Years ago,
When I began working with trauma,
I'd ask clients to tell me about the things in their lives that they found traumatic,
And they would go sort of foggy.
Their memories would become conflated.
They couldn't remember when,
Where,
How.
So I began to say,
Please put a line along the line.
Bottom of your paper divided into five-year intervals and just write in where you shut down,
Where you still have work to do,
Where you feel numb inside,
Where you have words unspoken,
Where you have resentment,
Anything that felt hurtful to you.
Event trauma is fine,
But all of the little drip,
Drip,
Drip of relational trauma that you absorbed and lived with and feared,
You know,
The turning of a face,
The rolling of the eyes,
The rejection,
Where you learn not to speak up for yourself,
Where you learn not to risk a rejection,
All of those things that constitute cumulative relational trauma.
Put them on a timeline.
And then share them with me.
That was the birth of a wonderful process.
You can do that writing and share it.
And that's a very full process.
You don't have to do any more.
You can do it in person,
You can do it online,
You can do it one-to-one,
You can do it in a group.
If there is more to say,
Because it becomes a developmental progression.
If someone is talking about how they felt but forgot they felt around seven or eight or nine.
And they want to go deeper,
Just say if that part of you were sitting in an empty chair.
What would you say to that part of you?
And then they speak.
They talk to instead of about.
It's a much more direct connection with what hurts.
Then they reverse rolls.
They become that seven-year-old part,
Talking back to their adult self.
It's a wonderful way to heal attachment wounds,
And so is the seven-year-old.
What went unsaid,
To say what they need,
What they want,
What hurt they're carrying,
And then reverse roles again and speak as the adult back to the childhood self.
This can be done for any part of the progression of developmental trauma,
If there's a person that comes up.
That person can be talked to if there's a pet.
That pet can be talked to.
If there's just an experience,
You can put the experience in a chair and talk to it.
A way to make this great for groups.
Is to put those numbers along the floor and invite one person at a time to just walk their timeline.
It becomes a kind of a bottom-up,
Top-down narrative.
That's spontaneous.
And there again,
You can pause and talk to a part of yourself anywhere along development.
It usually taps out at about three or four parts is plenty for a session.
Another variation is to put those cards on the floor and invite the whole group to come up.
Just say,
Go to an age.
Where you feel a little stuck,
Where you feel you don't know.
Took a breath in and you have them breathe it out again,
Where you feel angry,
Where you feel hurt,
Where you feel shut down.
The babies talk to the babies.
They're sociometrically aligned by age.
Adolescents talk to each other,
Young adults talk to each other,
And they have something to give each other that,
As a therapist,
I oftentimes don't have.
They're in the same place at the same time.
So they share at a deeper level and break their isolation and open further and develop more social emotional.
Skills and social intelligence and relational intelligence.
So the resilience timeline follows the same process.
But with a different.
Goal.
I invite you to try them,
They're very easy to do,
They provide context.
Who was there,
They can be followed up by a social item if you want to increase the context.
You know,
You talk to the seven-year-old self and find that they would like to do more work.
Do a social item of yourself at that age.
See who was there.
When that complex set in.
All part of the model.
And it's all part of breaking it down so that role play becomes focused.
And you have a warm-up to it.
So that it doesn't come out of nowhere and so that it's not.
So broad.
That it goes in too many directions.
