Richard Fay Counselling

13/09/2024

This is one of a collection of videos recently created for The Centre for Men and Families.

🌟 Discover the transformative power of understanding and expressing emotions as a man. 🌟 Join the Centre for Men and Families as we explore why anger is of...

12/07/2024

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27/02/2024

"When we are young, it’s the illusion of perfection that we fall in love with. But as we age, it’s the humanness that we fall in love with: the poignant story of overcoming, the depthful vulnerability of aging, the struggles that grew us in karmic stature, the way a soul shaped itself to accommodate its circumstances. With less energy to hold up our armor, we are revealed and, in the revealing, call out to each other’s hearts. Where before wounds turned us off, they are now revealed as proof that God exists. Where we once saw imperfect scars, we now see evidence of a life fully lived."
(~an excerpt from 'An Uncommon Bond')

21/02/2024

Recovering The Self: The foundation of trauma therapy

The author and addiction therapist Gabor Mate noted that children need two basic needs that are primarily the responsibility of parents: Safe (or secure) attachment and authentic expression. When these two are consistently offered to someone in the first seven or so years of life, there is a reasonably strong chance that child will flourish in adulthood, even when faced with hardship.

This was the discovery of John Bowlby when he observed orphans after the end of WWII. Those that seemed to navigate life best had the best attachment in infancy and early childhood. In other words, secure attachment is not merely about childhood, but is the most significant factor in determining the outcomes of a person’s entire life.

The two basic needs of every child

The first need, secure attachment, allows a child to explore and discover the world and their place in it without fear. The child knows that parents are emotionally scaffolding their development through attunement – the finely developed capacity to recognise what a child needs, moment to moment, and meeting that need in a calm, grounded and loving way. This helps a child self-soothe when things go a bit pear-shaped, and gives the child confidence to repeat tasks until they have mastered them. Failure is not punished; parents instil a growth mindset in the child, using failure as encouragement to try again.

The second need, authentic expression, allows a child to think, feel and act with autonomy, based on what they are experiencing at any given moment, without being punished by a parent and without a parent breaking the security of the attachment. This helps a child express themselves with clarity and congruity, allowing them to develop into a unique and creative individual. They know who they are, they are in touch with what they think and feel and most importantly, with what is going on in their bodies. They naturally and calmly honour their own lives, and know inner security and confidence.

Houston (and everywhere else), we have a problem

However, parents – often despite their best intentions – fail at one or both of these tasks. This leads to attachment trauma (not to be confused with PTSD, but often presenting with similar life-long debilitating impact). Research conducted by Blue Knot Foundation found that over one in four adults suffered significant trauma in their childhood (four or more traumatic events). In the first ever community-based study to link self-reported Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) to documented health records found that 62% of regionally based US adults reported at least one ACE. The research confirmed previously reported associations between childhood adversity and poor outcomes throughout adulthood. More broad-reaching research has revealed the figure is over 70%.

Before any effective trauma therapy can commence, these two needs – safe attachment and authentic expression - must be met in the adult client. Both conditions must be met without causing hyper-arousal in the client’s autonomic nervous system.

Trauma-informed is not good enough

Trauma informed therapy is vital if a therapist is going to prevent a client from becoming dysregulated, or to know what to do when something has caused a client to become dissociated. However, this does little to provide what the client most needs. Therapists who are not trained in a trauma-transforming approach will skew their work towards undershooting the client’s window of tolerance. Keep the client as calm as possible, but don’t expect any significant change outside the therapy room. Change can become painfully slow, even as the therapeutic relationship develops. The client doesn’t so much feel safe us numb, untriggered, perhaps thinking but not feeling or experiencing much.

Clients on mental health plans have their insecure attachment fears amplified when subsidised therapy ends after a limited number of subsidised appointments. Further, clients can become normalised to therapy and ritually retraumatise themselves telling their story over and over to countless therapists over a lifetime, with little to no change. This way, even trauma-informed therapy can become an ongoing experience of learned helplessness.

The centre of the cosmos is within us

The ancients formed a term to describe the axis that divides the earth between its celestial poles. Imagine a line that ran from an infinite distance through the earth from the north pole to the south pole and out the other side. This was called the axis mundi.

More recently, the term has been used to describe anything that connects two worlds, e.g. heaven and earth, form and essence. This concept of the centre of everything appears in almost every ancient religion and culture. For Jews, it was called the soul. For Christians, it was called koilia, or innermost being, the deepest place within us.

Leonardo da Vinci captured this in his painting Virturvian Man, symbolizing symmetry, balance, the integration of humanity, mathematics, proportionality, science and art (albeit a little patriachially!).

Recent neuroscience has discovered that we do in fact have an axis mundi, and our navels in some profound way are the steering wheel of our reality. The ancients believed the gut is where we choose our lives, hence why the soul was thought to abide there. But what if this power to choose to know who we actually are is taken from us early in life?

The one terrible choice

Gabor Mate observed that when given the choice between attachment and authenticity, the child will always surrender their choice in order to maintain any attachment to the parent.

As a result, the child becomes responsible, at least from their own psychological perspective, for the attachment to the parent. The child has lost their power to choose to express who they are, because it was far too costly to retain that choice. They will, however, maintain some sense of agency, at great cost to themselves. The one choice they can never make is to believe they are on their own and their parents haven’t got life figured out. That would be far too terrifying for any child. Instead, they will believe they are bad, or not good enough, or simply not enough, because that belief gives them the illusion of control. That is, they believe that they can try harder to “be good” or at least “be better” and then, perhaps, mummy and daddy will stop fighting, or daddy won’t get angry with me, etc. The problem is, these beliefs are formed before we are consciously aware, so the conscious mind can’t shift them. In other words, our unconscious beliefs, not our choosing, control our lives.

If a child grows into an adult while still carrying the unconscious core belief that they are bad, or not good enough, they will be open to all manner of abuse, much of it self-inflicted. They may not care for their health through diet and exercise, they might not take a path of learning for self-development for fear of judgment for not being “perfect”, they might engage in relationships with people who abuse them. Alternatively, they might feel like imposters and constantly strive to feel like they deserve anything good, never actually enjoying any aspect of their lives and needing to meet some notion of perfection before they can believe they deserve success, respect or love.

Who is behind the wheel?
The primary juice that allows the brain to operate is the neurotransmitter serotonin. However, the gut produces most of the serotonin within us. In fact, the American Psychological Society reported that it is likely that the gut is a second brain. It is the only organ in the human body with a separate nervous system, with over 100 million neurons embedded in the gut wall. The gut bacteria within our digestive system responds to the all the same neurochemicals as the brain, not merely serotonin.

Let me illustrate with the metaphor of a car.

The conscious mind is the headlights that can perceive reality as it comes towards us (what a small part of the car it is).

The unconscious beliefs we carry from childhood are the engine that drives us forward.

The gut is the steering wheel that chooses our life.

If the engine is driving us faster and faster in a desperate attempt to find safe attachment (without which we cannot survive), and our capacity to choose is offline because the child we once were could never choose in an authentic way, no wonder our unconscious beliefs sabotage the very thing we say we want. The power of the unconscious beliefs in our “engine” creates torque steer, wrestling the steering wheel out of our control. If as a child we weren’t allowed to know who we actually are, but were told who we had to be in order to keep others happy, it’s not unlike a child driving our lives at night when they can’t even see over the dashboard. As a result, the conscious mind (the headlights) has all the evidence to confirm everything we believe: We are stupid, we keep making the same mistakes, we are imposters and so on.

Trauma-transforming foundations

Any therapy that has the power to transform a client’s trauma must be able to offer the client safe attachment with the therapist within the confines of the therapy space. This must be the responsibility of the therapist. In other words, it requires the therapist to take the lead. Few modalities offer such a clear, directive approach to allow for this scaffolding.

In addition, any effective trauma therapy must equip the client with the ability to reclaim the power to choose their lives, to know who they are, experientially. It must take into account the whole person:

1. It must be embodied, taking in the whole person through somatic movement.

2. It must be authentic, addressing the unconscious barriers each individual client has.

3. It must have emotional resonance with the client – giving them a powerful sense of how their specific pain has held them back, and to actively challenge its right to keep them there.

4. Finally, it must be grounded in the client’s actual experience of reality. This can only happen if it is active, vital, clear, directed and empowered by the practitioner.

When all these conditions are met, the client is reconnected with the truth of who they are, and only then are they ready to begin to process their trauma safely, effectively and permanently.

The Richard Trauma Process (TRTP) is designed to equip practitioners with the tools to safely, quickly and powerfully introduce clients to the truth of who they are. In the space of minutes, clients move from powerlessness and despair to energy, strength, conviction and agency with beautifully authentic resonance. Clients regain the ability and motivation to choose their own lives, no matter how much their capacity to choose their own life has been stunted by their past experiences. People are returned to their authentic selves. TRTP then resolves the trauma that plagues people’s lives, usually within in three sessions.

© 2024 Richard Fay

About the Author
Richard Fay (Dip.Min., M.Couns.) is a psychotherapist with 15 years of experience in private practice. Richard is located in Brisbane, Australia and is a trainer of The Richards Trauma Process. Richard is also ambassador of the Centre for Men and Families, a not-for-profit charity that helps men and their communities in crisis.

05/04/2022

Most people on this page know that I was for many years CEO of The Centre for Men and I continue to advocate for this work, because of the way it changes men's lives and changes their communities. On 20-22 May we are holding The Gathering, which is for every man, regardless of their background. It's a gathering not only for men to connect deeply and safely with one another in a beautiful location, but for men to find tools for life. I'm both a keynote speaker and am leading two workshops, one with (now retired) Brisbane Lion's ruckman Archie Smith, and one on the Enneagram, and there are a bunch of other very interesting workshops on offer. I would love to see you there.
https://www.centreformenaustralia.org.au/thegathering/?fbclid=IwAR2iuMfyeSUlGxgLFieHsn8Sth7iHT4tvV8-nkVC3eHvXvIqMcQ-s8f2aYI

The Gathering The Gathering is a weekend event for men of all ages run by the Centre for Men and Families Australia. A lot has been said about toxic masculinity and the damage it does in our society. The Gathering is a celebration of healthy masculinity where men can be equipped to be part of the so...

09/10/2021

This article explores entrainment within the counselling room. It was written for therapists, but clients and prospective clients would also benefit from insights offered here. I confess that this article touches on some ancient therapeutic shibboleths.

Therapy on a G String:
Helping clients sing in the key of life

In the 17th Century, Dutch inventor and scientist Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock. Soon after, he discovered that over time, their pendulums would start to swing together. 350 years later, we are still trying to understand why. Two scientists from Lisbon University recently postulated that the pendulums sync up due to a tiny energy transfer in the form of a sound pulse, and the evidence supports their hypothesis.

There is anecdotal evidence around the world of women’s menstrual periods falling into a rhythm when they cohabitate for long enough. Plants share energy, solar systems share energy, whole galaxies and sub-atomic particles share energy. Entrainment is a term to describe this alignment which occurs throughout nature, because it exists at the quantum level. String theory observes non-adjacent particles behaving identically. Animals are entrained to the rhythms of night and day, sleeping and waking (or the reverse, just ask the possum currently inhabiting my roof cavity). Entrainment is a way the physical world conserves energy, and it reminds us that everything is connected, always. Watch how cyclists and geese use formation to minimise the effort to move.

Entrainment is most easily observed in music. Vibrations from one instrument or string will cause other instruments or strings to vibrate at that exact frequency. Mirror neurons in humans cause us to experience the sensory and emotional energy of other people around us. This capacity gives us empathy; it also causes us to imitate desire, something that French philosopher Rene Girard discovered in the mid 20th Century. Advertising and the media take advantage of this mimicry, not always unhelpfully.

Entrainment has rarely been discussed within the field of mental health, but it has huge implications for client outcomes. Carl Rogers, the founder of Person-Centered Therapy, has had significant influence on modern therapeutic interventions. His three values of empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard could not be more helpful characteristics in assisting the client feel valued, welcomed and understood for how they experience reality. However, the belief that the client, with help from the therapist, will find their own way through the fog to the truth within them can lead to reverse entrainment: The therapist takes on the powerlessness of the client, because the client is powerless, and the client is leading the process. It can become a bit like the blind leading the blind. I know; I have felt this powerlessness in the past all too often.

Imagine going to a surgeon who empathised with our broken body and identified with our powerlessness. “I want to experience this with you, I have no reason to be confident in your recovery because that confidence would dismiss your pain” is the last thing we would want to hear the surgeon say.

Don’t misunderstand me; empathy is a vital starting place for any positive therapeutic relationship. Brene Brown has written much on the topic. She borrows from Theresa Wiseman’s four defining attributes of empathy; to see the world as other people see it, to not judge others, to seek to understand another’s feelings from the inside, and to clearly communicate how you understand how another feels.

Brown wrote that “empathy is a strange and powerful thing. There is no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It’s simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of “You’re not alone.” However, if we stay with empathy alone, there is a risk that although our clients will feel heard, valued and known, they will feel comforted in their present state rather than invited into a better one. This helps only while they are in the room with us. The moment they leave, they are once again alone in their powerlessness.

In the therapy room, entrainment would look like a deep determination to take the client from their pain to a place of empowerment, and a wholehearted confidence that you know how to get them there. “I have your back, I know what I’m doing, just follow my lead.” It doesn’t involve becoming a psychological Pollyanna where sunshine and butterflies swim round the room like some cheesy 3D Hallmark card, or having to hype up the energy as if you are a self-help guru trying to convince the client you are taking them to Shangri-La. However, it does require the therapist to know and be clear and secure in who they are. In other words, you cannot take anyone where you are not already. Entrainment says they cannot go beyond your experience. This may sound like the inverse of empathy, but entrainment tells us that the therapist’s experience of who they are is more important than the client’s experience of who they are, at least at first, if there is going to be positive change.

If empathy allows us to feel with another, compassion says “let’s go somewhere better.” Scientists have mapped the biological role of compassion. it slows the heart rate and respiration, it bonds us to others and all matter through the excretion of oxytocin, it activates the pleasure centres of our brain, and it makes us feel empowered. Any therapy that does not bring a client to empowerment is doing a disservice to clients. Empowerment is our natural state. This is what entrainment does - the energy of empowerment vibrates in the life of the therapist and the client swims in the wonderful wash of this life-giving frequency. Rutger Bregman writes that empathy can sap our energy, whereas compassion injects us with vitality and peace, because it is focussed on the change you want someone to experience. In fact, compassion lights up a whole different region of the brain to empathy.

A truly compassionate stance requires the therapist to be in the state they want their clients to be. There are days when my workload has been too heavy, or I’ve suffered a loss that I need to process, or I have an illness, and I will reschedule clients. I don’t need to reschedule if all my clients require is my empathy. In fact, I can often be more empathetic when I myself am suffering in some way. However, that solidarity alone can eventually lead to a co-dependence upon the therapist. “At least he understands me, I need to make another appointment.”

Therapists who are committed to full and fast recovery in their clients would benefit greatly from understanding entrainment and what compassion looks like in the counselling space. I recently described entrainment as the screwdriver that prises open the lid to the paint tin so clients can put colour back into their lives. It is the very first step, the experience the client has when they pick up the phone or walk into your room. The challenge is, in my experience entrainment is counter cultural to most modalities. You may have sensed this merely in reading this article. We are not trained to reassure clients that we can take them to a better place, simply because most modalities can’t do that and to promise something we can’t deliver would put inordinate pressure on the practitioner and unethical exceptions within the client.

If your approach does not empower you to be confident in your work and assured of client outcomes in a timely manner, it is worth considering whether “tea and empathy” is doing you and your clients a favour. The Richards Trauma Process uses the tools of entrainment and the therapist’s clear and decisive leadership to powerfully resolve trauma, anxiety and depression, usually in three sessions. Clients are free to live their lives richly and fully, and practitioners enjoy a workplace of empowerment. Through entrainment, everyone gets to sing in the key of life.

© 2021 Richard Fay

About the Author
Richard Fay (Dip.Min., M.Couns.) is a psychotherapist with over a decade of experience in private practice. he is located in Brisbane, Australia and is a mentor of The Richards Trauma Process. Richard is also ambassador of the Centre for Men and Families, a not-for-profit charity that helps men and their communities in crisis

15/01/2021

Transforming Trauma
Taking the quantum leap into unconscious regulation

Therapists who navigate trauma with their clients often find the process grind to a halt just as the client starts to engage with what has beset them most of their lives. What causes progress to stall, and how can the client navigate the challenges of re-traumatisation as they engage with their trauma?

Three Steps Forward, Two Back
In 1969, Martin Broadwell first described the four stages of competence (or four stages of learning). They are:
Unconscious incompetence - we don’t know what we don’t know
Conscious incompetence - we are aware of what we don’t know, but can’t change it
Conscious competence - we are slowly developing consciously learned skills
Unconscious competence - the new learning is now integrated into our unconscious

The model applies to all forms of learning, and has become a key framework for training in all levels of education and business. It helps those who train others recognise their audience’s capacity to assimilate and apply knowledge to their lives.

The four stages are understood as psychological states and have been borne out by more recent neuroscience research: The conscious brain is slow to process new material, and the two middle stages require a constant back and forth process of learning and applying until the learning is unconscious. Three steps forward, two steps back, as the saying goes. On the other hand, the unconscious is fast, efficient and automatic. It requires no constant reinforcing of what it knows, but is damned by what it does not know.

This same model has been applied to the world of behavioural psychology. It looks like this:
Unconscious dysregulation - we don’t know why we keep ending up in the same mess
Conscious dysregulation - we are aware that we are stuck in trauma, but can’t change it
Conscious regulation - we are slowly applying to our lives skills we learn in therapy
Unconscious regulation - we are living a flourishing life without any conscious effort

Many people live in a state of unconscious dysregulation for much of their lives, thinking this state is native to them and that they must be the problem. The young child, who lives primarily out of unconscious impulses, imagines themselves as the centre of their world. As a result, they blame themselves for any dysfunction in their world. This self-blame gives them the illusion of control. It is much safer to blame themselves for whatever trauma their world presents to them than to lose trust in a parent or authority figure. Their world is not bad, they are. Therefore, if they could be better/stronger/smarter, mum and dad won’t fight, their siblings won’t abuse them, and so on. They believe they can - and must - change their world.

Stalling in Therapy
At some point, a person awakens to stage 2: Conscious dysregulation. They realise that their normal was not normal after all, and that their childhood was unhealthy, and it is causing them to be frequently triggered. Something authentic within them helps them find the courage to make contact with a therapist. The therapist helps them recognise how unhealthy their belonging systems were and, as a result, their reactions to life have been. They invite the client to move towards stage 3: Conscious regulation.

This is where all progress slows to a crawl.

Any professional in this field knows the patience required by the therapist and courage required by the client at this point. The client hears the therapist present alternative ways of thinking and behaving, and in the safe confines of the therapist’s room, with unconditional empathy and regard, the client starts hoping for a different future.

What the client does not know is that the therapist has inherited 100 years of tradition that has sought to raise this work to the empirical quality of science. This has created an unconscious incompetence within therapists (in this regard, the client is already a step ahead). Therapists cannot see past their learning, and their learning cannot take the client past conscious dysregulation except for a few brief moments of conscious regulation. They struggle to understand why the client cannot apply outside of therapy all they learn inside therapy, but asking a client to consciously regulate themselves when triggered is akin to asking them to lift a 100 tonne truck. Their conscious self is not up to the task (nor is it meant to be).

Meanwhile, the client has their own sense of being “not enough” which is reinforced by their own inability to establish regulation. This then creates a codependent dance between therapist and client. The client’s internal dialogue is something like “if only I could be as regulated as my therapist, if only I could get it right, perhaps it will all click into place at my session next week” while the therapist can retreat into his/her evidence-based certainty.

Most modalities operate at the level of normal human interaction; in other words, talk therapy. The therapist’s conscious self speaks to the client’s conscious self. The client knows conscious dysregulation and believes the therapist will help them across into conscious regulation. The therapist believes this too. Models such as CBT, psycho-education and a raft of other interventions are designed to do just that. The client goes home and tries to recall and consciously apply all the therapist said.

The Brain, Knowledge and Experience
Some information on how the brain processes information and experience is helpful here.

Information, like this article you are reading, gets processed into the unconscious in the first four or so hours of our nightly sleep as declarative memory. It’s like taking a jumbled jigsaw puzzle and putting it all into schemas or files in our long term unconscious memory were it all belongs. This information isn’t time stamped; it doesn’t matter when I learned the word aorta or that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris, only that I know it. I don’t experience such knowledge, I just know it.

On the other hand, experience, like learning how to ride a bike, or more importantly, how we relate to ourselves and others, is processed out of hippocampus (the part of the brain that holds today’s experiences) and into long term memory in the last four hours of our sleep through Rapid Eye Movement (REM, the dreams we remember) as emotional, episodic and procedural memory. Notice how relational, visual and emotive these dreams are. In this way, the repository of “now” experience becomes “then” recollection. We “feel” these memories, because they contain emotional and embodied content. We were there. Dad was holding the back of the bike.

Any experience of trauma never gets processed by the hippocampus so it is never properly stored in unconscious memory. The brain cannot find any reference to safety that is needed to process it, so it is dumped immediately and directly into the unconscious in its entirety without a time stamp, with warning triggers attached to it, lest anything like it happen again. Life is predicated not on thriving, but surviving. Instead of dreams, unresolved trauma creates nightmares, flashbacks, and sensory overload.

Episodic memory (who, what, when, where) becomes scrambled. My mother hitting me 30 years ago at my childhood home becomes my partner walking in the door a bit grumpy right now.

Emotional memory becomes scrambled. Feelings of shame when my father shouted at me for falling off the bike a generation ago revisit me when I send an email to the wrong person just now.

Procedural memory gets scrambled. My whole body freezing when a dog attacked me as a six year old happens all over again when I see a dog while walking down the street.

It is all still happening. Constantly.

What then happens after a client goes to therapy and consciously learns information on how to respond to life’s challenges, and walks out of the therapist’s office? If they are lucky, they go straight home and sleep (before their trauma can trigger them) and all that information is processed in the unconscious as declarative memory. They now know how they should live. This doubly damns them. They wake up the next morning to an angry voice message or an unhappy child, and what happens in their unconscious? “Here we go again.” “This always happens to me.” “I never get a break.” “Nobody gives a s**t about me.” etc etc. They are flung back into conscious dysregulation within hours of tasting a moment of conscious regulation.

Therapeutic models talk about titrating clients’ exposure to any intervention, because they recognise how slow and difficult the movement is from conscious dysregulation to conscious regulation. Trauma makes this exhausting and humiliating for the client and frustrating and tedious for the therapist. for example, exposure response therapy steps a client through triggers until they can navigate the minefield. A client witnesses an armed holdup in a bank in a shopping mall. From that day onwards, they cannot go near any shopping mall. The therapist invites the client to just drive to the mall and then drive home; then drive to the mall, get out of the car, and drive home; then drive to the mall, walk into the mall, then walk out and go home, all the while applying emotional regulation techniques to soothe themselves. It is a slow and painful and usually humiliating process for the client. The therapist is asking the client’s conscious self to do what it is not designed to do.

Destin Sandlin created a fascinating experiment where he designed a bicycle to steer in the opposite direction to the way the handlebars are turned. Having ridden a bike all his life, he wondered how he would adapt to this reverse direction pushbike. It took him eight months of daily practice to be able to ride it with any stability (this is a great example of procedural memory). This led him to conclude that knowledge is very different to experience. Until we have experienced it differently in our unconscious, we will live as if nothing has changed. Interestingly, Sandlin’s six year old son took only two weeks to master riding the reverse steering bike. A six year old lives in the amazingly plastic world of imagination and lived experience. We adults need to learn from such children. But how?

A Quantum Leap
For any intervention to help clients move to unconscious regulation, it must take the quantum leap over conscious regulation, skipping stage 3 entirely - the stage at which most therapy stalls. It must do the exact opposite of what most therapies do: It must not engage the conscious self. This is counter-intuitive to the prevailing thinking that adheres to the four-stage model of competence which has defined the historical frameworks that govern psychology.

For this to happen, the client must richly experience themselves in the world of empowered personhood, and they must re-imagine their younger selves as no longer trapped in dysregulation, but safe and loved. These two facets are reinforced by the experts in the field of trauma therapy including Bessel van der Kolk, Babette Rothschild, John Briere and others. A client who richly experiences themselves in the state that their biology was designed for, empowered and safe, is able to live a full and flourishing life.

There are tools that help clients take this quantum leap over stage three, directly and quickly from conscious dysregulation to unconscious regulation, and as I said earlier, children use these tools every day. They are the tools of the imagination. The Richards Trauma Process (TRTP) is an extraordinary approach to trauma because it is designed from the inside out to change a client’s state from dysregulation to regulation by bypassing the conscious self and speaking directly to the unconscious in the language of the unconscious. Instead of months (or often, years) of therapy, prodding the client slowly through the minefield of conscious dysregulation into the impossible mirage of conscious regulation, TRTP catapults the client quickly and painlessly into lasting, permanent unconscious regulation.

Once a client has experienced unconscious regulation, there is no work required to maintain this regulation. Like all unconscious learning, it is automatic. The client is then free to flourish and explore life, and the therapist is released from client dependency that mars professional fulfilment.

© 2020 Richard Fay

About the Author
Richard Fay (Dip.Min., M.Couns.) is a psychotherapist with over 10 years experience in private practice. he is located in Brisbane, Australia and is a mentor of The Richards Trauma Process. Richard is also ambassador of the Centre for Men and Families, a not-for-profit charity that helps men and their communities in crisis.