Background:
He had come with severe anxiety and depression. A friend recommended him to visit us, but he didn’t contact us for a few months. When he came to see me he was totally closed, skeptical about therapy and showing signs of depression. He had a history of childhood abuse and his ACE score was 5. Alcoholic father, abusive mother and a series of abusive relationships had broken his spirit from within. He was very-disassociated and couldn’t connect effectively with his immediate family members. He wasn’t close to his mom who also was abused in his childhood. Other therapists had worked with him before, but it hadn’t helped.
The sessions:
We started his sessions and mostly worked on his childhood trauma – physical and sexual abuse through Inner Child Regression Therapy. Once a client is physically or sexually abused, he/ she usually ends up attracting abusers all the time – it’s almost like their pattern of abuse continues over the years in different forms. Initial sessions his body language would be tense, closed, defensive and clearly with such history there were trust issues. After the third session, he said “now I realize that therapy is not stupid, it actually works!”. For me that was a big big breakthrough! After the sessions slowly, his anxiety reduced and confidence improved. Overall, he started feeling much better about himself. His relationship with his mom changed and she no longer triggered him. He was able to have meaningful conversations with her. His sleep also improved significantly.
Results:
His results before and after 4 sessions of therapy here.
Additional perspective:
According to us Therapy is still not complete till his well-being score doesn’t go above 80%. Depression score also needs to be less than 5. He needs more work, but we never insist on that. Often, the clients feel so good after 4-5 sessions that they feel everything is fine and they don’t need any more work. We hope that is true and in many cases it stays that way – but in cases where trauma is spread over years and the impact is deep rooted we recommend follow up sessions over few months just to keep the client on track and ensure that he/she stays that way.
Modalities used where Inner Child Regression Therapy, Regression Therapy, Gestalt, Empty Chair, clinical Hypnotherapy Techniques and Parts therapy. Some amount of Counselling also helped.
Riri G Trivedi, [email protected]
