and trauma-informed therapy. And a lot of that requires the therapist to be a mirror to help interpret and to help the client to identify the ego defenses that they had to employ to survive, to start to dismantle um some of the anecdotal fictitious ways in which we try to cope and uh and make sense out of what is happening to us. So it takes a while to really access the body's wisdom. And a lot of the work at first then is identifying what's happening with the nervous system. Is the client in a state of freeze, which is really a state of plain dead? So that's a real extreme level of terror. Is someone a fauner? Do they typically pacify and assuage to try to navigate through relationships and through difficulties? Or does one fight, you know, and become very aggressive and reactive, or is one take flight and completely retreat and avoid? So these are all kind of uh sensorial indicators of how the survivor has coped and really then having to find a sense of regulation, and the therapist is a co-regulator. So, in a way, the client borrows from the therapist and being able to get grounded in the sessions, to feel calm, to feel seen, uh understood. And that allows one to um have a baseline of safety. So that one can start to reclaim their perceptions and trust what they know in their deepest place of knowing.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

Yeah, that's that's a very important frame, I think, uh, in what you're describing. And and since you have spent over uh three decades with this work, with you know uh navigating complex trauma and CPTSD.

Compassion Fatigue And Disillusionment

SPEAKER_00 16:51

So from where you sit, Sherry, I just want to um ask you this one last uh you know question out of curiosity. I mean, we have talked about the uh the good side of things and you know how from the very early days it it I mean this whole uh process and the book itself did intrigue you, but has it uh ever um costed you anything? So the process of recovery, yeah, of of I mean helping people uh we get through this uh this whole uh uh trauma therapy and from from where you sit uh I mean with so much experience over I mean over three decades of of experience. So um I mean from what you have seen as a survivor, as a clinician, and as a writer and a creative, so what really keeps you in it, right? And do you have you ever felt that you know it really costed you anything? Because at the end of the day, Sherry, uh, I mean everything has its pros and cons. So I'm curious to know what what what is your uh thought process on this? And because I think it really takes a lot to hold this much of other people's pain over that time.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

Yeah. I mean, there's definitely compassion fatigue that I have to um recognize, and I have resourcing that I have to do for myself, pacing myself. Um but I think I guess one of the things, if I look at it as a cost, I don't know if I look at it as a cost anymore, but I think there is a disillusionment that one has with uh the human race that comes with being uh exposed to so much brutality.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

Um I am a spiritual person and I do believe in uh divine energy and the beauty and wonder of life and nature and creativity. Uh, but I do feel there is such a dark side to the human condition, and I have a lot of questions from my maker, you know, when my time comes. Um it does it does necessitate actually having to be very intelligently guarded. Um I I sometimes I think I see things that other people may not see because of the exposure I've had to so much traumatic abuse in my own life and in those I witness is in my clients. Um, so there's cynicism. You know, there's definitely um I don't scoff at notions of human evil. I know that human evil exists and is cloaked in virtue. Um I understand how it works. It's like uh borrowed from PsyOps, it's the same playbook. Um it is cunning and pernicious, and so I carry within me an awareness, you know, um, of a level of danger and moral depravity that I think most people don't reckon with. You know, and that's informed who I am. I don't feel I don't know if I'd say it's uh gonna it's is it costly?

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Um no, maybe, maybe it's a it's a gift because I I think I uh this part of the conversation really touched me and and I think um that really resonated with me, Shari, what you shared, because uh when when you said that you know you have a like you understand uh the beauty, and you know, since you said you're a spiritual person, uh I'm a spiritual person as well, but indeed there are so many um I mean um God forbid nobody gets to experience that brutal side of the human surface, but um because you have seen it and experienced it and uh you work with clients, um indeed. I mean, this kind of um, you know, I think this kind of commitment to this work, I would say it really comes from utmost compassion and passion for the work, um, of course. So I think you know, this is this is something that I I really resonated

Where To Find Sherry And Closing

SPEAKER_00 21:22

with. And um, I think, yeah, for the listeners who who perhaps uh resonated with this part and or perhaps the whole of conversation, Sherry. Um, before we just wrap this off, where's the best place for them to find you? Uh explore your practice, or simply if someone needs help and wants to work with you.

SPEAKER_01 21:42

I have a website. Um, my name is Sherry S, I spell it s-i, so it's sherytherapist.com, and that's one word. And the website really um is an encapsulation of all of my work. But if I blog on Medium, um some of the articles that I have contributed to. And so I'd be happy to have anyone come visit my site and can't you can contact me through uh through that particular platform.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

Brilliant. So I'll have the details in the show notes so that people can easily uh reach out to you and uh explore your practices or you know simply uh send a connect to you. So, folks, with that, unfortunately, uh we hit today's minute mark from this conversation. But what I'm really sitting with after this conversation, and I also, by the way, want you to sit with it for a few minutes as you wrap this off, is that real healing is not about learning to carry what harms you more gracefully. I think it is about being supported to see clearly and trust yourself fully and move towards life that is generally yours. So uh that is something that uh I would like you to um take forth from today's conversation. And Sherry, I generally I think conversations like these are the ones why this show exists and to create space for the things that needs to be said honestly and with real respect for the people living them. So I think uh I I really enjoyed your take and your insights on this conversation.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

Oh, thank you, Cyan. It's just great to share on your platform. Thank you for making the space for this.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

Absolutely. And uh folks, if today's episode did touch something um in you, please, please to share it with someone who might need to hear it. And if you or someone you know is going through a difficult phase um in time, please reach out to a trusted mental health professional who can support you. And please to subscribe to Healthy Mind Healthy Life wherever you listen, and come back next time. This has been Scion. And folks, take good care of yourselves today, and we'll see you in the next one.