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“I just want to get back to normal.” It is one of the most common things we hear in trauma work — and one of the kindest things we can do is to gently question the word ‘back’.
“I just want to get back to how things were.” “I wish I could go back to before.” If you sit with survivors, you will hear it again and again, and the key word is always back. But we cannot go back. We live inside time; there is no Tardis, no DeLorean, no way to zoom to a gentler era — and no way to fast-forward to a finish line where the struggle is over and done. As the children’s book has it: can’t go over it, can’t go under it, can’t go around it — got to go through it!
That is the heart of this Dynamic. We are not on a journey that takes us back. We are on a journey that takes us through. If we are seeking genuine Anastasis — a quality of life marked by honest relating, respect and responsibility — then we have to face that truth, and not avoid the hard personal work that is an inevitable part of the road. I call that road the Labyrinth.
A labyrinth is not a maze
People often picture a maze at this point, and the distinction matters enormously. A maze is designed to defeat you: it is full of dead ends and wrong turns. A labyrinth is something else entirely. It has twists and turns aplenty, but it is made of a single path. There are no wrong turns in a labyrinth. Once you understand that, everything shifts — because it means that everything you have experienced is part of the journey of your becoming.
There is no going back, the path may curve you round to face the way you came; but you are still moving forward on the path, and from this vantage point, you can see the progress you have made. In this way, what we think of as looking back stops being an exercise in regret and becomes, instead, a way of learning and of gratitude. It asks us to grow empathy for our younger selves — to accept that we could only ever know what we knew when we actually knew it, and could not have known it a moment sooner.
If we drive through life staring into the rear-view mirror, we will crash. The mirror is there to inform the journey forward — not to be driven by.
We often wonder what would have happened if we had taken a different path. In reality, we almost always made the best choice we could with the insight and information we had at the time. So the belief that we should have been a different version of ourselves is, when you examine it, rather a bogus thought. The person who made those decisions is as worthy of love and respect as the person reading this now. And here is the practical, liberating consequence: the journey cannot start from where we wish we were. It can only ever start from where we actually are, and with the self we actually are now. So when a member of your Committee starts pouring shame into the conversation, you — as Chair — are entitled to rule that those comments are unhelpful and will be disregarded.
Digging our own labyrinth
In a sense, what we are doing is digging out our own labyrinth. The path is as individual as we are; it has been under construction since before we were born, which is part of why it can feel like such hard work. What keeps us going is keeping our eyes on the hopeful thing — the possibility, the promise, the potential — so that demoralisation does not get the last word.
The journey asks us to dig down to inner resources we did not know we had. This is where good relationships with and within our Committee become essential, because the Committee holds the very resources we are most prone to deny in ourselves. My own experience — in my own labyrinth, and walking beside others in theirs — is that when we think we have given the last drop of sweat and burned the last candle, there is somehow one more step in us. And it is there, at the end of our own resources, that I have known the Source carry me — and known, too, that I was never walking the labyrinth alone.
We will need grit. This is a long-haul journey, not a hop-over. We need to find sustainable, healthy ways to stay resilient — which may mean time spent grounding and centring in spiritual or mindful practice, where we can be replenished. (What the western world markets as mindfulness, and has rather commodified, is really the ancient art of contemplation: the practice of knowing oneself as truly and fully as is humanly possible.)
Why it feels like ‘here again’
When we lay the winding path of the Labyrinth over the map of the Domains — which we will explore in later posts — we can see how the journey weaves us in and out of each Domain, over and over, on the way to our own centre. This is why recovery so often produces that demoralising sense of I’ve been here before or oh no, not here again!
It is true that we have visited that Domain before. But we are not at the same point we were last time — we are further along the path, and so we arrive with a fresh perspective. I find that deeply encouraging, and I offer it to clients as a reason to keep going rather than a cause for despair. When the path seems to lead nowhere and carrying on feels just too hard, that very feeling is usually a sign that we are being stretched in a way that will ultimately bring growth. Those are the times to draw on everything available to us — friends, family, colleagues, a therapist or group — and also, sometimes, on solitude and reflection, where we can attend to our own needs without the press of everyone else’s.
There is, I believe, nowhere we can go where love cannot reach us.
We can refuse that love — through old beliefs, or a familiar lack of love — but we cannot travel beyond its reach. So let us look self-doubt in the eye and speak a little adventure and curiosity into the feeling of being lost. The Labyrinth winds us through the Domains, Sub-domains and Functions of Anastasis towards a more whole and holistic sense of self. Along the way we will meet thoughts and feelings long abandoned, and memories archived for safety’s sake. We may discover parts of ourselves we had neglected or never known. That is the work — and it is good work.
For those of us who practise
For practitioners, the Labyrinth changes how we hold the whole arc of therapy. It frees us from the tyranny of linear ‘progress’, and from the disappointment — ours and the client’s — when familiar material resurfaces. It lets us say, with real conviction, we are not back at the start; we are further round the path. Learning to companion someone through that winding journey, without rushing them and without losing hope ourselves, is one of the things we practise most carefully on the course.
It also reshapes how we handle the inevitable plateaus. There are stretches of the Labyrinth where nothing seems to be happening, where the client feels they are going backwards, where we ourselves may quietly wonder whether the work is ‘working’. The metaphor steadies us. A walker on a labyrinth path frequently finds themselves close to the centre and then, a few steps later, swung right out to the edge again — not because they have failed, but because that is the shape of the path. Holding that picture in mind, we can offer a client something more durable than reassurance: a genuinely different way of reading their own experience.
And there is a deeper invitation in it for us as practitioners. We cannot accompany someone faithfully through a labyrinth with which we are unfamiliar, or one we have refused to walk ourselves. The therapists I most trust with clients experiencing complex trauma are not the ones with the most techniques, but the ones who have done their own going-through — who know, from the inside, the demoralising stretches and the surprising one-more-step. That is why our own ongoing journey is not a luxury or an indulgence; it supports our competence, and fitness to practise the art-craft of complex trauma therapy.
Welcome into the Labyrinth. Let us walk together for a while.
A few questions to sit with
- Where in your own life have you mistaken a labyrinth for a maze — treating a necessary turn as a wrong one?
- How do you respond, inwardly, when a client returns to material you thought was ‘done’?
- What helps you keep your eyes on the hopeful thing when the path feels long?
About the course
The Anastasis Model sits at the heart of a Level 7 Diploma in trauma-informed, advanced therapeutic practice — written for counsellors and psychotherapists who want to work more deeply with developmental and relational trauma, and who are moving towards senior accreditation (SCoPEd Column C).
It runs online, with three in-person residentials, over fifteen months: October 2026 to December 2027. The group is deliberately small — capped at twelve — so no one is ever just a face in a crowded screen. The fee is £5,250, with payment plans available.
To enquire, email training@authentictandt.uk or call Annie on 07949 677405. We shape the cohort together through conversation, so do get in touch early.