Relational Healing: Approach¶
Overview¶
Healing from Complex PTSD is not only an internal process — it also requires safe, reparative relationships. Walker identifies four qualities that make relationships genuinely healing: empathy, authentic vulnerability, dialogicality, and collaborative rapport repair. These qualities apply whether you are working with a therapist, a trusted friend, or a co-counseling partner.
Quick Reference
- Safe relationships repair attachment wounds that unsafe childhood relationships created
- Empathy models self-empathy — being accepted by another teaches you to accept yourself
- Authentic vulnerability from the therapist (or friend) normalizes imperfection and counters shame
- Dialogicality means true back-and-forth exchange — neither person dominates
- Rapport repair after conflict builds deeper trust than conflict-free relationships ever do
- Earned secure attachment is achievable through therapy, co-counseling, or committed friendship
The Four Dimensions of Relational Healing¶
1. Empathy¶
Empathy means genuinely immersing yourself in another person's emotional world — not just acknowledging their pain from a distance, but actually feeling into it with them. For survivors who grew up in dangerous or indifferent households, a truly empathic relationship may be entirely new.
- Careful listening, mirroring, and paraphrasing deepen empathic attunement
- Therapist or friend sharing emotionally analogous personal moments (briefly and sparingly) can dissolve shame and build trust
- The most lasting benefit: empathy from another gradually becomes self-empathy — the felt sense that all of your experience, including the ugly or embarrassing parts, is acceptable
2. Authentic Vulnerability¶
A relationship heals when both people can be imperfect in it. When one person is always the exposed one and the other remains perfectly composed, a shame-intensifying imbalance forms — mirroring the dynamic of a vulnerable child and an apparently invulnerable parent.
- The "blank screen" approach in traditional therapy often reenacts childhood emotional neglect
- A therapist (or co-counseling partner) who says things like "I get scared sometimes too" or "I feel sad hearing what happened to you" gives permission for the survivor to stop performing emotional perfection
- Self-disclosure should be used sparingly and purposefully — see guidelines below
Guidelines for therapeutic self-disclosure¶
When offering personal disclosures in a healing relationship:
- Use self-disclosure sparingly — it is a tool, not a default
- Disclose primarily to normalize imperfection and reduce shame, not to process your own material
- Only share integrated material — not raw, unresolved wounds
- Never disclose to meet your own need for venting or validation
- If the other person tries to care for your disclosed vulnerability, gently redirect the focus back to them and remind them you have outside support
3. Dialogicality¶
Dialogicality is the quality of a conversation where both people genuinely alternate between speaking and listening. It is the opposite of one person monopolizing (narcissistic monologuing) while the other shrinks into pure listening (codependent self-erasure). Real dialogue energizes both participants; one-sided talking drains the listener.
- In therapy, this looks like a collaborative, mutual brainstorming approach rather than a lecture or an interrogation
- Early in a healing relationship, the survivor often needs extended space to speak and be heard without being redirected — this is legitimate and important
- Over time, growing mutuality in conversation is itself a sign of recovery — and a skill that transfers to outside relationships
- A take-it-or-leave-it stance on feedback preserves the counselee's autonomy
Dialogicality and the four 4F types¶
Each trauma response type has a characteristic dialogical challenge:
- Fawn types may pull the therapist or friend into doing all the talking by over-listening; they need encouragement to speak up about their own needs
- Freeze types may talk around their pain with abstract or dissociative content; they need gentle steering toward their actual emotional experience
- Fight types may dominate conversation as a defense against intimacy; the therapist or partner must gradually insert themselves and model reciprocal exchange
- Flight types may talk in circles about surface-level worries; they need help moving from obsessive perseveration into deeper, emotionally grounded material
4. Collaborative Rapport Repair¶
Misattunements — small moments of misunderstanding, impatience, or disconnect — happen in every real relationship. What matters is not avoiding them but navigating through them together. Successfully working through a conflict generally deepens a relationship beyond where it was before.
- Repair begins by naming the disconnection without blame: "I think I may have misunderstood you"
- Then owning your own contribution: "I think I was tired / preachy / inattentive just then"
- This models that relational disappointment is normal and workable — not evidence that the relationship is over
- It also deconstructs the inner critic's demand for relational perfection
- One of the most common reasons people leave therapy (or relationships) prematurely is the silent accumulation of unaddressed disappointments
How Relationships Heal Abandonment Wounds¶
Childhood abuse and neglect leave survivors conditioned to expect danger, rejection, or indifference from other people. Repetition compulsion can drive them toward relationships in adulthood that replay these dynamics — not by choice, but by deeply embedded neural patterning.
A safe relationship interrupts this cycle by providing a corrective emotional experience: someone who stays present during emotional pain without withdrawing, shaming, or punishing.
- Survivors learn to stay in emotional contact rather than isolating when triggered
- Flashback responses (fear, shame, withdrawal) are normalized rather than punished
- Over time, the shame attached to having emotional needs begins to dissolve
- This makes it possible to be seen in one's full imperfection and not be abandoned for it
Earned secure attachment — the developmental achievement of having at least one genuinely intimate, safe relationship — is the goal. Attachment researchers now recognize this as achievable in adulthood even when it was unavailable in childhood.
Finding a Therapist¶
Not every licensed therapist has the qualities described above. Walker recommends interviewing at least three therapists before committing, and treating the first meeting as a consultation rather than the start of treatment.
What to look for:
- A therapist who willingly answers questions about their approach before the first appointment
- Someone who responds to you warmly, not aloofty or critically, even in a brief phone call
- A therapist who has done their own therapy, ideally including family-of-origin work — unexplored personal trauma limits a therapist's capacity for depth work with survivors
- Someone whose approach includes psychoeducation, emotional attunement, and active engagement rather than pure blank-screen neutrality
Signs to move on:
- Aloof, evasive, or shaming responses during initial contact
- A therapist who never challenges the inner critic or who silently tolerates your self-attack
- One who does all the talking or makes you their sounding board
Support Groups¶
When individual therapy is unavailable, unaffordable, or being supplemented, support groups can offer genuine healing through shared vulnerability in a community context. Group settings can be especially effective for shame reduction because no single person is the only one being vulnerable.
Walker recommends leaving any group (online or in-person) where a leader or member engages in narcissistic behaviors — monopolizing time, dominating discussion, pressuring others, or shaming anyone in any way.
Co-Counseling¶
Co-counseling is a mutual arrangement between two people who take turns being counselor and counselee. It can supplement therapy or serve as a primary healing relationship when therapy is not accessible.
A basic structure:
- Meet weekly; exchange 30 or 60-minute sessions, alternating roles
- The counselee talks freely; the counselor practices active listening only at first
- Active listening includes: affirming sounds ("mm-hmm"), mirroring (repeating key words or phrases), paraphrasing, and open-ended questions ("Can you tell me more about that?")
- No unsolicited advice, criticism, or feedback — only what the counselee explicitly requests
- The counselee sets the terms: "I'd like just active listening today" is a complete and valid statement
- Practice confidentiality: what is said in the session stays there
- Over time, if trust develops, both partners may agree to allow more spontaneous feedback — but never rush this, and always preserve the right to return to the no-feedback structure