massively confused about some level of dysfunction or the abusive system that you grew up in but if you're just here because you clicked on the title and you feel like you had a pretty good childhood but can't figure out your mental health problems this video might not be that helpful for you as a side note i find that unless the person grew up in say something like adoption or foster care or extreme abandonment most clients are more aware of their family system than they think they are and even if someone did grow up on all that extreme attachment trauma i don't think that they need to know the memories in order to work on that trauma we already know it was bad just from the attachment viewpoint so if you're new to me or new to the channel welcome if you like this video feel free to hit some of the buttons on the screen you can't mess with any of the buttons and if you feel like these videos are helpful to you into your recovery you can consider supporting the work that goes into these videos over at my patreon i do not take on any paid third party sponsorships on this channel because i think it must things up for the viewer in addition you can go to my website to do some childhood trauma e-course work that i offer there including a recent webinar on shame that discusses working with shame triggers through an inner child exercise called dialoguing you can also get in touch with me through my website and you can connect with me at my instagram or my tech talk and i will have all the links in the description of this video so as a reminder as trauma survivors we struggle with knowing what's healthy and what's not and we often second guess our experiences and our intuition childhood trauma is really trauma to our perception like we don't trust what we already know about our families because we don't have a frame of reference and clients need a lot of help with that it's almost like as survivors we start the healing journey as if to say like it was my family it was my experiences my life but what do i know about it this is helped by exploring what a healthy family system is like and getting some psycho-education and some validation about toxic family systems which i try to do a lot in my videos so clients also tend to think if they can't fully recall a chain of events then they don't have a case for how bad it was or what their parents were like or worse that they're not going to be believed that kind of stuff breaks my heart and as a side note it's important to think if you're a therapist watching this to be at least aware that if clients don't remember their childhood it doesn't mean that their childhood trauma is irrelevant it's important to think where might they have picked up their survival strategies like fawning freezing fighting coping where did their problems of intimacy come from and where did they learn to deal with their feelings the way that they do it's important to not rule out trauma because they can't remember childhood fully but they can list family having significant present issues especially if the client feels questionable stuff coming up with the family so let's explore this idea about what clients already know by actually looking at a family system through something called the genogram a genogram is a family tree of dysfunction i have all my clients put one together with me at the beginning of treatment to get a sense about what their system was like past and present here is a hypothetical genogram
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN or new to the channel welcome if you like this video feel free to hit some of the buttons on the screen you can't mess with any of the buttons and if you feel like these videos are helpful to you into your recovery you can consider supporting the work that goes into these videos over at my patreon i do not take on any paid third party sponsorships on this channel because i think it must things up for the viewer in addition you can go to my website to do some childhood trauma e-course work that i offer there including a recent webinar on shame that discusses working with shame triggers through an inner child exercise called dialoguing you can also get in touch with me through my website and you can connect with me at my instagram or my tech talk and i will have all the links in the description of this video so END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN