“Not all storms come to disrupt your life. Some come to clear your path.” —Unknown
Counseling and Treatment for Trauma & PTSD
Trauma can change how you see the world and yourself, and it may be holding you back from living a freer life. You didn’t choose to experience what you went through, and you certainly didn’t choose to have those experiences affect you today.
Going through a painful, traumatic experience makes it so hard to feel a sense of safety and stability. Because traumatic memories are linked to the emotional center of our brain, every trigger – sights, sounds, smells, etc. – bring up the pain and terror you experienced back then.
It’s exhausting to live with the hyper vigilance that accompanies a trauma reaction. No matter when the experience occurred, you probably feel a sense of not having control and worry you’ll never have control over your life.
Managing trauma is possible.
70 percent of adults have experienced trauma. You are not alone. Trauma is often a response to abuse (childhood, sexual, physical, emotional, passive), neglect, grief/loss, war, violence (including community violence), accidents, natural disasters, medical interventions, growing up in the foster system, and more.
46 percent of those entering therapy feel emotional relief within 6 weeks.
Getting Started with Trauma Therapy
We work with kids, teens, young adults, and adults who have experienced a negative event that has significantly impacted them and which they find highly stressful, traumatic, or overwhelming.
Hillary Counseling is committed to providing exceptional care in whatever capacity is most comfortable for our clients. Therapy can be an intimate, fun, engaging process where clients face their vulnerabilities and successes boldly. Your therapist will walk alongside you in healing life conflict.
Trauma is treatable.
The approach and treatment of trauma is not a universal, one-size-fits-all approach.
However, some common trauma therapy approaches can include:
Behavior Therapy
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a common approach to treating trauma which is based on the premise that our thoughts and behaviors are interwoven–meaning that changes in thought patterns can facilitate behavioral improvements.
Exposure Therapy
Prolonged exposure therapy is a form of exposure therapy used to address PTSD avoidance behaviors. Trauma survivors typically avoid reminders of their trauma to protect themselves from overwhelming fear and pain. Unfortunately, doing so only further reinforces fear.
Throughout treatment, the therapist employs systematic desensitization techniques through prolonged exposure to stressful trauma cues, leading to symptom dissipation.
Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy centers on assisting a client in creating an account of how their trauma has been and is currently impacting their life as a way to reclaim their identity and story.
Mindfulness Based Therapies & Wellness
Often, clients report success with guided meditations, yoga, acupuncture, grounding techniques and other holistic approaches to supplement treatment.
Somatic Therapies
Somatic therapy is a form of body-centered therapy that looks at the connection of mind and body to help release stress, trauma, and tension that has become “locked away” in the body.
EMDR Therapy
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy treatment that is designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories.
EMDR taps into the nervous system and helps us regain control. By stimulating it in a safe way, you can reprocess the event (or events) and teach your body to be less reactive to those triggers.
An EMDR therapist from our team can help you work through this. We will support you in re-processing your trauma so it no longer holds you back or controls your life.
We can’t take your painful memories away, but we can help you reprocess the traumatic event so you don’t react in the same way.
