A Trauma-Informed Psychodynamic Approach to Creating Safety and Healing from Past Experiences

This podcast episode, hosted by Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes, delves into the psychodynamic and phenomenological aspects of creating safety for individuals impacted by trauma. It emphasizes that trauma, often rooted in childhood experiences, can manifest as mood, developmental, addictive, and even autoimmune disorders, affecting physical, interpersonal, emotional, cognitive, and environmental domains. The core argument is that feeling "unsafe" stems from vulnerability, threat, or danger, which can be internalized as an "inner critic" or manifest as fear around certain people, environments, or times of day. The presentation highlights the importance of understanding how past traumatic experiences, particularly those related to attachment quality and chaotic childhoods, shape adult behaviors and feelings, often unconsciously.

The episode makes key distinctions between past traumatic realities and present safety, urging clinicians to help clients differentiate between memories/schema and current facts. It explains how psychodynamic principles, such as the impact of unconscious motives (like survival) and the idea that "all behavior is communication," are crucial for understanding maladaptive coping mechanisms developed in childhood. For instance, avoidant or anxious attachment styles are directly linked to caregiver consistency and responsiveness, or lack thereof, especially concerning concepts like object permanence. The discussion also explores how mental health issues like ADHD can inadvertently cause trauma due to societal reactions, underscoring the bidirectional relationship between mental health and trauma.

Practical insights and recommendations for clinicians include helping clients examine internalized messages, challenge faulty beliefs, and develop assertiveness. Strategies involve comparing past experiences with present realities to foster a sense of safety, identifying what truly brings contentment, and learning to trust one's own intuition. The podcast also outlines the physiological and interpersonal consequences of chronic unsafety, such as HPA axis dysregulation leading to physical ailments, hypervigilance, difficulty trusting, mind-reading, social withdrawal, giving up easily, and self-sabotage. It also details the "fight, flight, freeze, or flop" emotional responses to feeling unsafe.

Broader implications suggest that understanding these psychodynamic underpinnings allows for a more compassionate and effective trauma-informed approach. By recognizing the function of seemingly maladaptive behaviors (e.g., creating chaos, dysfunctional family roles), clinicians can guide individuals toward developing new, adaptive skills that align with their adult capacity for survival and well-being. The ultimate goal is to empower clients to move beyond their trauma-driven responses and cultivate a rich, meaningful life by consciously creating safety in all aspects of their existence, rather than being perpetually governed by past vulnerabilities.

"Trauma is often at the root of mood developmental believe it or not and addictive disorders."

"Unsafe is a sense of feeling vulnerable threatened or in danger."

"We internalize messages that we get from other people and we can use those messages to encourage and support and help ourselves feel loved or we can use those messages to be critical and rejecting and unpleasant unkind."

"Psychodynamics includes the behavior and feelings that are significantly impacted by our unconscious and subconscious motives."

"Our behavior and feelings as adults are rooted in our childhood experiences including the quality of our attachment."

"All behavior is communication all Behavior has a cause and a function it's just figuring out what it is."

"When you feel unsafe you can't relax it's like a soldier in a fox hole you may be able to doze but it's not going to be good quality sleep."

"Unfortunately when we're in this mental mindset we're looking for confirmation bias we're looking for things to confirm that hey we're not safe instead of looking for all the things that say you know what this is a safe place you're fine in this context at this time."

"If something feels wrong then there may be something to it."

"If I succeed then people may expect me to do it again and I don't know if I can do it again if I fail then I am playing into their already negative view that I assume they have of me and self-sabotage is a lot of times a self-fulfilling prophecy that's created based on those internalized messages that the child got um when they were growing up."

"People respond in their own way and fighting can be through feeling angry through being aggressive through um anything that would be pushing towards someone else pushing towards the problem trying to make the problem go away fleeing is anything that helps you Escape it's a fear Behavior it can be addiction it can be physically running away it can be going to sleep so you don't just don't have to even know you know sort of sticking your head in the sand there are a lot of ways to flee freezing the best example of that is rumination going over the same thing repeatedly trying to figure out okay how can I get out of this or what should I have done and then withdrawal or depression the person feels unsafe and Powerless and just doesn't have any other options doesn't have any other energy and they're just like screw it do to me what you will."