Understanding Containment with Clients with Complex Trauma

What Do Container Resources Do?

Long story short, containers help you expedite the process of returning difficult content to the limbic brain. Library metaphor. Containers very often are a cognitive strategy or intention not to engage with something right now. A container can also be a somatic strategy, because if we only address the cognitive aspects of rumination we may be leaving a lot of distress in the body, which can reactivate the mind.

Containers are also a helpful ritual in pivoting away from activation. It’s a ritual that signifies something to parts. However, the reasons why we need to container matter. Many, many, problems with containment come from the assumptions that clients make about what containment means… what it means to current functioning, what it means for their past, and what it means for their recovery. For example, many clients say “wait a minute, Tom… I have locked this stuff up all of my life… I come to see you to get it all out… and you’re telling me to do something I’m coming to you stop doing.”

Again, we need to explain that the reasons why we container are very important. All of these are good/healthy/adaptive reasons for containing something that has been activated:

• We have been trying to solve the problem using strategies that have a very long history of being ineffective (rumination, allowing lots of memories/cognitions/themes to connect)
• Now is not a good time to try to resolve the problem or issue
• The issue is intruding on our ability to function at the present time
• The problem is actively contributing to current instability
• We would like to exercise control over what is getting our attention in the current moment
• Adaptive containment is ultimately about client agency… deciding on purpose what to attend to in this moment and what to defer, because we are not wired to attend to everything past/present/future in every moment.
• Containment is the beginning of stability.

Ultimately, we want to emphasize that it’s okay to container because we have a plan to resolve this issue in an effective way at a later date (a transformational psychotherapy)

Ways that are not a good idea to use in containment, since parts may react to the implications of these approaches (although clearly these are preferred methods by some parts):

• Diaper Genie
• Rocket
• Incinerator
• Trash can
• Explosive

Containment is one of the best adaptations of human evolution. The limbic brain is a container. I tell my clients that the reason we’re not all in the psychiatric hospital all of the time is because of the containering qualities of the limbic brain. We are information processing systems and when we encounter information that we cannot assimilate because we were too shut down, too overwhelmed, or lacked the needed adaptive information at the time, it is helpful to have a place to put it until we can try again to assimilate it. Clients often come to us with a lot of ambivalence about carrying a lot of containered experiences. On one hand, they have been consciously and unconsciously trying to process (or at least manage) this information using incredibly ineffective strategies likely all of their lives. One the other, they have visceral experiences (all of them bad) from trying to purposefully interact with containered information. Containering isn’t a neutral activity. Asking a client to simply let go of information that is both existentially salient and intractable is not a neutral ask. Everything we container, past interactions with container, past strategies to try to process trauma, and the fact that we are carrying stuff that needs containment are all implicated in what makes purposeful containment difficult for many clients with complex trauma.