'Trauma' and 'Trauma Therapy' |
Trauma is any experience that leaves you feeling helpless, hopeless, confused, or powerless.
Some examples of traumatic experiences:
Traumatic experiences come in through our five senses, but are not processed by our brain in the same was as non-traumatic events. Our brain does not know what to do with traumatic experiences—they don’t make sense or are too overwhelming. The brain “shuts down” the normal memory system, making traumatic memories more scrambled. And rather than fading over time, emotions connected to this experience stay fresh. When you think about the memory it might be like you are experiencing it all over again, travelling back in time to the original trauma.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) causes your brain and body to constantly operate on high alert, so your body never gets a chance to recuperate. It’s like having the gas pedal always stuck to the floor! No wonder you feel so exhausted all the time. Your immune system is overworked meaning you probably get sick more often, your heart and lungs work way too hard, and your muscles get strained from being too tense. This constant state of stress puts you at risk for diabetes, heart attack, obesity, depression, concentration problems, and even certain types of cancer. What started as a way to protect you from trauma has become a real problem.
Trauma Therapy may include some or all of the following:
Workshop: Coping With Trauma Symptoms
Some examples of traumatic experiences:
- Accidents or Injury
- Assault
- Death of a Loved One
- Job Loss
- Physical, Sexual, or Emotional Abuse
- Relationship Trauma (Deception & Betrayal, Abandonment & Neglect, Humiliation, etc.)
Traumatic experiences come in through our five senses, but are not processed by our brain in the same was as non-traumatic events. Our brain does not know what to do with traumatic experiences—they don’t make sense or are too overwhelming. The brain “shuts down” the normal memory system, making traumatic memories more scrambled. And rather than fading over time, emotions connected to this experience stay fresh. When you think about the memory it might be like you are experiencing it all over again, travelling back in time to the original trauma.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) causes your brain and body to constantly operate on high alert, so your body never gets a chance to recuperate. It’s like having the gas pedal always stuck to the floor! No wonder you feel so exhausted all the time. Your immune system is overworked meaning you probably get sick more often, your heart and lungs work way too hard, and your muscles get strained from being too tense. This constant state of stress puts you at risk for diabetes, heart attack, obesity, depression, concentration problems, and even certain types of cancer. What started as a way to protect you from trauma has become a real problem.
Trauma Therapy may include some or all of the following:
- Explaining how trauma affects the body and the mind, helping you feel more 'normal' and less 'crazy'.
- Practicing relaxation, deep breathing, mindfulness, or grounding to help you feel more comfortable and less stressed out.
- Identifying triggers so you can recognize them.
- Learn to talk yourself down from triggers and ground yourself in the present
- Begin to re-experience the intense emotions that the brain shut down during the traumatic event. (This may be a painful process because you may have been closed off from some of these feelings for a long time. We will work together to access these feelings slowly and in a safe, controlled way.)
- Addressing how your trauma symptoms might be affecting other areas of your life such as eating, sleeping, relationships, avoidance of certain people or places, suicidal thoughts, etc., and making a plan to create more healthy behaviours.
- We may also use some therapies that work directly with the brain, like Observed Experiential Integration (OEI) which uses the eyes to access traumatic memories and reprocess them so they can be stored in the normal memory centre of the brain.
Workshop: Coping With Trauma Symptoms
