Trauma Therapy
Trauma can change how you perceive the world and yourself, making it difficult to live fully. You didn’t choose those painful experiences, nor did you decide for them to impact your life today. Trauma influences the way your brain reacts to feelings of anger, often without your control. Seeking support from a therapist can help you understand and process your trauma more effectively.
Our Approach
Trauma can disrupt your life, leaving you feeling broken after a traumatic event. Even if you try to compartmentalize your thoughts and feelings, they can affect every aspect of your life. You might attempt to numb unpleasant emotions, but this can prolong your suffering.
Our Trauma therapists help you reprocess trauma so that it no longer controls your life thus making healing possible.
Trauma isn't just emotional; it also impacts your body. Your nervous system may become more sensitive to certain triggers following a traumatic experience.
Trauma therapy helps you regain control by safely stimulating your nervous system, allowing you to reprocess events and reduce your reactivity. This therapy integrates both physical and emotional elements for a comprehensive approach to healing.
trauma therapy FAQs
Trauma affects the brain and activates the nervous system.
When someone feels unsafe, the body responds to stress. This threat can come from a single traumatic event, like an accident or violence, or from ongoing issues like bullying or abuse.
During this response, the thinking part of the brain goes quiet, and the amygdala takes control, releasing stress hormones like adrenaline. This reaction causes physical symptoms, such as a racing heart and tense muscles.
These reactions create strong memories of feeling unsafe, often without words. As a result, trauma can leave people facing fears and flashbacks and struggling to cope effectively.
Events that seem safe to others can cause distress for trauma survivors. For example, fireworks may remind someone of a past explosion, making them feel that the danger is real again. A loved one’s casual frown might trigger fear in a partner who learned to associate frowns with rejection or abuse.
This kind of trauma does not respond well to logic, as the nervous system reacts in ways that bypass the thinking brain.
The most effective form of therapy varies from person to person, with some approaches being more suitable for addressing trauma than others. A combination of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is often recommended to aid in the integration of new brain networks.
Trauma triggers involuntary responses when we encounter reminders of past traumatic events, making it crucial to choose therapy that addresses the neurological aspects of trauma. EMDR, for instance, uses techniques that involve recalling traumatic memories while stimulating both hemispheres of the brain. This can be achieved through handheld pulsars or by following a light back and forth with the eyes.
For more information, you can explore our EMDR (insert EMDR link) and IFS (insert IFS link) therapy options through the provided links.
We can't take your painful memories away, but we can help you reprocess the traumatic event so you don't react in the same way.
The goal of therapy is to alleviate your trauma. When you stop having the same reaction to things that remind you of a traumatic event, your trauma is getting better.
For example, you may have traumatic memories of abandonment. If so, you may go into a trauma response when a romantic interest ignores your texts. The outcome of therapy is to lessen or obliterate your response with any anxiety, irritability, and fatigue when someone doesn't respond to your texts.
The length of trauma therapy varies based on your unique experiences and the complexity of your trauma. It’s important to avoid strict timelines for healing and to trust the process.
If you’d like to speak with a therapist, please visit our contact page to schedule a 15 to 20-minute consultation. During this call, you can ask questions and set a time for your sessions.
After the consultation, we’ll send you paperwork to complete before your sessions begin!