Aug 3, 2026 · 31 min · 12 segments
Do you have shame about how you may feel about things, how you respond to your environment, and how you respond that is not congruent with your values? This is the client that comes in and usually…
Sarah Della VellaHost
Abbey SamideHostToday, I got permission from a client to share this really important revelation she had in therapy just last week.
I'm going to change all the identifying information to protect her confidentiality.
But I think the message from our work was really an important one to share.
She has a history of sexual abuse as a child and has been working really hard to understand herself because she carries a whole lot of shame.
And what we do a lot of work around is obviously how some of the trauma that we know gets stored in the body shows up in her life today.
And kind of talked about what sounded like a really normal mother moment where she was like saying, oh my God, sometimes I just want to run away.
Right after she told me that she had just helped out someone in her life take care of something they really needed because they had a newborn baby.
on vacation even on vacation you can get calls yes we need you home or this is what's happening
yes you're at work and you're like i just got to keep the phone out because just in case i'm sure you go down um here's the difference right so through this we talked about the intensity level of these feelings in response to feeling trapped and forced and of course and a very important question is tell me about a time when you felt trapped and forced Enter in the sexual abuse as a child, both trapped and forced, right? So now we start looking at this not as a she's a bad parent or a bad mom, but as her body is physiologically reacting to a trauma trigger, which is, you got it, is trapped and forced.
And when she took that, the context of maybe I'm not a good parent out of the picture, that was the narrative she walked in the door with and instead looked at it through the trauma lens of, oh my God, I'm reacting to feeling trapped in force.
The reason that we bring this up today, right, is because I think it's so important to shift in our thinking, and this is a great way to sort of look at
If you've had trauma in your past, we're going to talk a little bit about trauma.
And we're going to talk about how you, to learn a little bit more about the body states and also how it might show up in your life and what maybe therapy around that looks like.
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Today, I got permission from a client to share this really important revelation she had in therapy just last week.
I'm going to change all the identifying information to protect her confidentiality.
But I think the message from our work was really an important one to share.
She has a history of sexual abuse as a child and has been working really hard to understand herself because she carries a whole lot of shame.
And what we do a lot of work around is obviously how some of the trauma that we know gets stored in the body shows up in her life today.
And kind of talked about what sounded like a really normal mother moment where she was like saying, oh my God, sometimes I just want to run away.
Right after she told me that she had just helped out someone in her life take care of something they really needed because they had a newborn baby.
on vacation even on vacation you can get calls yes we need you home or this is what's happening
yes you're at work and you're like i just got to keep the phone out because just in case i'm sure you go down um here's the difference right so through this we talked about the intensity level of these feelings in response to feeling trapped and forced and of course and a very important question is tell me about a time when you felt trapped and forced Enter in the sexual abuse as a child, both trapped and forced, right? So now we start looking at this not as a she's a bad parent or a bad mom, but as her body is physiologically reacting to a trauma trigger, which is, you got it, is trapped and forced.
And when she took that, the context of maybe I'm not a good parent out of the picture, that was the narrative she walked in the door with and instead looked at it through the trauma lens of, oh my God, I'm reacting to feeling trapped in force.
The reason that we bring this up today, right, is because I think it's so important to shift in our thinking, and this is a great way to sort of look at
If you've had trauma in your past, we're going to talk a little bit about trauma.
And we're going to talk about how you, to learn a little bit more about the body states and also how it might show up in your life and what maybe therapy around that looks like.
