The Trauma Therapy Process: Containment, Resourcing, and Working Through Resistance

Written by Roland Bal

Let me stress that a therapist is there to facilitate the healing process. By all means, it is within the natural capacity of the body and mind to heal itself!

Nevertheless, it helps to know the mechanisms of dissociation and associated neurobiological effects so that you may return to emotional integration and the reorganisation of the nervous system.

Emotional release is often part and parcel of psychotherapy, especially when you are working through deep-seated issues that have had a lot of meaning connected to them. These releases help clear up emotional residue and assist in rebalancing body systems and mental/emotional functioning.

Emotional Release and the Risk of Retraumatisation

It is of the utmost importance, though, that when you go through emotional release you have a sense of containment. What I mean by this is that you have enough strength and resources available to be able to observe and allow release without becoming overly focused on shame, guilt and blame, or feeling overwhelmed by the emotional release. The initial trauma is made up of exactly these properties, and you need to avoid retraumatisation.

In order to provide containment, you need to make sure that the processes of emotional unfoldment and accompanying body sensations are slowed down. As overriding feelings and resistances arise, they need to be addressed and processed before you move on. When space is given to you to digest and integrate by slowing down and verbalising what is occurring, there is the potential for the healing of the body and the mind.

Containment, Resourcing, and Context: The Three Pillars

Within the unfolding of the trauma therapy process, there can be a constant moving back and forth between working with resistances, overwhelming feelings, and other emotions like anger, grief, and sadness, through resourcing, providing containment and context.

To contain is to be able to hold the space for the emotions that surface. Resourcing is to provide the tools to discharge and neutralise harmful emotions, and providing context gives a new perspective to an experience or period in one's life.

Containment, resourcing and providing context go hand in hand. It is necessary to address resistances whenever they arise; monitor them as bodily sensations, trace and acknowledge them as protective mechanisms which were put in place during times of crisis.

A Body-Oriented Approach to Trauma Therapy

Tracking body sensations while resourcing helps in working towards a resolution. Tracing and acknowledging provides a new perspective on what has happened and where one is at present psychologically. All aspects are equally important: containment, resource, and context. Most of all, you have to stay and work with "what is" in the present until that drops away and a new state of mind presents itself.

This is where body-oriented trauma therapy differs from approaches that rely primarily on narrative. You can talk about what happened for years and still find the body reacting as though the threat is present. The nervous system does not reorganise through understanding alone — it reorganises through direct experience of safety, regulation, and discharge at the level of sensation. That is what tracking body sensations actually does. It brings the therapeutic process out of the story and into the body, where the activation is held.

How Resistance Shows Up in the Therapeutic Process

We have a tendency to act based on how we feel. If we perceive feelings as heavy, dense or upsetting we instinctively want to move away or try to get rid of them. If we perceive feelings as light, upbeat and pleasant we very quickly develop an attachment towards them. We are constantly choosing, based on what we perceive as negative or positive. Within the trauma therapy process, this is no different. Trauma, which is emotional residue, is based on resistances. It is inevitable that they will present themselves as such while we are working through them.

Resistance can show itself as a reluctance to open up, focusing on resolve or understanding, being too quick to accept or move into a process, being stuck in the remembered narrative of what happened, and dwelling on blame, guilt, and self-reproach.

None of these are failures. They are survival strategies — the same ones that were put in place during the original overwhelm. The work is not to override them but to meet them with the same containment and resourcing that applies to everything else in the process. When a resistance is seen for what it is — a protective mechanism, not a character flaw — it begins to soften on its own. That softening is not forced. It happens because the nervous system recognises, gradually, that the threat it was bracing against is no longer present.