Trauma & PTSD
Heal Trauma, Reclaim Your Life
Trauma can overwhelm you emotionally, mentally, and physically. Trauma survivors often oscillate between feeling numb or being flooded with intense emotions like fear, anger, and shame.
Traumatic events shatter our fundamental beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world. After enduring trauma, we might see ourselves as powerless, others as untrustworthy, and the world as unsafe. Physically, trauma can leave us in a constant state of hyperarousal, leading to chronic irritability, anger, and various physical ailments like headaches and hypertension.
Trauma can stem from sudden, shocking events like sexual assault or from prolonged exposure to stressors such as childhood abuse or domestic violence. Both types of trauma, whether sudden or prolonged, can lead to conditions like Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Complex Trauma.
Specific Types of Trauma:
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD):
PTSD encompasses a range of symptoms following exposure to death, injury, or sexual violence. These events could be experienced directly, witnessed, or indirectly. Symptoms include intrusive memories, avoidance, negative changes in thinking, mood swings, and hyperarousal. While these symptoms are common initially, they can persist and interfere with daily life without proper treatment.
There are several types of specialized cognitive behavioural treatment approaches for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder such as Prolonged Exposure and Cognitive Processing Therapy. Read more about treatment.
Complex Trauma/Childhood Abuse:
Complex trauma, often experienced in childhood, involves repeated interpersonal trauma, including physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, as well as neglect.
Exposure to such experiences of abuse and neglect can be particularly damaging because they are usually chronic, occur during developmentally vulnerable periods of life (i.e., during critical periods of brain development and personality formation), and involve harm and/or betrayal within relationships that are supposed to be trustworthy, nurturing, and protective. As a result, these experiences compromise normal self-development and basic trust in primary relationships.
Complex trauma can profoundly affect you and your ability to relate to others, resulting in problems in the areas of emotion, self-concept, relationships, and physical health. Mental health issues such as PTSD, anxiety disorders, depression, substance use issues, and low self-esteem are common.
Emotion Focused Therapy for Trauma (EFTT) is an effective treatment for complex trauma related to childhood abuse or neglect. Read more about treatment.
Treatments for PTSD and Complex Trauma
Avoidance of trauma-related memories, feelings, thoughts, and situations is a natural response to painful experiences. However, avoidance can prevent processing and integration of the trauma and ultimately perpetuates symptoms and interferes with natural recovery. Chronic avoidance also leaves people stuck in the feelings and perceptions formed at the time of the trauma.
In order to heal from trauma, people need to remember, to tell the story over again in a safe and validating environment in order to work it through and begin the healing process. Talking through the trauma helps individuals get ‘unstuck’, gain more control of their thoughts and feelings about the trauma, make sense of it, and integrate it into their experience so that it does not continue to haunt them. This process of integration allows the trauma to become a part of normal memory rather than something to be perpetually feared and avoided, interfering with normal life. Revisiting the traumatic event(s) is hard at first, but many feel better over time and notice reduced symptoms as well as feeling more empowered, more connected to themselves and others, and regaining a sense of meaning in life.
There are several effective treatments for PTSD and complex trauma. These therapies all teach skills to manage anxiety and other intense emotions. They also involve working directly with trauma memories and feelings to process them, and helping individuals make sense of the trauma. However, therapy for complex trauma is typically longer and the therapeutic relationship plays a more central and direct role in the treatment. Additionally, more time is spent addressing emotion regulation (e.g., awareness, tolerance, managing intensity of emotions, coping), relational problems (e.g., learning how to effectively communicate feelings and needs, setting healthy limits) and self-related problems (e.g., self-criticism, self-blame).
Prolonged Exposure
Prolonged Exposure is a type of cognitive behaviour therapy for PTSD that helps people approach trauma-related thoughts, feelings, and situations that they have been avoiding due to fear. Repeated retelling and visualizing of the traumatic event (called imaginal exposure) helps to process the trauma leading to reduced posttraumatic symptoms as well as reduced fear of trauma-related memories and emotions. Individuals are also helped to confront safe but avoided situations in the real world. Repeated exposure to these thoughts, feelings, and situations helps reduce the power they have to cause distress.
Cognitive Processing Therapy
Cognitive Processing Therapy focuses on the meaning given to the traumatic event(s) and problematic beliefs about the trauma that interfere with recovery, called “stuck points”. In revisiting the trauma memory, individuals are helped to understand how their interpretations of the event contribute to persisting negative emotions such as fear, guilt, shame, and anger; skills are taught to challenge and change problematic beliefs. In particular, therapy attends to areas of safety, trust, power, control, esteem, and intimacy which may have been disrupted by the trauma. Cognitive Processing Therapy has shown effectiveness for PTSD and complex trauma.
Emotion Focused Therapy for Trauma
Emotion Focused Therapy for Trauma (EFTT) is an effective treatment for complex trauma that was specifically developed for individuals who have experienced different types of childhood abuse (emotional, physical, sexual abuse, emotional neglect). In addition to addressing symptoms of distress and problems in functioning associated with this type of complex trauma, this approach focuses on resolving issues with past perpetrators of abuse and neglect, usually attachment figures (e.g., parent) and healing these specific emotional injuries. There is also a focus on modifying maladaptive trauma-related emotions such as fear and shame and an emphasis on helping individuals draw on inner strengths and access adaptive emotions as healthy resources.
Don’t let trauma dictate your life. Reach out to us to start your journey towards healing today.