My therapist would have agreed; just repeatedly talking about trauma can be retraumatizing. It was an older school of thought that just repeating the trauma and revisiting it time and time again would somehow "fix" things, but he emphasized the "old" part.

His philosophy and method was to approach my therapy from my present. If, in dealing with my reactions and dealings with my present, it became clear that I was reacting to current issues out of response to my history, only then did we directly delve into those memories. And when we did, we talked about where we were going and why we were going there first, kept it as isolated to that specific incident as possible, learned what we needed to as it applied to the current issue, and got back to the present. So rather than a free swim in the swamp of traumatic memory, it was a purposeful short lap there and back again.

Did this approach always work to keep things contained? Not always. I have PTSD, so my tendency was to dissociate in those memories, but generally it worked pretty well. And, because my therapist learned my tendency to dissociate, he could actively work to keep me as present as possible, even when we were delving in my past.

Because recalling those memories was done with a clear purpose in mind each time, and because those ventures into memory were kept short and monitored closely, I found they became "easier" over time and the need to actually go back there started to lessen as I gained real insight with the very directed and purposed focus when we did look at that history.

I finally reached a place where that history stopped running my present (which was my goal), and I honestly rarely think about it much anymore. It's in its proper place finally. I haven't needed therapy in pushing ten years now.