Trauma Therapy
Are You Struggling To Move On From A Traumatic Experience?
Do you feel extremely sensitive to events, people, smells, sounds, or anything else that reminds you of your trauma?
Have you been ridiculed for speaking up about your traumatic experience or blamed for what happened?
Do you want to be free of your emotional pain so that you can live the life you want?
Trauma is a serious mental health disorder that happens after an experience leaves you feeling unsafe. You might find yourself dreading getting up each day because you have to interact with people who might unknowingly trigger your trauma. This can deeply affect your relationships with your loved ones and impact your ability to perform daily tasks at home, at school, or at work. For the first time, you may be considering seeing a therapist who treats trauma.
Trauma Often Leads To Avoidant Behaviors—But That Only Makes Trauma Worse
When you’ve been traumatized, your natural instinct is to run from anything that could trigger feelings of fear and panic. You might feel like you’re walking on eggshells with other people, causing you to withdraw and spend more time alone. Although isolation might make you feel safe, it ultimately holds you back from living your life to the fullest. The more you avoid confronting your fears, the more powerful they become.
In order to safely work through your fears and overcome the pain of the past, sometimes you need the help of a compassionate professional. Here at Sunrise Counseling Services, our goal is to help you get your life back. Our counselors have lots of experience helping people process and resolve their trauma. We’re confident that we can do the same for you!
You Are Not Alone—We Understand How Painful It Is To Live With Trauma
Virtually everyone has experienced trauma in their life. Sometimes, the trauma takes place in a one-time incident such as a robbery, car accident, or violent assault. When this happens, the trauma survivor is often scared to leave the house, walk down a certain street, or even talk on the phone with others—everything around them becomes a trigger-point for their trauma. These are all signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Other times, however, traumatic experiences take place over long periods of time and have subtler effects on the mind and body. This is often the case with toxic or abusive relationships. Harmful parenting styles can also be traumatizing and make it hard to form healthier connections with others. In these instances, trauma may not cause PTSD, but it can still impact your ability to feel safe and trust others.
Many Trauma Survivors Are Too Afraid To Reach Out For Help
Sometimes, they’re afraid to seek help because they fear being asked to relive the horrible experience that they’ve been working so hard to forget. Additionally, many trauma survivors are used to being blamed or ridiculed when they share their experiences. In cases of abuse, people often leap to the defense of the abuser—especially if the abuser is in a position of power. As a result, many people fear repercussions if they’re honest about their trauma.
That’s why therapy is so powerful—it gives survivors like you a chance to be transparent about your experiences in a safe, confidential setting, with someone who will listen to and accept you unconditionally from a nonjudgmental point of view.
How Does Trauma Therapy Help?
As humans, we are emotional creatures. We’re wired to feel intense emotions and physical sensations after a traumatic event. It’s our brain’s way of protecting us—by reminding us of what happened, we can be more cautious so that painful experiences don’t happen again.
The downside to this, however, is that even though your emotional mind is trying to protect you, it causes unnecessary fear and panic and makes you relive the traumatic event over and over. With trauma therapy, the goal is to reconfigure the way your emotional mind responds to the memories of your traumatic experience. By doing this, you can change your thought process so that you don’t focus on past experiences whenever you have feelings of fear or panic.
What To Expect In Trauma Therapy Sessions
At Sunrise Counseling Services, our approach to trauma therapy is all about building trust between the client and therapist so that there is room for the healing process to begin. Your therapist will work to build an atmosphere of safety so that you feel comfortable sharing your thoughts and feelings. From there, they’ll help you create a customized treatment plan based on your strengths, needs, and goals for therapy.
Since trauma usually goes hand in hand with negative beliefs, we often use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to help clients reframe the way they see themselves. In the wake of a traumatic event, it’s normal to think “I’m at fault for what the other person did” or “I’ll never recover from what happened to me.” CBT empowers you to challenge these thoughts and develop a more positive and enriching view of yourself.
To help clients process and resolve the emotional impact of trauma, many of our therapists utilize Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR). When you’ve experienced something traumatic, your brain becomes too overwhelmed to process it or file it away with the rest of your memories. EMDR can help you reprocess what happened so that the memory of your trauma no longer feels so present in your life.
By drawing from a wide range of evidence-based modalities and taking a gentle, compassionate approach, we’re confident that we can walk with you on this journey toward recovery. Therapy can is a journey that you take with your therapist that can lead you on the right path to full and complete healing from trauma and its effects.
You May Have Some Questions And Concerns About Trauma Treatment…
What I experienced isn’t as bad as what many other people have experienced.
It’s natural to try and minimize what happened to you—in fact, downplaying trauma is a common way to try and cope with its effects. But the truth is that no trauma is too small for support. Everyone responds differently to traumatic events, so it’s important to be kind to yourself and understand that you deserve healing just like anyone else.
How long will trauma therapy take?
It often depends on how long ago the traumatic experience happened and how severely it impacts your life currently. That said, everyone heals on their own time. When you have a trained and empathetic counselor working with you, it usually doesn’t take long to experience relief. The key is to be patient and move at whatever pace feels natural for you.
I’m worried that my therapist will judge me.
At Sunrise Counseling Services, you are in a safe environment where your therapist will listen to you, validate you, and hold your story sacred. There is no judgment here. We know that talking about trauma can feel scary and embarrassing at times, but we will support you unconditionally.
We’re Here To Help You Get Your Life Back
If you are ready to move past the emotional pain of trauma, don’t hesitate to reach out. To get started, you can email us, use the contact form or call 931-494-6803.
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