Trauma Therapy and Agency: Reclaiming Your Sense of Choice

When we think about trauma, we often think about what happened to someone.

The event. The relationship. The loss. The violation. The years of living in an environment where there was little room to feel safe, seen, or fully yourself.

But trauma isn't only about what happened. It can also affect our relationship with choice, control, and agency.

Agency is the sense that I have a say in my life. I can make choices. I can have preferences. I can say yes and no. I can move toward something, move away from something, change my mind, take up space, and decide what is right for me.

Trauma can disrupt this sense of agency.

When we have experienced situations where we could not protect ourselves, speak up, leave, resist, or influence what was happening, we may learn that our choices don't matter—or that having needs, preferences, or boundaries isn't safe.

Sometimes this is obvious. Someone may have experienced abuse, coercion, neglect, control, or repeated violations of their boundaries.

Sometimes it is not obvious; you may automatically accommodate other people. You may struggle to know what you want until you know what everyone else wants first. You may second-guess your decisions, feel guilty for having needs, or find yourself saying yes when something inside you is saying no.

This is one of the reasons I believe that restoring agency is such an important part of trauma therapy.

What does trauma therapy actually look like?

One question I get repeatedly in consultations is:

“How do you do therapy?”

Or:

“What does therapy actually look like?”

It's a surprisingly difficult question for me to answer.

Of course, I have clinical training and experience. I draw from different therapeutic approaches, and my clinical judgment helps me understand what might be supportive. I may notice patterns, offer observations, ask questions, introduce therapeutic tools, or suggest that we slow down and pay attention to something happening in your body.

But ultimately, what happens in therapy isn't entirely my choice, and I think that's an important distinction.

If one of the impacts of trauma can be losing a sense of choice or agency, I don't want trauma therapy to become another place where someone else decides what happens to you.

So rather than following a predetermined path, I want therapy to be a collaborative process. We might explore what brought you to therapy and what you hope will be different. We might become curious about patterns that are showing up in your life, or about what your body and nervous system are communicating.

But we also pay attention to your experience along the way:

Does this feel useful?

Do you want to keep going?

Would you rather slow down?

Does this feel like something you want to explore, or something you don't have capacity for right now?

You might know the answer immediately, or you might not know what you want yet, and that's okay too.

Sometimes figuring out what you want - that you can have and ask for what you want, safely - is part of the exploration and healing.

Trauma can affect our sense of agency

When we experience trauma, we often adapt in ways that helped us survive or get through what was happening. Some people become highly attuned to other people's moods and needs. Some learn to avoid conflict at all costs. Some become perfectionistic or extremely self-reliant. Others disconnect from their feelings or bodies because being fully present with their experience once felt too overwhelming.

These adaptations aren't failures and in fact they made sense. But sometimes strategies that helped us cope in the past continue long after the original circumstances have changed.

You may find yourself automatically saying yes.

You may have difficulty setting boundaries even when you know intellectually that you need one.

You may look to other people for reassurance before trusting your own decisions.

You may know what you should want but have difficulty knowing what you actually want.

Healing from trauma can involve developing a different relationship with these patterns—not fighting them or judging them, but becoming curious about what they are trying to do for you.

In Internal Family Systems (IFS), for example, we might understand these patterns as parts of you that developed protective roles for good reasons. Instead of trying to get rid of these parts, we can become curious about them and what they may be trying to protect.

And underneath that curiosity, we can begin to ask:

What do I want?

What do I need?

What feels right for me?

What choices are available to me now?

Therapy can be a place to practice choice

For someone whose choices have historically been ignored, overridden, punished, or unsafe, having meaningful choices in therapy can be more important than it might initially seem. Choice doesn't have to mean making a major life decision, it can be very small!

Do I want to talk about this today?

Do I want to slow down?

Do I want to keep going, or pause?

What am I noticing in my body right now?

Do I actually want this, or have I learned to want it because it keeps other people happy?

What would I choose if I didn't have to worry about disappointing anyone?

Safely answering these questions int herapy can help create new experiences.

I can pause.

I can say no.

I can change my mind.

I can have preferences.

I can listen to myself.

I have options.

My experience matters.

This is part of what trauma-informed therapy means to me: not simply understanding that someone has experienced trauma, but creating a therapeutic relationship where their autonomy, boundaries, preferences, and choices are respected.

Over time, these experiences can contribute to something deeper than simply knowing intellectually that you have choices.

They can help you develop a more embodied sense of agency—the feeling that you can listen to yourself, trust yourself, and participate in shaping your own life.

This is also one of the reasons I incorporate somatic, or body-based, therapy into my work. Sometimes our sense of choice isn't only something we need to think about. We may need opportunities to notice what happens in our bodies when we move toward something, pull away, become activated, or feel more settled.

The body can offer information that we have learned to overlook.

Being witnessed without being told who to be

Restoring agency doesn't mean that you have to figure everything out on your own. Relationships can be an important part of healing from trauma.

Many people who have experienced trauma have also experienced being misunderstood, dismissed, blamed, controlled, or made to question their own perceptions. Having another person genuinely listen and bear witness to your experience can be deeply meaningful.

This is where compassionate witnessing comes in.

Compassionate witnessing means being with someone's experience without trying to take it over.

It means making space for what happened, listening without judgment, and helping someone understand that their responses often make sense in the context of what they've lived through.

It might sound like:

“I can understand why your nervous system learned to respond this way.”

Or:

“It makes sense that this is difficult for you.”

Or simply:

“I'm here. We can slow down.”

Being witnessed can help us feel less alone with experiences we've carried by ourselves for a long time.

But compassionate witnessing isn't about telling you who you are or what your experience means.

You remain the authority on your own experience.

That distinction matters.

The goal isn't for your therapist to become the person who knows you better than you know yourself. It's to have a relationship where you can become increasingly curious about your own experience and develop greater trust in your own knowing.

As children we know and trust ourselves well; trauma therapy reconnects us to this knowing.

What if I don't know what I want?

One of the things that can happen after trauma is that choice itself can feel overwhelming. If you've spent a long time adapting to other people's needs, expectations, or emotions, you may not have had much opportunity to ask yourself:

What do I want?

What do I need?

What feels right for me?

Sometimes there is a tendency to think that if we can't immediately answer those questions, we're doing something wrong. But not knowing is information too and we can start there.

This is part of what I mean by restoring agency. It isn't simply learning to make decisions. It's developing a relationship with yourself where your different needs, feelings, and internal experiences can be heard.

The goal isn't for me to take the wheel

My role as a therapist is not to take the wheel. It's to help create enough safety, curiosity, and space for you to begin taking your own wheel back. My clinical knowledge and experience matter, as they help me offer perspective, notice patterns, and bring different therapeutic tools into the room.

But you are not a project for me to fix.

Trauma therapy isn't about turning you into the person you think you should be.

It's about creating the conditions where you can become more connected to yourself—and have enough safety and freedom to decide how you want to live from there.

Restoring agency is not something I do to you. It is something we work toward together. And ultimately, the goal isn't for you to become dependent on therapy to know what is right for you. The goal is for you to increasingly trust your own knowing.