Trauma Therapy
The Safe Space to Process Your Past
What you may be experiencing:
Symptoms you may be experiencing as a result of trauma could be nightmares, having a hard time regulating your emotions, difficulty maintaining relationships, depression, anxiety, relying on substances to cope, flashbacks, feeling hopeless or worthless, suicidal thoughts, difficulty sleeping, loss of interest in activities that used to bring you joy, or being quick to anger.
Maybe you can’t recall the trauma memories or are avoiding people or places that remind you of the trauma. You may even feel at times that you see yourself from the 3rd person perspective. Your physical symptoms can include agitation, numbness, confusion, and frequent headaches.
Trauma shows up in many ways from many events: natural disasters such as hurricanes or fires, physical or sexual assaults, witnessing a crime, knowledge of a crime or the passing of a loved one. It can be one traumatic event or exposure to a series of repeated events. Whatever the case, it overwhelms our ability to cope.
What traumatizes one person may not traumatize another. So what exactly does that mean? How do we know what could be traumatic? Thing is, trauma isn’t so much about the event itself (or series of events), as much as it is about our experience of those events, that felt sense of helplessness.
How we can help:
Trauma gets stuck in the brain. Imagine your brain as a filing cabinet. Throughout the day, 'processing’ involves filing away the day’s experiences neatly in the correct filing cabinet. When a traumatic event happens, that process is halted, and those papers are scattered, no longer filed away according to the correct date and time. Your brain can no longer make sense of the fact that those events are no longer happening in the present, as they have no time stamp and are not filed away in the correct file.
In therapy, with a therapist that you feel safe and connect with, as you begin to process the trauma, you will, in a sense, have 1 foot in the present, and 1 foot in the past revisiting those leftover unprocessed papers and begin filing them away. The key is safety. The safety of today, while recalling the traumatic memory, will allow you to sort through that information without overwhelming your nervous system, so that your natural processing can take place & begin to make sense of that information and store it.
Your therapist will likely go through various grounding exercises meant to calm you nervous system and allow you to stay within a safe and tolerant space while you are processing, and before you leave your sessions. Your safety is of upmost importance to us.
After working with us:
While treatment outcomes are individualized and unique for each client, our hopes for you are that after you regain access to not only your future, but also free yourself from your past. By processing through the stuck memories of your past, you free yourself from the chains of yesterday.
The symptoms listed above, both psychological and physical would begin to lessen, and your quality of life would improve. Your ability to tolerate more uncertainty would increase as your confidence in your own ability would expand.
Your ability to live life on your own terms, according to your own values increases. You no longer make choices as a result of your past, but rather view yourself as a resilient human who has experienced, endured, survived, and continued living a fulfilling life despite their past experiences.
We are right here with you:
Trauma therapy goes at your page, as your comfort throughout the healing process is the key factor in treatment.
