Current trauma therapy takes you near the trauma so you know it’s there. And then it makes you observe your reaction/s. However, it – the therapy therpist/setting – will not let you drown in it or be overwhelmed by it. You are kept ‘on the circumference/s – so ‘resilience’ in your own psyche increases (maybe same as ‘awareness’ is getting stronger). Doing it doesn’t sap your energy/pull you (as far) down as before on your own.

Thus, one does therapy as it is available and affordable according to ‘the method’ or system chosen.

Like when one is hungry enough one may eat.

‘Catfood Sandwiches’ – story told live by David Lindley:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n9Td_q1H3eU&t=1107s&pp=2AHTCJACAQ%3D%3D

Wuuufffff.

The therapy-historical roots of the abuse issue are when Freud decided that his female patients’ accounts of sexual abuse were not actual accounts of real events but rather fantasies on the part of the patients. At first he believed his patients` accounts , then he changed his mind and his theories. Why did he do this? Because it was just too much to wrap his head around the fact that sexual abuse was so endemic in the society in which he lived.

Not to mention the fact that if he continued to accept the level of abuse and report such, he might find himself as a kind of whistle-blower for abuse amongst his wealthy clients. Dangerous and bad for business! He instead invented a disease, ‘Hysteria’, that afflicted only women. This “illness” was not removed from the DSM “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” until 1980.

So trauma and abuse weren`t really such a thing in the 70s and 80s therapy-wise.
A better understanding of how dangerous and deleterious this kind of trauma is for the person subjected to it is a relatively recent development.

Maybe the Sannyas therapists you are talking about, NP, haven`t been keeping up and are stuck in a past-its-sell-by-date paradigm. Or like Freud, they prefer to downplay the importance and keep their jobs and kudos intact.

By thinking, mind creates reality.

If I call something “a trauma” then sooner or later I will find a trauma-therapist who calls it also a trauma.

It is just a question of supply and demand.

I have done my share of therapy and I am glad that I did. It left me with some useful tools. I see that people who did not run the therapy gamut are often lacking in certain psychological dimensions, repressing emotions, projecting onto others and so forth.

Yes, ultimately we have to create our vision, but help and guidance from others can speed up and hone the process.
I think the therapy process has been surpassed by plant medicine healing, which also comes with guides…good and bad ones. Discretion is the name of the game. Currently reading ‘Seeding Consciousness’. Highly recommended.

Of course, as Frank says, this might also be another fashion or fad, but it certainly is a fascinating one with many new dimensions to explore and discover.

Trauma-informed therapy is probably useful for some people, but I very much doubt that its tenets are as scientific and unquestionably proven by psychobiology/neuroscience, whatever that would mean, as they like to make out. They have a product to sell, after all.

Reichian theories (they also believed and promulgated the gay disease theory) informed Sannyas therapy a lot. The idea was that if you could have good orgasmic sex you would, due to the psycho-biological release, be free of all neurosis, was key. Such a theory helped a few uptight folks to get their rocks off at the time, but, as an all-embracing theory, it does seem to have a few plot-holes and it`s not hard to see how this theory can lead to coercive behaviour

I find it helpful that some intelligent writers have pointed out that ‘psychotherapy’, going back to the original Greek, means “care of the soul”. That broadens it out nicely.

Push comes to shove, you are going to have to do it yourself.
Like art, you can spend your life wondering at the creations of others, submitting to their tutelage maybe, but in the end you have to paint your own picture, sing your own song, write your own poem etc., even if it doesn`t look like the greatest masterpiece ever.

Looking back to the 70s and 80s, I think much abuse did happen in the therapy groups with these so-called therapists.

So yesterday I asked on Facebook, from the Sannyasrich community of therapists, have there been any who have come forward to talk to the FB group where the then-kids hang out? And it turns out there hasn’t been any effort to help them. More to the point, on getting in touch with normal non-sannyas therapy centres, it appears that sannyasin therapists are generally not held in high esteem, because many still seem to be operating from knowledge from the 70s and 80s and haven’t followed the latest developments in Trauma Informed methods and the neurobiology research supporting it.

The things I am hearing make me grateful that I never went to a therapy group in the ashram. I did once do Japanese Archery in the meditation resort in the 90s, but that is as close as I came.