Sometimes people come to counselling with a question that sounds something like:

“Why is this bothering me now? It happened years ago.”

They may have experienced abuse, neglect, violence, sexual assault or other difficult experiences in childhood and then simply got on with life.

They worked. Built careers. Raised families. Had relationships. Paid mortgages. Looked after other people.

From the outside, life may have appeared perfectly normal.

And yet experiences from much earlier in life can sometimes continue to influence how a person feels, reacts and relates to other people many years later.

Getting on with life can be a way of surviving

When something overwhelming happens in childhood, a child does not necessarily have the understanding, language or support to make sense of it.

So people adapt.

They may learn to keep difficult feelings to themselves. They may become fiercely independent, stay constantly busy, avoid vulnerability or become very good at looking after everyone except themselves.

Those ways of coping may have been incredibly useful.

They helped that person get through.

The difficulty can come many years later when responses that were once protective begin affecting relationships, intimacy, trust, anger, anxiety, self-worth or the ability to simply relax.

Trauma is not only about remembering the event

In my work, I don't think of trauma simply as the event that occurred.

The event is what happened. Trauma can be what remains.

That distinction matters.

Something may have happened thirty or forty years ago, but a person can still carry beliefs, emotions and protective responses that developed around that experience.

This doesn't necessarily mean someone spends every day thinking about the past.

Quite the opposite.

Some people rarely think about it at all.

They may simply notice that certain situations trigger a reaction that feels much bigger than the situation itself. They might struggle to trust people, feel uncomfortable being vulnerable, need to remain in control, withdraw emotionally or wonder why particular relationships seem so difficult.

The question then becomes less:

“Why haven't I gotten over it?”

and more:

“What did I learn to do to survive, and is that still helping me today?”

Trauma counselling doesn't change the past

Nothing can change what happened.

And trauma counselling is not about forcing somebody to repeatedly relive painful experiences.

For me, it is about understanding the person who survived them.

What happened?

What did you need to do to cope?

What did you come to believe about yourself, other people or the world?

And what might you still be carrying today?

I often think of this as working with the scar rather than reopening the wound.

A scar tells us that something happened. But it also tells us that a person survived it.

It is never simply “too late”

People can begin making sense of earlier experiences at many different stages of adulthood.

Sometimes it happens when life finally becomes quiet enough to notice what has been sitting underneath everything else.

Sometimes a relationship brings something to the surface.

Sometimes becoming a parent or grandparent changes how a person understands their own childhood.

And sometimes somebody simply reaches a point where they think:

“I don't want to keep carrying this in the same way anymore.”

There does not have to be something “wrong” with you to seek counselling.

Sometimes there is simply something that happened to you that deserves to be understood differently.

Virginia Kehoe provides trauma-informed psychotherapy and counselling for adults in Cairns, Queensland, including support for childhood and historical trauma, sexual assault and sexual violence, interpersonal violence, victims of crime and other traumatic experiences.

You cannot change what happened. But you can work with what it left behind.