With a genuine desire to offer a truly sacred place for clients to heal, a therapist can put a lot of pressure on themselves to know exactly what to do when working with a client who presents with symptoms of complex trauma. Many therapists take multiple trainings on how to work with trauma, and yet they still feel ineffective in their ability to offer deep repair and healing to clients. Because each client is so different, there are so many unknowns when working with trauma. Linear models and frameworks designed to “heal” a client overlook the vital role of a client’s own innate spirituality as the Source of their healing.
The old paradigm in psychotherapy, where the therapist needs to be the expert who holds the answers to their client’s suffering, can actually interrupt the therapeutic process and distract from the healing potential available for clients. There are three main problems with this old paradigm: 1) When the therapist holds the answers to a clients suffering, this model perpetuates the trauma response of a client giving their autonomy away, 2) when the therapist is the expert, they treat their client as an object to be fixed, and 3) when the therapist controls the steps to healing, the client’s success is dependent on them fitting into to someone else’s map.
The pressure on clinicians to know all of the modalities of working with trauma can pull them away from the healing potential inherent in guiding therapy from their spiritual intelligence. When the therapist is not being guided by their intuitive spiritual intelligence, their thought-based reality is in charge, which is where the ego and personality lives. While conceptual-knowing is useful, a therapeutic container that is dominated by the mind will ultimately ignore a client’s innate spirituality as the Source of their healing.
In transpersonal gestalt therapy, we don’t engage with out client’s personality from our personality. Instead, we trust that the client’s soul knows what it is that they need in order to heal. We affirm our trust in our client’s inherent intelligence with every question, every reflection, and every intervention we offer. As we defer to the client’s innate wisdom as the guide for their healing, we offer clients a sacred container to return back home to the truth of who they are.
Because the dysregulation of the stress and trauma response has a person feel disconnected from their spiritual Self, a client can feel stuck in patterns that were created in an attempt to find safety (Miller, 2023). These patterns paradoxically perpetuate the feeling of being unsafe, and the trauma loop persists. If a therapist tries to fix the client’s pattern, they become another imprint of an authority who holds the power, which ultimately undermines the client’s autonomy and sovereign will.
A therapist who is both trauma-informed and spiritually aligned maps out the interplay between the client’s nervous system dysregulation and hyper-identification with their ordinary mind. This informs the therapist of how the client interrupts contact with themselves and gets pulled out of the present moment. By understanding the client’s map in this way, a therapist can accurately reflect the client’s habitual patterns to them, which increases awareness. Without bypassing the client’s suffering or attempts to find safety, a therapist can invite their client to listen deeply to their patterns in order to learn what is needed from themselves in order to repair the inner wound.
By inviting the client to deepen into the actuality of their experience, as opposed to resisting their experience with efforts to become how they think they should be, a client increases awareness of the way unresolved experiences keep them from their embodied sense of being alive. Furthermore, when invited into the actuality of their experience, a client becomes congruent, which is essential to a client’s sense of safety and security. The awareness that is cultivated from deepening into what is allows the client to increase their capacity to be available for themselves, which is necessary for them to find their way back to a regulated aware state.
When every question and intervention that a therapist offers affirms their trust in their client’s deeper knowing, they offer a sacred container for the client to reconnect with their essential self. Without ever saying the word “spirituality” and without offering any spiritual ideology, a client can return to a sense of well-being that has them feel more like themselves, more connected to their true nature. When we see our clients accurately in their dysregulation and welcome the dysregulation as a wise and adaptive response to trauma, we affirm our client’s humanity. From this clear witness, a therapist’s trust in their client’s innate wisdom can be the healing catalyst needed for a client to move through their trauma response.
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