Therapy for Trauma
If you are reading this page, you’ve likely arrived here with personal experience that defines trauma for you—a crisis or series of them that shook your world.
We can be traumatized by:
- being directly exposed to a traumatic event;
- witnessing a trauma;
- discovering that someone close to us or a relative has been traumatized; or
- being indirectly exposed to the details of someone else’s trauma, such as what happens in helping professions.
A current or past traumatic event may have left you feeling shattered, set adrift, vulnerable, or deeply unsettled. You may be wondering if things will ever again feel right with your world.
Anyone who has experienced trauma can benefit from therapy to work through and past it. Cognitive behavior therapy is a powerful tool in addressing the effects of trauma. Narrative therapy helps us gain insight into the strengths we showed during and after traumatic events. Solution-focused therapy can be used to channel the emotions felt from reliving or avoiding the trauma into time spent on productive goals that create positive life changes. My preference is to combine two or more of these therapies in an integrated approach when addressing trauma.
Some people who have experienced trauma go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). To be clear, not everyone who experiences trauma develops PTSD. PTSD is a severe response to trauma where the event is persistently re-experienced, very negative thoughts and feelings begin or worsen, a heightened response or reaction to things in the environment develops; and people are not functioning in their lives as they had been doing.
Some traumas result in a ‘new normal’ to which we need to find a way to adapt—often literally overnight, such as when there has been a sudden death or a natural disaster.
Post-Traumatic Growth
Research has shown that strengthening coping skills and social supports helps to reduce the negative responses to trauma while increasing our opportunities to experience post-traumatic growth.
Post-traumatic growth happens when we reexamine the effects of the traumatic experience in new ways. This reframing helps us become aware of the positive changes that were born out of crisis.
Examples of post-traumatic growth include strengthened relationships, increased appreciation for life or spiritual development, the creation or discovery of new personal strengths, and an openness to new possibilities. It can be life-changing to gain insight into unrecognized or new strengths that came into play during or after a traumatic event or to awaken to the positive changes that unfolded because of traumatic events.
It is possible to experience post-traumatic growth
while you are still processing a trauma,
including if you are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder.
Therapy can help you enhance or develop those things known to support post-traumatic growth, especially positive, active coping skills and strengthening social supports.
If you take one thing away from reading this page, please know that post-traumatic growth is possible regardless of the age at which you experienced the trauma, the frequency or intentionality of trauma, your level of spirituality or religiosity, or your symptoms.
I have many years of experience in helping people work through a wide range of traumatic issues and events. This has left me a believer in the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.