Trauma Therapy

If you’ve been struggling with the effects of past trauma, the thought of addressing it may seem overwhelming. You may have put it off, believing things would improve over time, only to find that life has become unmanageable. If you’re having trouble functioning at work, school, or as a parent, or your relationships are suffering, you may finally feel ready to seek help.

In the course of your daily life, you may encounter reminders of past trauma and feel as though you’ve been transported back in time. Images and sensations may trigger intense shame, fear, or anger. You may even play a part in creating new situations that are similar to your painful past, leading to a sense of being trapped in a cycle and somehow defective.

Because re-experiencing the most painful moments of your traumatic past is so distressing, you may live in fear of being hijacked by your emotions at any moment. As a result, you may start to avoid situations that trigger these reactions. Over time, your search for safety leads to life becoming increasingly smaller. The idea of stepping outside those constraints may seem impossible.

What are Post-traumatic Symptoms?

If the effects of unresolved traumatic events are holding you back from living the life you want, you are not alone. Many trauma survivors experience a host of symptoms, including unwanted re-experiencing of the traumatic event, such as nightmares, flashbacks, and intense emotional responses; persistent avoidance of people and situations associated with the memories; negative changes in thoughts and mood; and increased baseline arousal and reactivity, such as feeling on edge all the time, or difficulty concentrating or sleeping. If all of these symptoms are present and impairing your functioning, we call this posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

While post-traumatic symptoms can result from one discrete event, such as a sexual assault or military combat, they can also be the cumulative effect of complex trauma, such as chronic traumatic invalidation, i.e., being repeatedly misunderstood, criticized, or neglected by the most important people in our lives, like parents or partners.

The most insidious aspects of trauma responses are the invisible yet problematic beliefs that are created. Traumatized people tend to learn that the world is unsafe, that we are bad, unlovable, or reckless people, and that intense emotions are intolerable. We think these are facts, so we don’t know they can and should be challenged.

Thankfully, post-traumatic responses and PTSD have been researched for many years, and we now understand the underlying mechanisms that keep people stuck in their suffering. When traumatic events are not initially processed in a supportive environment, they don’t get incorporated into a helpful narrative about ourselves and the world. Instead, we develop problematic beliefs that lead us to re-experience the most distressing aspects of our trauma repeatedly. This, in turn, leads to avoidance of the very situations that could result in more adaptive learning.  The takeaway: avoidance maintains PTSD.

What Does Effective Trauma Therapy Look Like?

The idea that time heals all wounds is inaccurate when it comes to PTSD. The passage of time is only helpful if we’re not avoiding trauma cues. Avoidance of traumatic memories and related emotions is what keeps post-traumatic symptoms around. This is why each of the recommended first-line therapies for PTSD involves exposure.

Exposure means intentionally coming into contact with memories and situations that remind us of the trauma, but which are not actually dangerous. With the guidance of a supportive therapist with specialized training and experience in a trauma-focused intervention, symptoms can be alleviated and often eliminated.

According to the National Center for PTSD, the trauma-focused therapies with the strongest evidence of their efficacy are Prolonged Exposure (PE), Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). These treatments are highly effective and can be completed in as little as 12 weeks.  People often begin to experience alleviated symptoms even before the course of treatment is complete.

But I’m Terrified of My Trauma, How Can I Talk About It?

If you’ve spent much of your life avoiding trauma cues, it’s not surprising that the idea of approaching them would seem insane or impossible! But consider this: you’ve been plagued by memories, whether you wanted to experience them or not. Wouldn’t it be better to approach them in an intentional and strategic way, to experience freedom once and for all?

A key factor to understand here: your PTSD lies to you! It wants to stick around. It tells you that you can’t handle talking about your trauma, that you’ll fall into the abyss, or start crying and never stop. It tells you that it’s the only thing keeping you safe in a dangerous world. But we know that, in reality, it’s what’s holding you captive.

Exposure during trauma therapy will be different from the way you experience intrusive symptoms in several important ways. First of all, you’ll have control over when you encounter your memories, as opposed to the surprise attacks you might experience as part of your PTSD. 

Secondly, you won’t be alone. You will have the guidance of a supportive therapist who can provide a safe environment where new learning can take place. You’ll also learn specific skills that you can use between sessions if emotions or problematic urges become overwhelming.

And third, when unwanted intrusions happen, we typically re-experience only the most distressing aspects of our memories and then quickly shut them down. During exposure therapy, your therapist will help you to avoid avoiding! By staying with the memory, you will likely end up with a more coherent story that consists of more than just your most intense pain points.

My Training in Trauma Therapy

Prolonged Exposure (PE) was developed by Edna Foa, PhD, in the 1980s to treat trauma symptoms and PTSD. Since that time, a substantial body of evidence has accumulated, proving its effectiveness. It is considered a first-line treatment for PTSD.

In 2005, Melanie Harned, PhD, began developing a protocol called DBT PE to address the fact that many trauma sufferers had been excluded from getting treatment. Complicating factors, like self-injury, suicidality, or having multiple diagnoses, led clinicians to believe it was unsafe to address past trauma with these clients. Dr. Harned’s treatment combined PE and Dialectical Behavior Therapy to finally create a framework for helping these individuals. 

I underwent intensive training in DBT PE with Dr. Harned in 2021. If you begin the process of seeking trauma treatment with me, we’ll start with a thorough assessment to determine your readiness. This will help us develop the safest approach to your treatment, as you may need time to accrue skills before diving into exposure work.

You Deserve to be Free

Having undergone my own trauma treatment, I strongly believe in the power of facing our fears. I’ve experienced the freedom and lightness that come from letting go of limiting beliefs that felt like facts. And I’ve witnessed my clients’ almost magical ability to find strength they didn’t know they had and gain a new understanding of their pasts and themselves. 

What would life look like if you could get unstuck from the past? Who could you be if you weren’t carrying around all that shame and resentment? How would your loved ones be impacted if you could feel whole and experience a full range of emotions? You deserve to find the freedom to be the person you’re meant to be!