Letter to Psychologists, Therapists and Psychiatrists

Reclaiming Healing: A Patient’s Perspective on Childhood Trauma and the Limitations of Standard Mental Health Treatment

Author: Sieglinde W. Alexander

Abstract

This narrative presents a personal account of long-term treatment for childhood trauma, highlighting the limitations of pharmacological and cognitive-based approaches when trauma remains unprocessed.
The author describes how emotional and neurobiological healing occurred outside the conventional system, calling attention to the need for more integrative, empathetic, and biologically-informed care. A concluding appeal is made to mental health professionals to reevaluate prevailing practices and place greater trust in the natural emotional processes of trauma survivors.

Introduction
In 1993, after confronting and writing a narrative about my childhood abuse, I experienced severe depression, flashbacks, and suicidal ideation. When I sought help through my HMO, the wait time to see a therapist was 12 weeks. In the interim, writing became a spontaneous therapeutic act. Though emotionally painful, it initiated a cognitive and emotional integration of past experiences—what I can now recognize as the beginning of genuine trauma healing.

This early progress, however, was not supported or recognized once formal treatment began.

Pharmacological and Theoretical Intervention
Upon finally meeting with a therapist, I was referred to a psychiatrist and prescribed bupropion (Wellbutrin), later replaced with venlafaxine (Effexor). Although I expressed a clear desire to continue emotional processing, the therapeutic focus shifted to cognitive behavior therapy and symptom management. My requests to explore traumatic memory and its emotional imprint were met with resistance, intellectual detachment, or, at times, condescension.

Over the course of seven years, I experienced significant side effects from antidepressant treatment—both expected and additional to those already known—including a 65-pound weight gain, memory impairment, slowed metabolism, and the onset of new allergies. Despite ongoing treatment, my core symptoms—severe migraines, panic attacks, chronic anxiety, and emotional dysregulation—remained largely unchanged. I pursued cognitive therapy with four different clinicians over more than 40 sessions, yet key physical issues—such as brain inflammation and a documented hormonal imbalance involving low cortisol—were never addressed. Nor was the underlying trauma meaningfully explored. The overall approach remained focused on symptom management rather than on achieving deeper, long-term resolution.

Disengagement From Treatment and Self-Guided Recovery
In 2000, I made the decision to discontinue all medications and therapy. After several months of withdrawal, my cognitive clarity began to return. I then engaged in a self-directed process of emotional regression, allowing traumatic memories to surface, and revisiting significant places from my past. Through this process—and with the support of empathetic, nonjudgmental individuals—I was able to release long-suppressed emotions and bring resolution to painful memories.

This form of healing was not based on clinical theory, but on the body’s innate drive to process and complete unresolved trauma when given the chance. Today, I live free from the emotional weight of my past, though I still deal with residual physical effects from years of medication, including slow metabolism and partial memory loss.

Discussion
My experience is not unique. I have been contacted by many adults who were abused as children and who have spent years in conventional therapy without significant progress. Many remain on antidepressants, not as a pathway to healing, but as a method of emotional suppression. Some have adopted cognitive frameworks or religious ideologies that further repress their pain rather than resolve it.

Current models of psychiatric care often overlook the neurobiological and hormonal consequences of early trauma. Dysregulation of neurotransmitters—dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, glutamate—and hormonal imbalances involving estrogen, progesterone, and cortisol are rarely assessed.
1,2 Chronic inflammation, related to permanent low or high cortisol now understood to be a key biological driver of depression, is also frequently ignored.3,4

Treating trauma as a purely psychological issue, without addressing these biological factors, limits therapeutic outcomes and prolongs patient suffering.

Conclusion and Plea to Mental Health Professionals

My plea to all professionals is:

Respect the human being. Support clients in becoming more aware of their inner selves, and answer their questions without assuming intellectual or professional superiority.
Apply your education wisely. Use knowledge as a tool for liberation, not as a framework that fosters dependency, helplessness, or ideological indoctrination.
Teach future clinicians the fundamentals. A human being is born with a fully functional limbic system.5 Throughout life, every person has the right to their feelings—before theory, before diagnosis, and before intervention.
Above all, address your own trauma. Those who enter this profession due to personal pain must first feel and process their own history before applying left-hemisphere knowledge to others in distress. Healing cannot be imposed from the outside. From the third trimester of gestation, the emotional brain is already functioning.6 It is trauma—not the absence of theory—that disrupts cognition, emotional development, and even gene expression.

Childhood trauma cannot be healed through SSRIs or cognitive frameworks alone. It demands human presence, emotional engagement, and a willingness to support—not suppress—the innate healing process.

Sieglinde W. Alexander

References

Sherin JE, Nemeroff CB. Post-traumatic stress disorder: the neurobiological impact of psychological trauma. Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2011;13(3):263–278.
Heim C, Nemeroff CB. The role of childhood trauma in the neurobiology of mood and anxiety disorders: preclinical and clinical studies. Biol Psychiatry. 2001;49(12):1023–1039. doi:10.1016/S0006-3223(01)01157-X
Miller AH, Raison CL. The role of inflammation in depression: from evolutionary imperative to modern treatment target. Nat Rev Immunol. 2016;16(1):22–34. doi:10.1038/nri.2015.5
Dantzer R, O’Connor JC, Freund GG, Johnson RW, Kelley KW. From inflammation to sickness and depression: when the immune system subjugates the brain. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2008;9(1):46–56. doi:10.1038/nrn2297
Panksepp J. Affective neuroscience: the foundations of human and animal emotions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 1998.
Schore AN. Affect regulation and the origin of the self: the neurobiology of emotional development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; 1994.
Childhood trauma and frontal-limbic network abnormalities in major depressive disorder: Resting-state functional connectivity and brain network analysis
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394879003_Childhood_trauma_and_frontal-limbic_network_abnormalities_in_major_depressive_disorder_Resting-state_functional_connectivity_and_brain_network_analysis

Both organisation formed by Sieglinde W. Alexander:
AAaCWorld.org Adults Abused as Children Worldwide in 1994
and
EMaK.org Erwachsene Misshandelt als Kinder
formed in 2000 are closed in 2016.

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