What If We Can’t Reach the Trauma? Working with the Unknowable

One of the most common, and tender, questions that comes up in trauma therapy is: What if there’s something the client can’t access? What if an experience is so dissociated that neither of us can “get to it”?

It’s a wise question. And the answer isn’t simple.

Many trauma survivors carry experiences that are fragmented, preverbal, or defended against so powerfully that they aren’t available to conscious awareness. This can happen when trauma occurs in early life, when it is overwhelming, or when relational contexts make it impossible to integrate experience safely.

In these cases, clients often report a feeling of “something there,” without knowing what it is. Or, as therapists, we may find ourselves in moments of silence or dissociation in the room — with the sense that something unspoken is shaping the session.

What then? Does healing require full narrative access?

Fortunately, no.

Modern trauma theory helps us understand that healing isn’t always about recovering the origin story. It is about helping the nervous system and the psyche build a different relationship to what has been held outside awareness.

Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1962) offered a beautiful frame for this. He described raw, unprocessed experience as beta elements - sensory-affective fragments that cannot be thought. These elements exist as bodily sensation, tension, or even relational tone. They are unthinkable not because they are lost, but because they are overwhelming or unmentalized.

Modern somatic trauma therapies echo this view. Van der Kolk (2014) and Ogden et al. (2006) show that trauma lives in the body as much as in the mind. Often, it is through embodied presence, breath, posture, movement, relational attunement, that dissociated material begins to shift.

This means that when a therapist sits in silence with a client, unsure what is happening, it may be the most important work of all. The task is not to push for a narrative, but to become a steady container for unformulated experience. Being-with is the intervention.

In my own practice, I’ve witnessed this: moments where words won’t come, where the air in the room thickens, where the body speaks through stillness or subtle shifts. When we can stay present at those edges, without forcing meaning too soon, the system begins to reorganize. The unspeakable becomes thinkable, but only in its own time.

So: if you are a client worried about “getting to the memory,” or a therapist wondering if progress requires full retrieval, know that it doesn’t. Healing is not about forcing the unknown into the light. It is about helping the whole system feel safe enough to allow whatever needs to move to emerge.

And sometimes, sitting quietly together at the edge of what is not yet known is the deepest kind of work we do.