Trauma Therapy & How It Can Help You
Trauma Therapy & How It Can Help You
Experiencing trauma can be excruciating, and seeking trauma therapy is often the only way to a complete recovery from it. On its own, a person might feel confused about how to process what they have been through or how to start healing from the trauma. They want to recover and feel that sense of safety again, yet don’t know how to get there.
Trauma quite often has deep impacts on us, which can be overwhelming, so seeking help in a form of therapy is completely normal and should be a choice of every person who has gone through something like this.
There is a range of trauma treatment programs that can help individuals heal from their traumas and help them continue living their life as they used to before the trauma occurred. In this article, we’ll review what trauma therapy entails and how a trauma therapist helps someone heal.
How Trauma Affects Us
There are numerous reasons that trauma affects us negatively and causes post-traumatic stress. Trauma will physically change our brains, so when we experience a traumatic event, our minds will change. Due to the hyperarousal, which happened during trauma, areas of our brains that worked in a particular way will change.
Our amygdalas will get overly activated once the traumatic experience occurred. The phrase “fight, flight, or freeze” refers to having a physical and emotional response to your trauma trigger. That makes you remember the trauma and the amygdala becomes overactive. In these moments, you will be hypervigilant and alert to ensure you’re safe from any potential danger.
Experiencing trauma is very painful, and those who are hurting from it should always seek help. As a result of trauma, a person can develop several health disorders, personality changes, and other symptoms.
Trauma Therapy
If you’ve experienced trauma, it would be best to seek a trauma therapist as soon as possible. Talking about the pain and starting to process what happened is an essential step to recovery. Although it might seem scary, this will help you process those past events and start living a fulfilled life that is not dominated by your traumatic experience.
Finding a therapist skilled at helping individuals who have been through trauma is the best way to deal with your trauma and everything else it brought. As many therapy types exist, a person might feel like there is no difference between them, however, the best kind of therapy for trauma is undeniably trauma therapy.
Experiencing trauma can have an impact on your life for many years and even if an event happened ten or twenty years ago, it can still hurt you. Trauma is not a problem that can be resolved easily on your own, so many people decide to talk to a trauma therapist with experience in helping people overcome all the stress, pain, and dysfunction from having lived such trauma.
Trauma Therapy Benefits
Learning that trauma therapy is beneficial for individuals who have experienced any type of traumatic experience will help them seek help sooner. To start with therapy, a person will need to be aware of their trauma, their triggers, and the way they react to those triggers. All these things will help your therapist understand how the trauma has affected you and where they’ll need to direct the therapy to help you recover from it.
There are many objectives a person wishes to achieve with therapy, yet they all have something in common – healing. To heal, a person needs to be willing to share all information about their traumatic experience and post-traumatic consequences. The more effort you put into the therapy, the bigger the chances you will recover completely quicker.
Those who have experienced trauma will never be able to eliminate that event. So they should learn how to live happily and fulfilled without trauma affecting them. It needs to become an event that happened in the past and is just a memory of something that happened to you. Instead of it affecting most choices you make in life.
Trauma Therapy Goals
As an individual or with your therapist, it might be beneficial to set goals for your therapy. That said, don’t treat these goals as a matter of success or failure. Your goals are something that should guide and motivate you throughout your therapy and help you heal. Here are some of the most common goals people with trauma will set for their therapy sessions:
- Successfully handling the reality of the traumatic experience that happened to me in the past,
- Eliminating the symptoms of trauma,
- Boosting my day-to-day operations,
- Sharing with people my hereditary trauma experience,
- Learning how to regain my “personal power”,
- Getting over the addictions caused by traumatic stress, etc.
Trauma Therapy Types
Although there are many different therapy types, only three of them are beneficial when dealing with trauma: trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TFCBT), psychodynamic psychotherapy. And eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
This type of therapy refers to a unique form of cognitive-behavioral therapy that helps individuals with trauma by dealing with the thoughts related to that experience. Typically, a person will have between 10 to 25 sessions. Followed by further trauma-focused therapy to continue recovering from all the secondary problems that might arise as trauma symptoms.
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
This is a common type of therapy aiming to uncover all the conflicts and content that exist in the unconscious mind of a person that experienced a traumatic event. Psychodynamic psychotherapy emerged from methods of psychoanalysis and it monitors how interpersonal relationships can positively affect your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. It’s mostly used when a person needs to become aware of the trauma to deal with it properly.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is one of the most recent types of psychotherapy. Intending to help individuals process their traumatic experiences in healthier ways. This type of psychotherapy assumes that the mind is constantly moving towards an individual’s mental health until there is a blockage in that flow. The trauma therapist will use external stimuli, such as eye movements or hand tapping, to direct the patient’s attention outwards.
Regardless of the treatment, trauma therapy can have incredible benefits and help individuals heal from their traumatic events. With proper care, you will soon be able to enjoy your life and make the most of it and your trauma will stay where it belongs – in the past.
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About Life Coaching and Therapy
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Our team of compassionate, licensed therapists and certified sex therapists help all clients who visit us for a variety of personal, relationship, intimacy and sex problems.
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