Abstract
ABSTRACT Safety is a key component of trauma therapy, which requires the therapist to be acutely aware of states of unsafety that can get evoked in a client during a session. This article explores the theme of ‘When the past becomes the present’ that arose from a qualitative study on the client’s experience of safety in psychotherapy. An interpretative phenomenological analysis of ten Irish psychotherapy trainees’ experience of safety as a client showed that it was impacted by their trauma history. Consistent with knowledge about the nature of traumatic memory and the neuroceptive evaluation of safety, this theme suggests that previous traumatic experiences can resurface during a session in the form of memory fragments, physical sensations, and nervous system activation to produce feelings of unsafety. Consequently, psychotherapists need to be able to recognize these moment-to-moment shifts in their clients’ experience of safety and know how to respond to these.
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