From Fire to Sun: Why Therapy Fails

"Many approaches treat trauma responses as "low-level" cognition: primitive, irrational, something to overcome through reason. They offer cognitive restructuring: "Let's examine the evidence that you're safe now." But this misses what's actually happening. My clients haven't failed to learn-they've learned extraordinarily well. They've achieved a sophisticated, integrated understanding of how to survive in genuinely dangerous contexts. The problem isn't that their thinking is distorted. It's that their highly accurate thinking is organized around contexts that were destroying them."

"Think of it this way: If you spent years in combat, you didn't develop "irrational beliefs" about danger. You developed genuine expertise in an environment where constant vigilance actually did prevent death. Every neural pathway, from brainstem to prefrontal cortex, was organized around accurate threat assessment. That's not cognitive distortion-that's mastery."

"The woman who survived domestic violence understands her current partner isn't a threat. But her hard-won wisdom says: "People who seem safe become dangerous. The ones who hurt you are the ones you trust." She didn't learn this through faulty reasoning-she learned it through accurate pattern recognition in an environment where it was true. The person in a destructive relationship can list every reason to leave. But their integrated understanding responds: "Better the danger you know than the unknown you don't. What if there's nothing better? What if you can't handle it?" Again, not cognitive distortion"

Many therapies treat trauma responses as primitive misbeliefs to be corrected by cognitive restructuring. Survivors instead develop sophisticated, context-dependent survival strategies that were accurate within genuinely dangerous environments. Neural systems from brainstem to prefrontal cortex reorganize to support expert threat assessment and automatic responses. Intellectual recognition of present safety often cannot override these deeply integrated patterns. Veterans, domestic-violence survivors, and people in destructive relationships all demonstrate accurate pattern recognition tuned to past danger. Labeling these adaptive systems as distortions misreads their origin, function, and the learning that produced them.

Read at Psychology Today