Conversations with Carolyn Spring

We're often used to the idea that it's hard to tolerate distressing emotions. But for many of us as trauma survivors, we can be easily triggered by positive emotions too. Good feelings can be strange, novel and frightening. When we've experienced grooming, they can appear to be the prelude to abuse. And they can feel just plain wrong! In this podcast I look at why we can find positive emotions so difficult, and what we can do about it.

Therapy can be, and often is, transformational. But why? I benefitted greatly from the empathy and attunement offered by my therapist, but over time I also had to adjust my expectations about how change would occur in me. I had to learn to consider what's really going on when we feel misattuned-to as well. I needed validation and acceptance, but I also needed to be challenged. Here's the story of how that played out in one particular therapy session, and the question that at first offended, and then transformed me.

Trust is so key for smooth human relationships, but it's also invariably damaged after we have suffered trauma, especially abuse. So how do we learn to build it again? In this episode I talk about how there aren't 'three top tips', but how it's a meticulous process of firstly learning to trust ourselves, to tune into our internal radar, and then to bring our front brain online to assess the data we're presented with – especially when we say 'no' to people.

In this second and final part, I look at the cognitive mindsets and practical approaches I've employed to keep going even when everything in me wants to give up: because 'keeping on keeping on' matters to me, not least because by doing so, things do invariably improve.

There's often nothing we can do to prevent challenging times happening – they're part of life. But when they hit, how do we keep going? In this episode (part 1 of 2), I look at the painfulness of overwhelm of trauma, the heart-cry of which is often 'There's nobody there' and the need for us, in learnable ways, to develop self-compassion.

Trauma teaches us that we are helpless to act in the face of danger. But recovery from trauma involves learning to act, learning to take steps, learning to start to find and create the solutions. In this podcast, I talk about the symptoms of trauma and how they drive us towards a solution.

Trauma isn’t something we’re supposed to get over easily. It’s supposed to impact us. It’s supposed to change us. That’s part of why it’s so hard to shift. The problem isn’t with us. In this podcast, I talk about the impacts of trauma and how it isn’t something that we can get over easily.

Sometimes life doesn’t go to plan. In this episode, I discuss the circumstances that led me back into therapy, the return of dissociative parts of the personality, and how I'm rising again after being knocked (and literally falling) down.

Unkindness is rife in our society. Extreme unkindness is, in simplistic terms, called abuse. To heal from abuse, we need an abundance of kindness. But our survival-based back brain preferentially focuses on unkindness, on danger and threat. In this podcast I talk about how to retrain our front brains to focus on and notice the many kindnesses that are in fact all around us.

Recovery from trauma is a journey, an orientation, a direction, not a specific location. Just head north - where you're at is less important than which direction you're headed in. In this podcast, I discuss why we can feel that recovery is impossible, how recovery perhaps doesn't look as we imagine it to, and how society needs to help with 'public transport' to help us on our way.

Recovering from trauma takes time. In this podcast, I look at how we often missed out on developmental stages during childhood, and how we have to learn what we were not in a position to learn as children - not least our ability to regulate our emotions, which isn’t a sign of character deficiency, but simply the loss of opportunity.

When we have suffered trauma and pain, our brains find it hard to experience joy. But we need to put ourselves in the right place to find joy, and we need to cultivate it. In this podcast I talk about a life-transforming trip from 2012 and how the big breakthroughs are built on the backs of daily small breakthroughs.

Reindeer and suncream?! Life doesn’t always appear as we expect it to. In this podcast, I talk about how trauma anticipates danger and badness, and how to develop the imagination for life to be different.

In this podcast, I talk about the crippling isolation of shame, and how to move beyond it. I talk about how shame is a survival strategy which tries to keep us from being hurt. And how, in moving towards ‘unshame’, we need to find out who we really are and live from that place of deep self-compassion.

Is recovery from trauma and abuse - resulting in dissociation and even a dissociative disorder - possible? That's the subject of this podcast where I talk about the vulnerability of hoping for good things, the difference between correlation and causation, and the difference between hoping for and planning for.

Join me as I talk about how important the relationship between therapist and client is, and what factors go into making a good one.

Join me as I talk about how important I found it to discover who I am as an individual, rather than as someone trying to simply 'fit in'.

Join me as I talk about the most important things to focus on for survivors at the start of their recovery journey.

Recovery from trauma isn't about 'getting over' something upsetting. It often requires building skills for managing emotions. In this podcast, I explain the process.

Is recovery possible? I'd say it is … based not just on my own personal experience, but on the fact that it’s how our bodies and brains are designed by default. Often when people don’t recover, it’s a problem with the therapy or the ‘treatment’, rather than a problem with a person. In this thought-provoking podcast, I bring hope for healing.