Hello all,

This is my first post here and I am a bit nervous.

I have a great trauma therapist I have been working with for awhile. She is not perfect, but things have been pretty good and I have made significant progress in the 6 months we have been working together. One possible red flag has come up that I would like to get some outside perspectives on.

She told me she feels dissociation in sessions sometimes when clients talk about hard things. She says she can feel the clients dissociation coming on, and she will even have moments where she has visual changes when her clients do. She also gave another example of feeling energy in her arms when her clients feels that.

I work with traumatized people in my professional life, so I know what it is like to deal with others with PTSD. She knows my professional background and that I feel very incompetent sometimes. This therapist is generally very reserved with self disclosure, and she told me about this because I was convinced that hearing sound differently, like it is far off, is a sign that I am crazy. She was trying to convince me it is a sign of dissociation, not psychosis. I believe the intent behind her telling me this was to help me not be so hard on myself and to help me understand I had not lost my mind, but that changes in sensory perception are signs of dissociation. She explained, that if I know that the sounds are not actually far off, I am just hearing them that way, then I have not lost touch with reality, I am simply overwhelmed by whatever triggered me. She explained that it's like when she has a visual distortion. I didn't need to go check myself into the ER, but to ground myself when I feel like I am suddenly hearing sounds like they are far off.

In the moment, I was quite reassured by her telling me this.

Now, I am a little worried. She does somatic experiencing and attachment trauma therapy and she really works to be attuned on a physical level with her clients. At the time she said this, it seemed like she was just describing what it was like to pick up on a client's state. Now, I am not so sure. I am wishing she had not told me this as I think I will be concerned to share something that is triggering me. At the same time, I was about to quit therapy because I felt like I was not able to get better, and her description of her process gives me hope that maybe I am not broken beyond repair. It also leaves me confused.

I know that I need to talk to her about this, but that is more than I can handle right now.

Hope