Trauma Therapy
Are You Stuck In Shame And Fear?
Do you feel like you’re always waiting for the next bad thing to happen?
Are you often anxious, depressed, or fearful?
Is it difficult for you to trust or feel present with others?
You may often feel hypervigilant and panicked. Finding it too difficult to relax, you might experience physical symptoms, including muscle tension, chronic pain, and changes in your appetite. Maybe you struggle with sleep issues or often wake up after disturbing nightmares. All you want to do is maintain your focus during the day and be able to turn your brain off at night—but something in your mind and body keeps you from doing either.
A Traumatic Experience From Your Past May Be At The Core Of Your Symptoms
Did you survive something scary, unexpected, or life-altering? Were you raised by emotionally or verbally abusive parents? Did you experience physical, psychological, or sexual abuse or neglect as a child?
All of these events can produce a post-traumatic response, but trauma takes many forms. Any challenging or disturbing experience for which you feel unprepared can cause you to enter fight, flight, or freeze mode. As such, a sudden loss can be traumatic—whether it’s the loss of a loved one, a job, or an ability—as well as any instance of undue or prolonged stress that keeps you feeling stuck and anxious. A good example of this is infidelity, which often produces something called “betrayal trauma” in partners who have been cheated on.
While trauma affects you on a deep level personally, you might have noticed that it also impacts your relationships. You may avoid becoming too vulnerable or letting your guard down around others out of fear that they will hurt you or make you feel judged. For survivors of sexual trauma in particular—including assault, harassment, or childhood sexual abuse—it can be challenging to find healthy, trusted relationships in which you can feel secure.
I know you just want to move past your trauma so that you can be the partner, parent, friend, and person you want to be. But it’s important to process your trauma rather than work around it. Therapy offers you a meaningful opportunity to address your trauma and residual symptoms of PTSD so that you can live life to its fullest.
Have any questions? Send us a message!
None Of Us Gets Through Life Unscathed
The unfortunate reality of trauma is that we all experience it. Human experiences like breakups, accidents, job loss, or the death of a loved one can compromise our mental health and block our progress. Because trauma is stored in the body, it literally rewires our brain, creating barriers to rational, self-affirming thinking.
However, instead of seeking treatment for trauma or symptoms of PTSD, we’re more likely to minimize our experience. It’s common for survivors to downplay the severity of their trauma by saying things like “I didn’t die,” “It could have been worse,” or “Other people experienced so much more than I did.” These rationalizations continue to affect the brain’s neural pathways, keeping us stuck in a loop of mental anguish and distress.
Not to mention, it’s pretty uncomfortable to feel scared, angry, and sad, so we avoid these feelings instead of confronting them head-on and getting curious about where they originated. The truth is that avoidance actually gives the traumatic event more power by invoking a fight-or-flight response every time we feel threatened. Not only does this hypervigilance affect us on a conscious level—it often seeps into the unconscious parts of our thinking, making the trauma all the more powerful.
Therapeutic treatment can verifiably help trauma survivors rewire their brain. Body-based methods like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy uses bilateral auditory or visual stimulation to restructure the brain’s neural pathways so that you no longer feel stuck in the discomfort of your trauma.
Therapy Gives You A Chance To Heal Your Trauma Once And For All
When living on high alert, it can be hard to truly feel safe. Yet, as your therapist, we are invested in your safety and healing. Our work together in trauma treatment will not only normalize the experience you survived and the symptoms you struggle with—it will give you effective tools to meaningfully process your trauma so that you can thrive.
Before we get started with EMDR, we will use our initial counseling sessions to understand presenting concerns, goals for therapy, and the history of your trauma. We offer counseling services to both individuals and couples, so if you’re experiencing the effects of PTSD in your relationship, we will develop a collaborative treatment plan that will allow you to heal together.
From there, we will address your trauma at a pace and comfort level that works for you. Because EMDR is both gentle and relatively nonverbal, you won’t be spending the whole therapy session discussing your trauma at length. Instead, we will spend a lot of time building a trusted therapist-client relationship and familiarizing you with the EMDR treatment process so that you can overcome the long-term effects of trauma.
In addition to the body-based work we do using EMDR, we will help you understand your attachments and relationships a little better. This will help you build trust within your intimate connections and clarify what you need to feel secure with others. We will also provide you with tailored relaxation techniques and coping strategies that you can reach for when feeling unsafe or under threat.
I have been working with trauma survivors for over two decades, and we even have training from the Parnell Institute, a leader in trauma studies and treatments. We know from experience that it’s possible to heal your trauma and manage your symptoms. With the help and support of counseling, you can escape the painful, counterproductive cycle of trauma that keeps you stuck.
Perhaps You Struggle With Symptoms Of PTSD But Aren’t Sure If Counseling Can Help…
I am ashamed of what happened to me.
Most people experience some degree of self-blame or guilt for what happened to them—feelings of shame are completely normal within the community of trauma survivors.
If you feel too ashamed or embarrassed to discuss your trauma in therapy, remember that you are not at fault for what happened to you. By bringing your shameful feelings to light, you will take away some of their power, which will allow you to overcome some of the barriers keeping you stuck.
My trauma is too painful to discuss in therapy.
As a therapists, it’s essential that our clients feel safe and supported in counseling. We will never push you to discuss something that makes you feel uncomfortable, and we will always move at a pace that works for you. You know your trauma best—we are just here to guide you in processing it.
It’s also important to mention that EMDR therapy is actually very gentle in its approach. Because EMDR orients around healing the trauma at the brain level—as opposed to through verbal processing—it’s not a therapy that requires a lot of discussion. Unlike other conventional talk therapies, EMDR is a relatively nonverbal trauma treatment.
Counseling will just make me feel worse.
When it comes to effective trauma treatment, it’s important to work with a therapist who is specifically trained to not re-traumatize clients. By working at your pace and discussing only what is relevant to the EMDR treatment, you can feel confident knowing that you are in control of the therapeutic process. And if things start feeling unsafe, there are strategies we can use to “put away” the memories that you’re not quite ready to address yet.
Regain A Sense Of Control And Security In Your Life
You are not alone in the experience of your trauma, and you don’t have to be alone in processing it. We will work together in counseling to help you safely and effectively overcome the residual effects of trauma that keep you from achieving a sense of peace.
To find out more about how we can help, email us or call 817-887-8157 to schedule a free, 15-minute consultation.
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