“Trauma memory processing often is misunderstood as either a revivification or a cathartic release of the recollections and feelings from past traumatic events. This viewpoint omits the crucial ingredient of “processing”. Phase 2 involves more than the recollection or simple retelling of the trauma or a cathartic “venting” of the pain those experiences and memories have caused. Therapeutic processing intentionally focuses on many formerly unacknowledged, unconscious, and unintegrated feelings, thoughts, and beliefs so that the client can gain (or regain) the ability to regulate emotions and to think more clearly. It is focused on building increased emotional tolerance that, in turn, promotes emotional processing to the point of resolving onerous symptoms. Clients may need to move back and forth between Phases 1 and 2, especially in times of crisis and/or when they need to refresh skills or apply or reformulate elements of their safety plan. In Phase 3 the gains of Phase 2 processing are applied to current and future life issues and decisions.”

“We have to believe that we are more than the sum of our symptoms. When we settle for anything less, we limit our recovery, because we allow ourselves to be defined by what happened to us: the oversensitisation of our neurobiology and the fragmentation of our sense of self. Recovery means that we connect the dots between all the different parts of ourselves: the different experiences, emotions, outlooks; the desires, and hopes and fears; and we become the person that we truly are, the whole that is greater than the sum of all its parts. I had to believe that I was more than a collection of symptoms, and forge forwards into the entirety of my being.”