Psychotherapist Sunny Strasburg describes how trauma therapists move from trying to rescue clients to holding compassionate presence without fixing them. Her own psychedelic experiences taught her to sit with intense material as a collaborative partner, not a rescuer, using the image of carrying a lantern into a client's darkness while keeping one foot above ground.
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And you know, when I was doing a lot of trauma therapy early in my career, I went from. And I think most therapists go through this trajectory in our careers, you know, and hopefully we keep learning. But, you know, the first few years you're this hero. You're going to save everybody from their own trauma and you're working harder than they are. And every appointment you're leaning forward and, you know, working so hard and you want to rescue this person from their pain. And you know, that's really like this naive way of being a beginning therapist. And then you get burned out. You see enough trauma, you've heard every gnarly story you can imagine, and then you, you have parts that want to protect you and then you become kind of numb. So, you know, there's this, this kind of second phase where you're just trying to survive these really intense, horrible things that you're hearing and you, you shut yourself off from the pain, right? And then you get to a point, hopefully in your learning where you're able to stay in compassion, but you're not in sympathy and you're not overly working too hard or trying to rescue the client and you're not detached and traumatized yourself. You're riding that edge with that discernment of I need to feel connected to this person, this other human who's suffering so that we can relate and I can be attuned and build rapport. So I'm here with, with this person. I'm tracking with this person. I think of it in a visual as I'm in the client's underworld, in their deep, dark underworld. And I'm holding a lantern for them and I'm not dragging them along and I'm not walking behind them. I'm at their side holding up a lantern and I'm with them, right? And I'm always keeping a part of me, you know, or self energy up on above ground. And I always have access to that. So no matter where we go, I always have access to the, the ground above. I don't get lost in the underworld with them. And I. That has been a really helpful image for me when I've been in really int sessions. And I will say that doing my own psychedelic work has been the most profound way that I've worked through, through holding all of the intensity that I've been with with clients. That, that has really helped me see that, that I am in this divine partnership with working with people. I'm not rescuing anybody and they're not rescuing me, but we're in this together, and we're metabolizing this crazy thing called human experience together.
