Tag: trauma therapy

Inviting curiosity and compassion as you explore your inner world

Trauma, depression, anxiety and life challenges can leave you feeling disconnected from yourself, overwhelmed, dysregulated, out of rhythm and without a sense of true meaning or purpose. Life events can imprint certain unhelpful ways of thinking upon you, which you may find difficult to escape, or even to identify. Your intuition may feel like a luxury you cannot afford, or access.

You may fear your feelings, believing they are too much for you to contain. You may feel that you are too much for others or too little. You may be in battle with your body, misunderstanding it’s language and unsure of how to re-connect with it. You may feel betrayed by yourself, by your body.

You may doubt yourself, doubt whether you are capable, doubt whether you can love and be loved. Your beliefs about yourself and the world may be unfounded, and unhelpful. You may wonder who you are, whether you can know yourself in any meaningful way. Your life, your decisions, your view of yourself, may be dominated by events, people, traumas of the past. You may feel stuck and unable to move past such things.

Your behaviours may be contrary to what you truly desire for yourself; you may feel you have no control over them. You may get stuck in a loop of damaging, unhelpful ways of acting in relationships. You may secretly long for more in life. You may desperately want to understand yourself. You may need to turn inward and accept the call to return home to your true self.

Therapy sessions are adapted to your needs. I work on a continuum from verbal therapy to body-based techniques. This holistic approach to therapy is suited to various mental health challenges, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar and personality challenges, as well as life transitions or spiritual searching. The work is trauma-informed and consciously focused on reducing power dynamics. I work out of a beautiful practice in Vredehoek, Cape Town, where we have the space to move between verbal and body-based work.

To enquire about therapy or book a session, contact Melissa: Whatsapp 0834129768 or email info@melissamcwalter.co.za

It Begins With The Body

People who come into therapy have often (arguably always) been traumatised. This may be an overt traumatic incident or more subtle and complex traumas over a period of time. Often, the trauma is in childhood and possibly outside of our ability to recall or consciously work with. Sometimes, we repress traumatic memories, even in adulthood. Trauma blocks our connection with ourselves by disrupting the connection between our minds and bodies and disallowing connection between various parts of ourselves. This means fragmentation is always around the corner and estrangement from one’s own self may become a familiar experience.

The body is where we begin. The body holds an immense amount of knowledge and tries to communicate with us all the time. However, we are frequently so shut off to our body’s intelligence, that we live in a conceptual, intellectual, ego-consciousness state of being. As if everything that exists and is of import in our journey is upward of the neck. This is untrue.

Our bodies hold vast wisdom and memory, storing information from nourishing and meaningful events but also storing trauma, holding it for us until we can look at it. Until we are able to bring our mind and body together – to engage the trauma on a bodily level – trauma held in the body may manifest all kinds of symptoms such as diagnosable illness, inexplicable symptoms, depression, anxiety, rage, fear, tight muscles, postural difficulties, sexual problems, addictions, loss of confidence and more. So many people coming into body-based therapy cannot feel their bodies, and definitely cannot feel their feelings in their bodies.

This is a slow process of learning to reclaim the body, to become aware of it’s existence, what it actually is, and to form a relationship with it. To learn to listen to it and allow the inner dialogue between mind and body to continue unimpeded by blocks.

For individuals who have suffered trauma, the body can be a frightening place. A place to escape from – not to. The body may have let us down or even turned against us, and coming into relationship with it may be overwhelming. However, verbal dialogue without the complement of coming into one’s own body can stay simply conceptual. However, verbal psychotherapy with body-based, non-verbal therapies can also be of great assistance to those are are trying to come home to their bodies and take control – a way to conceptually and emotionally process the increasing awareness of the body.

Breathing, trauma-informed yoga, cold water therapy and similar practices, when facilitated professionally, are non-invasive yet powerful ways of coming into the body.

The body is where we begin. If you are interested in body-based therapy or body-based therapy complementing psychotherapy – a brilliant combination of processing styles – please click here.