Trauma and recovery – Julia Fry – Psychotherapist, Neurodivergence Coach, Writer, Poet, Artist.

The Little Boy Who Wanted to Jump a Gap and Was Scared of Falling

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I watched a video on Instagram of a little boy who wanted to jump a gap and was scared of falling. His dad was cheerily pressuring him into it, telling him he could do it. The child kept trying but kept stopping at the edge, and the dad egged him on, a note of exasperation creeping into his tone. As the child grew more agitated, his self-talk became more erratic with words and phrases being repeated excitedly, like “one step, one step, one step.” The dad said at one point that he had to stop himself laughing at the child’s self-talk. Finally, the child did the leap with a reassuring hand hold from the dad. Then he did it without the hand hold and was rewarded with cheers and high fives, and loads of praise. This is how conditions of worth are created.

Gratitude: what’s the point?

In a dark place once, I felt utterly depressed; could not think of one thing I was grateful for. Not one. I hated where I was living in my sixth floor council flat, where I’d taken up the tiles leaving a bare, concrete floor in the lounge. It felt cold, looked freezing, like the night sky. I had no spiritual practice. I had isolated myself. I wasn’t working. I was on government ‘benefits’. I felt unable to work and bad for not working. Wretched is the word for it.

Is it safer to fit in or stand out?

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Do you want to be different or do you want to fit in?

When I was a teenager, with undiagnosed AuDHD and cPTSD, I desperately wanted to fit in, be accepted, be loved for who I was. I also wanted to express myself through what I wore and I had all kinds of ideas of the outfits I would put together to give space to this self-expression, but I didn’t let myself. I couldn’t. The need to fit in, not be ridiculed, and the desire to feel safe were stronger than the courage needed to stand out and be different.

photo shows a caterpillar with orange and yellow fur sticking on a green leaf

Othering Me, Othering You

Image shows strands of finger knitted wool of differing lengths arranged in a circle with the ends at the centre in a spiral. The wool is multi-coloured. — Othering Me, Othering You, 2023, Wool

I created this piece using wool. The wool came from a cardigan I made where I found the seams to be too irritating so I unpicked it. I am very sensitive to seams and labels in clothing. I was left with lots of small balls of wool in varying sizes and I followed an intuitive prod to finger knit each ball into a long strand. This took a few months and during this time I was working on my dissertation for my creative psychotherapy master’s, which was a heuristic inquiry into the experience of othering people different from me.

Othering Me, Othering You Is This The Best We Can Do?

I completed my MSc Counselling and Psychotherapy – Contemporary Creative Approaches in August 2023 with a research project called Othering Me, Othering You – My Living Experience of Internalised Patriarchy. I’m going to share the following sections from my dissertation in this post: definition of terms, introduction, and conclusion. If you’d like me to send you the dissertation or have a conversation about setting up creative workshops to uncover hidden biases with compassion, please email me.

image shows a wall with 2 canvas paintings and 8 pieces of paper with drawings on them: a heart with 2 people inside, a person with their head inside a cloud with the word "worry" in it and the word "othering" written on the paper, a large multi coloured heart, two spirals - red and blue, a series of black circles, a pink triangle, a red circle with black spikes surrounding it with yellow outside of the black and green in the corners of the image, a diagram with colour coded lines leading to bits of paper, a collage with the words "would I have known where to start without this?" written on.

Some of my creative outputs from my research that I analysed for themes

So Much More

Can Vision Boarding Help Your Mental Health?

Kind Communication With Yourself

Paying Attention to Your Inner Voice

How we talk to ourselves has a direct relationship to how we feel and what we do. This has been documented in psychological research (see references below) and there is a correlation between self criticism and feeling crap. You can see for yourself how true this is by paying attention to your inner voice. If your inner voice is hard to notice at first in daily life, you could pick an activity that you’d like to be able to do well, but haven’t clocked up the hours yet to be able to do well in it. It could be drawing or painting or parkour, for example.

Could being ‘trauma informed’ help you in your work and personal relationships?

Given that an estimated 20% of women and 4% of men in England and Wales* have experienced sexual violence since the age of sixteen (and those are just the reported cases; therefore, these figures could be just the tip of the iceberg, not to mention the child sexual abuse figures; see Rape Crisis for more statistics), there is a high probability some of them will be your clients or customers or colleagues or students or apprentices or family members. There are also many people who have experienced emotional and/or physical abuse and/or neglect. You might not know this about them because they may never tell you. Since some of the people you spend time with at work and home are likely to have experienced trauma, it follows that being trauma informed in the ways you communicate with them will be helpful to both you and them.

Overcoming irrational fear in climbing

In January 2018 I was experiencing deep frustration at the fear that was paralysing me when I went to climb. Climbing was one of my passions and had been for about a year, yet when I went near the wall I felt crippling fear. I wondered whether my fear was related to the effects of trauma that pop up in my life, so I decided to research trauma and recovery, and set myself experiments to overcome fear. I recorded my journey in a series of blog posts, in case anyone else was going through the same thing as me. I thought I’d share links to those posts here because the sports psychology I used in my experiments might be useful to you. Here they are: