Becoming Your True Self

Book excerpt: Trauma is a situation where one is not in control of one's life. This book is about becoming the author and authority, rather than a hostage, of your life. We think of trauma as the big and obvious events, such as major catastrophes like 9/11 or a tsunami, or as childhood abuse and neglect. These are important of course, but there is another potential trauma that is rarely talked about. It happens at a time that we do not remember and cannot discuss. This is 'symbiotic trauma', the trauma of coming into a less than welcoming world at the beginning of life. It is a trauma that happens before memory, in that pre-verbal time of our existence, and it influences us profoundly, including our capacity for dealing with later traumas. This handbook will take you on a journey of hope. Trauma can be healed and resolved. You can't do all the work of healing your trauma on your own, but this handbook gives you some basics to help you on your way, and gives you some pointers to finding the appropriate help. Vivian Broughton has been a psychotherapist in private practice since 1989. She has developed her current work along the model proposed by Franz Ruppert in which unresolved trauma, particularly early attachment trauma and the entanglement with earlier systemic traumas, underlies all of our psychological difficulties.