Starting Therapy: Breaking the Cycle of Trauma

There is a particular kind of bravery that comes with sitting down with starting therapy. Sitting down with a therapist and asking for help is vulnerable. It’s scary. And, often, it feels unnatural.

If you grew up in an abusive, chaotic, or emotionally neglectful household, the idea of therapy might feel strange. You likely learned that survival meant staying quiet, or pretending everything was fine. So, now, as an adult, you’ve probably noticed that these same things are causing anxiety, confusing feelings, or even trouble in maintaining relationships. Choosing to find understanding for why this is happening in your adulthood and seeking support can feel both deeply necessary and deeply terrifying.

Being the first to start therapy is not just about self-improvement. It’s about untangling generational patterns, unspoken traumas, and inherited roles and beliefs that no one else has dared to question. This kind of healing is courageous. But it’s also scary, exhausting, and sometimes incredibly lonely.

Fear of Starting Therapy

The unspoken truth is that starting therapy when no one around you understands is scary. It’s not just about finding a therapist, or setting up the appointment, or even talking to a stranger. It’s about the fear around exploring thoughts and questions that you’ve had and avoided for years.

And it’s about breaking the silence that you’ve held onto your whole life.

You might find yourself wondering –

• What if talking about it makes it worse?
• Does this mean that I’m betraying my family?
• Maybe things weren’t that bad… maybe I’m being dramatic.

These worries aren’t small. They’re protective thoughts that, in the past, have served you by keeping you safe.

When you grow up in a house where expressing your emotions led to negative responses, where speaking up meant being punished, or where you were often dismissed, it’s hard to believe in your own experience.

Sometimes surviving meant pretending nothing was wrong – so speaking up about the past can feel like betrayal. But it’s not. It’s the beginning of breaking generational cycles.

Challenging Old Survival Strategies

When your earliest life experiences were marked by neglect, emotional chaos, or abuse, then your survival has often depended on NOT looking too closely.

You learned to stay quiet and to blame yourself. It was easier if you found fault within yourself, because how could the people around you – those responsible for your well-being – be the ones who are causing any issues. You often shrunk and dismissed yourself to keep the peace and, well, keep on surviving.

Therapy is a space that challenges this. It requires taking a risk to challenge what you’ve always known, to challenge that the negative thoughts about yourself are not true, and to challenge you to see how you impact other people. For someone who has learned to survive through denial or caretaking, doing this can feel like shaking up everything that makes you who you are.

Therapy is a threat to those old survival skills. But it’s a good threat.

It allows you the space to get curious about the emotions you were never allowed to feel. It creates space to connect the dots of your past to create understanding for how its effecting you now. And, by connecting these dots, it asks you to take a deeper look at your family system. However, the goal is not to blame your family, but to understand their lasting impacts.

Breaking Generational Patterns

Challenging the patterns that you grew up with – especially when you’re the first in your family to do so – can feel incredibly isolating and confusing. For trauma survivors, the decision and leap of faith to begin unpacking pain that has been buried for generations is an act of courage. It also tends to be coupled with a flood of emotions.

You might feel guilt – for stepping away from what is familiar, for naming the pain that others either didn’t know how to name or didn’t recognize. It is possible that you might also feel guilty for setting boundaries that your family never taught you about or that were unimaginable in the past and for allowing yourself to create some distance and separation from the relationships that you once needed to survive.

Fear also plays a role in healing. Fear of being judged, shamed, or even rejected. The fear of what you might uncover by facing your past. And, also, fear about what it means to move forward.

When you have started to acknowledge and recognize past patterns, the unknown of doing something different can be quite scary. It can be hard to trust yourself when learning to challenge automatic patterns and reactions. This is especially true when you’ve spent most of your life already struggling with trusting your intuition.

Then, there’s anger. Anger for what you have been through, what you did not have, and how long you had to pretend that everything was fine. This anger also comes laced with deep sadness. A deep grief for the childhood you thought you had, the childhood you might have needed, or the version of your family that you wished was real.

Yet, alongside all the pain, there will also be moments of pride. Pride for challenging yourself to choose the truth over comfort and for healing the parts of you were never seen. There will be glimpses of hope for a future that you are present and in charge of. A deep feeling of satisfaction for finally feeling safe enough to listen to your inner voice.

Exploring your trauma is not just rehashing past experiences – it’s about rewriting your relationship with yourself. By healing your relationship with self, you also begin to build self-trust. You stop second guessing every decision, every boundary, and every feeling. These emotions that you start to feel, though potentially overwhelming, are NOT wrong or too much. They’re evidence that you are showing up for yourself in a real and honest way.

When You Change but No One Else Does

One of the hardest parts of healing, especially for trauma survivors, is realizing that while you are doing the hard work of changing, the people who hurt you might not. Worse, they might never.

There is a deep frustration that comes with being the only one doing the work. The only one that is recognizing past patterns, that is challenging beliefs, and that is taking the risk of doing things in a new way. It will be hard when no one else is taking accountability and when denial is still dominating the way that your family system is operating.

For trauma survivors, you crave a sense of justice. You look for some form of acknowledgement of what you experienced and that it was real. But this may never come. It might never feel like justice is served. When you don’t get the apologies that you are yearning for or never see behaviors change, you might feel angry, frustrated, and exhausted. You might find yourself falling back into old behaviors of thinking that you are too much or that it wasn’t that bad.

But here’s the truth: just because others do not see it does NOT mean that it is not real.

Your growth does not need to be recognized by others to be meaningful.

Although frustrating, sometimes lonely, and scary, getting help and going through the therapy process is almost always worth it in the end. Because even though it’s hard and others might not join in, even though justice won’t be served, the thing is, you get to live a happier life. You get to find peace. And, you get to break the cycle of trauma.

It’s brave. It’s vulnerable. And, it’s so very freeing.