Why this trauma therapist loves neutrality.
If I had a nickel for every time someone started therapy with me saying, “I just want to be happy,” I could probably stop working tomorrow. I get where they’re coming from: a lot of life has happened, things we can’t seem to “get over” keep popping up in our minds, and none of it ever seems to make sense, despite spending hours trying to organize it and think it through. I believe a lot of people have this unintentional belief that once they do the work in therapy, they won’t have any more bad days, and it’s smooth sailing from there. Unfortunately, I often have to deliver the bad news that no matter how perfect you do your skills, how curious you remain about yourself, and how deep you go into your journey, you’re still going to have terrible days, get triggered, and possibly even experience new traumas or stressors. This is personally why I have beef with the constant climb to accessing excessively positive and pleasurable emotions.
To set the stage for my clinical approach to emotions and neutrality:
I believe that emotions occur on a spectrum, think of the feelings wheel laid out in a straight line.
I use the definition of neutrality as the “absence of strong views, expression, or strong feelings.”
To be clear, the absence of strong feelings, emotions, and expressions is not to be confused with dissociation, apathy, depression, defeat, or indecision. It’s the absence of living in fearful triggering moments, the absence of not enjoying the joy of the moment because the joy is “too big.”
To the traumatized or stressed brain, we are used to operating in extremes. We understand a lot of life to be either terrible or the best day ever, we can also remember that during times where neither terrible nor great were happening, we were walking around waiting for the other shoe to drop. Should this kind of dynamic happen long enough, such as your childhood, a job, deployment, school, a relationship, or marriage, the brain starts to download that as its understanding of the world and expand into all parts of life. A traumatized or stressed-out brain tends to have a lot of extreme or powerful views on:
How good a person we are
How good or bad we look
Our perceived performance
How successful or unsuccessful we are
What or how much we eat
How family view us
and many other things that play into how we see ourselves as a person
As a result, if we struggle to get things right the first time, unintentionally hurt someone’s feelings, or find it difficult to make the change we want, our brains tend to have us believe that we are also bad people, we just don’t care, and should be better at perceiving the unperceivable. If I were to show up at the beginning of your therapy journey and hand you a therapy wand, allowing you to wake up tomorrow with the life you want, it would probably be “happy.” There would be smiles, understanding, compassion, financial security, the ability to see the future and what to look out for, and the ability to “get out of your own head.” While those things are absolutely achievable, they are not something we will ever have consistent access to.
To start to bring my point into clearer focus, my hope for a lot of the people who come to see me is that they eventually come to a point where they like themselves, trust their intentions, have grace within mistakes, and have the ability to establish safety within chaos: neutrality. We don’t have to engage in excessive self-love, although I believe you should have access to it. Our worth doesn’t have to be tied up in our ability to achieve, but ambition and goals can help us achieve things that further reflect our identity. We can decide how we would like to be treated by others, feel uncomfortable about it, and know that it’s not a crazy request. I believe a lot of that healing and access to neutrality happens when we do a few things:
We have to learn about our emotions. Once we have a general understanding of how resentment and anger feel and sit differently on our bodies, how anxiety and triggers “sound” a little different in our minds, that’s when we have full access to tell our story and experiences. If we can only ever say that we are mad about something in our past, we never really get the chance to process the fear we might have had in the moment, the betrayal from someone we loved and trusted, the anxiety of the anticipation that it’ll happen again, the overwhelm when running into things or people that remind us of that moment, the rage that it even happened at all. I think the majority of the battle is just the knowledge of self. If we have the understanding that we are feeling closer to 5 emotions vs 1, we tend to make more space for ourselves. If we understand that certain emotions bring out behaviors we don’t like, we are more likely to put ourselves in places that allow us to get space from that emotion.
Understanding what belongs to us and what was given to us. Many, many, many people walk around with thoughts and beliefs about themselves and the world that they don’t realize aren’t even theirs. People tend to believe that they can’t accomplish big things because there was probably someone in their life telling them how much they were messing up. People shut down in the face of confrontation because they were told their voice didn’t matter when there was disagreement. People don’t expect good things because they’re not grateful enough for the small things, so why would better things come? Have you ever sat down and mapped out where some of your innermost beliefs come from? I would bet everything in my trinket box that the beliefs that you carry that don’t “feel good” don’t actually belong to you. As we start to further understand what was given to us, we get to make the decisions on if we would like to keep those thoughts and beliefs, tweak them, or completely revamp them.
Reprocessing our hardest moments in life can give us permission to let go. As we go through life and experience traumatic events, the brain starts to store those emotions and memories and use them as a guide light. If our guide light is rooted in fear, chaos, dissociation, and anger, that’s likely how we will experience life. If we engage in a therapy like Accelerated Resolution Therapy, EMDR, Brainspotting, etc. We can actually gain access to a process that cuts that “emotional chord” we have to some of our worst moments. As we cut that chord, that guide light tends to get a bit clearer, decisive, and more rooted in intention and safety, versus fear and hiding.
I hope that the moral of this story is that neutrality in my clinical work talks about safety, the ability to regulate gently, to hold two really hard things at once without tipping over. I think that those emotional abilities come when we gain much more access to ourselves within safe spaces, and allow us to create bigger spaces of safety in the real world. Our healing doesn’t have to be defined by our ability to swing as far away as possible from the negative; it can be defined by letting go of the requirement of excessive feeling, expression, and thought in order to self-advocate or establish normalcy.
If you want more information on trauma therapy or accelerated resolution therapy, you can click these links!
Accelerated Resolution Therapy
If you want more information on how to better access safe neutrality, you can book a free 15-minute consultation here!
This article was written by Stephanie Townsend, LCSW, CCTP, ART Practitioner
