PTSD Treatment
Have you been dealing with intrusive thoughts, panic attacks, or painful flashbacks?
Do you find yourself avoiding intimate connections because you don’t feel safe in relationships?
Are you looking to finally put the pain of the past behind you and live a better life?
Maybe you feel like you’re barely functioning and every day is a constant battle just to get by. Perhaps you’re struggling with heightened anxiety and have trouble feeling safe and regulated when you go out. As a result, the temptation to isolate may grow stronger and stronger each day. You might find yourself breaking off connections before they have a chance to develop and living in a state of fear and hypervigilance. For the first time, you may be thinking it’s time to see a therapist who specializes in treating PTSD.
Past Treatments May Have Left You Empty And Wanting More
Perhaps you’ve already seen other therapists, but they didn’t offer the deeper trauma healing you were looking for—they only gave you cognitive skills or surface solutions. Or maybe you’ve worked with psychiatrists who just treated your symptoms from a medical standpoint, failing to acknowledge the complexity of your trauma.
Deep down, there’s probably nothing you want more than to have a compassionate professional at your side who understands the physical, emotional, and social ramifications of living with complex trauma. If this is the case, I encourage you to connect with me. As a trauma-informed therapist, I specialize in helping people like you put the pain of the past behind them and find relief in every area of their lives.
Are You Struggling To Move On From An Emotionally Distressing Experience?
Anyone Who’s Been Through An Emotionally Disruptive Experience Has Endured Trauma
The scope of trauma is far broader than most people imagine. By definition, a traumatic experience is any emotional disturbance that disrupts your life and affects the way you function in the world. Some of the experiences that can lead to complex trauma include:
Physical, sexual, or psychological abuse from a caregiver, friend, or partner
Growing up with an insecure attachment to a parent/caregiver
Having a parent with an alcohol or drug addiction
Living in a shame-based culture where emotional expression is punished or minimized
Growing up in a home where “feelings don’t exist”
For many people, these experiences continue to impact their functioning long after the traumatic experience has passed. When that happens, it’s usually a sign of post-traumatic stress disorder, which means that their trauma has not fully healed and they could benefit from therapeutic intervention.
Many Therapists Treat The Symptoms Rather Than The Causes Of Trauma
Overcoming trauma is incredibly hard. After all, although you can cognitively work through the aftereffects and reassure yourself that your traumatic experience won’t happen again, trauma can still impact you on a deeper, subconscious level. The brain needs specific reprocessing in order to reach an adaptive resolution, which is why seeing a trained professional is so vital.
Unfortunately, not every counselor is trained to work with complex trauma. Many of them gloss over the bigger picture and focus on treating symptoms instead of trying to figure out where those symptoms come from. As a result, many trauma survivors go from specialist to specialist without finding relief.
PTSD Treatment Can Help You Find Relief From Past Trauma
You don’t have to keep spinning your wheels trying to manage trauma. With the right help and support, you can finally find the relief you’re looking for and start living up to your true potential. Once you are able to heal from trauma, you can function better at work, in your relationships, and in every area of your life. It’s my goal to help you get there.
In the beginning, you and I will focus on understanding the context of your trauma and exploring how it impacts your everyday life. We’ll work on developing somatic skills and body awareness to decrease your symptoms, enabling you to heal trauma at its core.
Trauma is a somatic issue, so you can’t treat it using only cognitive skills. The solution is in the body, and the work I do is centered around helping you understand that. You will learn to practice skills like breathwork, meditation, grounding, resourcing, and other techniques for increasing somatic awareness and reducing your trauma symptoms.
Tailoring My Approach To PTSD Treatment
Working together, you and I will develop a treatment plan that reflects your goals and then monitor your progress throughout counseling. Depending on what works best for you, I may draw from a combination of approaches, including:
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) Therapy, which uses bilateral stimulation to reprocess unresolved trauma and create new and healthier pathways in the brain.
Clinical Hypnosis, an approach that allows for awareness into your subconscious mind so that you can reprocess trauma on a deeper level.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which is all about challenging and reframing the negative distortions that stem from trauma, such as “I’m not good enough” or “No one will ever love me.”
By incorporating a wide variety of healing methods into treatment, I’m confident that I can help you reduce your PTSD symptoms and get back to normal functioning. You may not be able to change what happened, but with the right interventions, you can change the way it impacts your life.
You May Have Some Questions About Trauma And PTSD Therapy…
I’ve tried therapy before and nothing changed. How will this be different?
It’s quite likely that the therapists you worked with used a purely cognitive approach, focusing on reversing negative thoughts and beliefs instead of doing the deeper somatic work necessary to heal from trauma. The truth is that you can’t think your way out of trauma, which is why my approach goes deeper and addresses the whole person.
What if talking about trauma makes me feel worse?
The good news is that with a somatically-oriented approach, there’s more focus on restoring calmness in the body than on talking through trauma. For instance, EMDR therapy does not require you to share the details of your trauma—the bilateral stimulation exercises essentially do the healing work for you, allowing your brain to process what happened without the risk of re-traumatization.
Will I have to go on medication?
Whether or not you take medication is entirely your choice. I may recommend it if I think it’s a helpful option, but ultimately, you are in charge of your own treatment. Many clients find that therapy is powerful enough on its own to bring relief, but there is no shame in supplementing the treatment process with medication. If you are interested in doing so, I’d be more than happy to connect you with the appropriate specialist.
The Past Does Not Define You
If you’re ready to heal from complex trauma and finally experience relief from your PTSD symptoms, I believe that my approach to treatment can help you. To begin your journey today, email me, text me at 734-536-2444, or use the contact page. I look forward to working with you!
Recent Blog Posts
