Transforming Trauma
Taking the quantum leap into unconscious regulation
Therapists who navigate trauma with their clients often find the process grind to a halt just as the client starts to engage with what has beset them most of their lives. What causes progress to stall, and how can the client navigate the challenges of re-traumatisation as they engage with their trauma?
Three Steps Forward, Two Back
In 1969, Martin Broadwell first described the four stages of competence (or four stages of learning). They are:
Unconscious incompetence – we don’t know what we don’t know
Conscious incompetence – we are aware of what we don’t know, but can’t change it
Conscious competence – we are slowly developing consciously learned skills
Unconscious competence – the new learning is now integrated into our unconscious
The model applies to all forms of learning, and has become a key framework for training in all levels of education and business. It helps those who train others recognise their audience’s capacity to assimilate and apply knowledge to their lives.
The four stages are are understood as psychological states and have been borne out by more recent neuroscience research: The conscious brain is slow to process new material, and the two middle stages require a constant back and forth process of learning and applying until the learning is unconscious. Three steps forward, two steps back, as the saying goes. On the other hand, the unconscious is fast, efficient and automatic. It requires no constant reinforcing of what it knows, but is damned by what it does not know.
This same model has been applied to the world of behavioural psychology. It looks like this:
Unconscious dysregulation – we don’t know why we keep ending up in the same mess
Conscious dysregulation – we are aware that we are stuck in trauma, but can’t change it
Conscious regulation – we are slowly applying to our lives skills we learn in therapy
Unconscious regulation – we are living a flourishing life without any conscious effort
Many people live in a state of unconscious dysregulation for much of their lives, thinking this state is native to them and that they must be the problem. The young child, who lives primarily out of unconscious impulses, imagines themselves as the centre of their world. As a result, they blame themselves for any dysfunction in their world. This self-blame gives them the illusion of control. It is much safer to blame themselves for whatever trauma their world presents to them than to lose trust in a parent or authority figure. Their world is not bad, they are. Therefore, if they could be better/stronger/smarter, mum and dad won’t fight, their siblings won’t abuse them, and so on. They believe they can – and must – change their world.
Stalling in Therapy
At some point, a person awakens to stage 2: Conscious dysregulation. They realise that their normal was not normal after all, and that their childhood was unhealthy, and it is causing them to be frequently triggered. Something authentic within them helps them find the courage to make contact with a therapist. The therapist helps them recognise how unhealthy their belonging systems were and, as a result, their reactions to life have been. They invite the client to move towards stage 3: Conscious regulation.
This is where all progress slows to a crawl.
Any professional in this field knows the patience required by the therapist and courage required by the client at this point. The client hears the therapist present alternative ways of thinking and behaving, and in the safe confines of the therapist’s room, with unconditional empathy and regard, the client starts hoping for a different future.
What the client does not know is that the therapist has inherited 100 years of tradition that has sought to raise this work to the empirical quality of science. This has created an unconscious incompetence within therapists (in this regard, the client is already a step ahead). Therapists cannot see past their learning, and their learning cannot take the client past conscious dysregulation except for a few brief moments of conscious regulation. They struggle to understand why the client cannot apply outside of therapy all they learn inside therapy, but asking a client to consciously regulate themselves when triggered is akin to asking them to lift a 100 tonne truck. Their conscious self is not up to the task (nor is it meant to be).
Meanwhile, the client has their own sense of being “not enough” which is reinforced by their own inability to establish regulation. This then creates a codependent dance between therapist and client. The client’s internal dialogue is something like “if only I could be as regulated as my therapist, if only I could get it right, perhaps it will all click into place at my session next week” while the therapist can retreat into his/her evidence-based certainty.
Most modalities operate at the level of normal human interaction; in other words, talk therapy. The therapist’s conscious self speaks to the client’s conscious self. The client knows conscious dysregulation and believes the therapist will help them across into conscious regulation. The therapist believes this too. Models such as CBT, psycho-education and a raft of other interventions are designed to do just that. The client goes home and tries to recall and consciously apply all the therapist said.
The Brain, Knowledge and Experience
Some information on how the brain processes information and experience is helpful here.
Information, like this article you are reading, gets processed into the unconscious in the first four or so hours of our nightly sleep as declarative memory. It’s like taking a jumbled jigsaw puzzle and putting it all into schemas or files in our long term unconscious memory were it all belongs. This information isn’t time stamped; it doesn’t matter when I learned the word aorta or that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris, only that I know it. I don’t experience such knowledge, I just know it.
On the other hand, experience, like learning how to ride a bike, or more importantly, how we relate to ourselves and others, is processed out of hippocampus (the part of the brain that holds today’s experiences) and into long term memory in the last four hours of our sleep through Rapid Eye Movement (REM, the dreams we remember) as emotional, episodic and procedural memory. Notice how relational, visual and emotive these dreams are. In this way, the repository of “now” experience becomes “then” recollection. We “feel” these memories, because they contain emotional and embodied content. We were there. Dad was holding the back of the bike.
Any experience of trauma never gets processed by the hippocampus so it is never properly stored in unconscious memory. The brain cannot find any reference to safety that is needed to process it, so it is dumped immediately and directly into the unconscious in its entirety without a time stamp, with warning triggers attached to it, lest anything like it happen again. Life is predicated not on thriving, but surviving. Instead of dreams, unresolved trauma creates nightmares, flashbacks, and sensory overload.
Episodic memory (who, what, when, where) becomes scrambled. My mother hitting me 30 years ago at my childhood home becomes my partner walking in the door a bit grumpy right now.
Emotional memory becomes scrambled. Feelings of shame when my father shouted at me for falling off the bike a generation ago revisit me when I send an email to the wrong person just now.
Procedural memory gets scrambled. My whole body freezing when a dog attacked me as a six year old happens all over again when I see a dog while walking down the street.
It is all still happening. Constantly.
What then happens after a client goes to therapy and consciously learns information on how to respond to life’s challenges, and walks out of the therapist’s office? If they are lucky, they go straight home and sleep (before their trauma can trigger them) and all that information is processed in the unconscious as declarative memory. They now know how they should live. This doubly damns them. They wake up the next morning to an angry voice message or an unhappy child, and what happens in their unconscious? “Here we go again.” “This always happens to me.” “I never get a break.” “Nobody gives a shit about me.” etc etc. They are flung back into conscious dysregulation within hours of tasting a moment of conscious regulation.
Therapeutic models talk about titrating clients’ exposure to any intervention, because they recognise how slow and difficult the movement is from conscious dysregulation to conscious regulation. Trauma makes this exhausting and humiliating for the client and frustrating and tedious for the therapist. for example, exposure response therapy steps a client through triggers until they can navigate the minefield. A client witnesses an armed holdup in a bank in a shopping mall. From that day onwards, they cannot go near any shopping mall. The therapist invites the client to just drive to the mall and then drive home; then drive to the mall, get out of the car, and drive home; then drive to the mall, walk into the mall, then walk out and go home, all the while applying emotional regulation techniques to soothe themselves. It is a slow and painful and usually humiliating process for the client. The therapist is asking the client’s conscious self to do what it is not designed to do.
Destin Sandlin created a fascinating experiment where he designed a bicycle to steer in the opposite direction to the way the handlebars are turned. Having ridden a bike all his life, he wondered how he would adapt to this reverse direction pushbike. It took him eight months of daily practice to be able to ride it with any stability (this is a great example of procedural memory). This led him to conclude that knowledge is very different to experience. Until we have experienced it differently in our unconscious, we will live as if nothing has changed. Interestingly, Sandlin’s six year old son took only two weeks to master riding the reverse steering bike. A six year old lives in the amazingly plastic world of imagination and lived experience. We adults need to learn from such children. But how?
A Quantum Leap
For any intervention to help clients move to unconscious regulation, it must take the quantum leap over conscious regulation, skipping stage 3 entirely – the stage at which most therapy stalls. It must do the exact opposite of what most therapies do: It must not engage the conscious self. This is counter-intuitive to the prevailing thinking that adheres to the four-stage model of competence which has defined the historical frameworks that govern psychology.
For this to happen, the client must richly experience themselves in the world of empowered personhood, and they must re-imagine their younger selves as no longer trapped in dysregulation, but safe and loved. These two facets are reinforced by the experts in the field of trauma therapy including Bessel van der Kolk, Babette Rothschild, John Briere and others. A client who richly experiences themselves in the state that their biology was designed for, empowered and safe, is able to live a full and flourishing life.
There are tools that help clients take this quantum leap over stage three, directly and quickly from conscious dysregulation to unconscious regulation, and as I said earlier, children use these tools every day. They are the tools of the imagination. The Richards Trauma Process (TRTP) is an extraordinary approach to trauma because it is designed from the inside out to change a client’s state from dysregulation to regulation by bypassing the conscious self and speaking directly to the unconscious in the language of the unconscious. Instead of months (or often, years) of therapy, prodding the client slowly through the minefield of conscious dysregulation into the impossible mirage of conscious regulation, TRTP catapults the client quickly and painlessly into lasting, permanent unconscious regulation.
Once a client has experienced unconscious regulation, there is no work required to maintain this regulation. Like all unconscious learning, it is automatic. The client is then free to flourish and explore life, and the therapist is released from client dependency that mars professional fulfilment.
© 2021 Richard Fay
About the Author
Richard Fay (Dip.Min., M.Couns.) is a psychotherapist with over 10 years experience in private practice. he is located in Brisbane, Australia and is a mentor of The Richards Trauma Process. Richard is also ambassador of the Centre for Men and Families, a not-for-profit charity that helps men and their communities in crisis.
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