The therapeutic relationship is core to healing that can occur in therapy. Building trust and repor in relationship is essential for the psyche to feel safe and relaxed to open and explore one’s inner world.  The developmental needs of each client guide the therapist towards what is healing in the therapeutic relationship. Often, exploring one’s relational and inner experience through talking within a trusting therapeutic relationship is healing and transformative to one’s relational and intrapsychic wounding.

There are times, especially in processing specific or developmental trauma, that just talking about the trauma can be re-traumatizing or overly activating. Signs that this is happening include being in a state of over-activation, or agitation, or being in a state of collapse, or under-activation in one’s nervous system. When this is occurring, it is helpful to make sure to establish a Resource, or place of safety and soothing.  This can be a person, place, thing, animal, color, breathing, body awareness, or any soothing activity.  This is a place someone can go to when they need a break from the trauma.  The resource should simply be soothing and calming, not complex or complicated.  Once the Resource is established, then the process of Titrating the trauma, through pendulations between going into the trauma, then going into Resource, back and forth, can gently facilitate the release or discharge of trauma through the body.  Signs of release or discharge of trauma include embodied crying, yawning, shaking, trembling, or tingling.

Through this gentle titration and pendulation of traumatic material, one can experience relief of traumatic symptoms, related to Anxiety, Stress, Depression, and Relational Issues.