Reclaim Your Power After
Trauma
Living with trauma can be inherently difficult because its a constant struggle to navigate the challenges of everyday life while carrying the heavy burden of the past. Trauma can infiltrate every area of our life, often manifesting as persistent feelings of fear, anxiety, and distrust. The lingering effects of trauma can disrupt relationships, erode self-esteem, and can leave us feeling isolated and misunderstood. Moreover, the invisible scars left by trauma impact every facet of one’s well-being making it challenging to find a break from the relentless cycle of pain and distress.
Trauma refers to an experience that challenges an individual’s sense of safety, security, or well-being, leaving lasting emotional, psychological, and sometimes physical effects. It can result from a single distressing event or from prolonged exposure to adverse circumstances, such as abuse, neglect, or combat. Trauma can profoundly impact how we perceive ourselves, others, and the world around us. It’s important to recognize that trauma is subjective and can vary widely in its manifestations and severity, with each person’s response influenced by factors such as genetics, past experiences, and available support systems.
Acknowledging and addressing trauma is essential for promoting healing and resilience, as untreated trauma can significantly impair an individual’s quality of life and functioning. At Epios Therapy treating trauma is a specialty of ours and we are excited at the opportunity help create a newfound sense of resilience, personal strength, and meaning in your life.
How Trauma Can Manifest In Our Lives
Avoidance
- Avoidance: Efforts to avoid reminders of the trauma, including places, people, conversations, or activities that may trigger distressing memories. This also includes utilizing substances, gambling, spending, our phones, and other unhealthy behaviors to avoid distressing thoughts.
Intrusive Symptoms
- Flashbacks: Vivid and distressing recollections of the traumatic event that feel as if the event is recurring. This is often accompanied by discomforting physical sensations.
- Nightmares: Disturbing dreams related to the trauma, which can contribute to sleep disturbances.
Arousal and Reactivity
- Hypervigilance: Heightened alertness and increased sensitivity to potential threats, leading to an exaggerated startle response.
- Irritability: Easily angered or agitated, with a reduced tolerance for frustration.
- Sleep Disturbances: Insomnia, nightmares, or other sleep-related difficulties.
Changes in Mood and Cognition
- Persistent Negative Beliefs: Negative beliefs about oneself, others, or the world stemming from the trauma.
- Cognitive Impairments: Difficulty
with memory recall surrounding traumatic periods and challenges with concentration.
Emotional Changes
- Mood Swings: Unpredictable and intense shifts in mood, ranging from irritability to significant emotional detachment.
- Numbing: Difficulty experiencing positive emotions, feeling detached, or having a reduced ability to connect with others.
Changes in Relationships
- Social Withdrawal: Isolation from friends and family, avoiding social activities and may be done unconsciously.
- Changes in Attachment: Challenges in establishing or maintaining trust in relationships. or gravitating to the other extreme, codependency and enmeshment.
DISCUSSING CPTSD
What About Complex Trauma?
Complex trauma refers to prolonged exposure to traumatic events, often beginning in childhood and continuing over an extended period, such as ongoing abuse, neglect, or multiple instances of trauma. Unlike acute trauma, which typically involves a single event or a short-term occurrence, complex trauma results from sustained and pervasive stressors that affect an individual’s sense of safety, trust, and emotional well-being.
Another way complex trauma can manifest is prolonged exposure to an environment that lacks consistency such as someone close to us being mentally, physically, or spiritually unwell themselves. This chronic exposure to trauma can lead to profound psychological, emotional, and physiological effects, disrupting normal development and maladaptive coping mechanisms. Complex trauma can manifest in a wide range of symptoms and can be a challenge to identify since for us, it is our normal.
How We Treat Trauma
Trauma-informed care is an approach to therapy that recognizes the widespread impact of trauma on individuals’ lives. It involves understanding the signs and symptoms of trauma, acknowledging the prevalence of trauma in society, and actively seeking to avoid re-traumatization. In trauma-informed care, we focus on creating an environment that promotes safety, trust, and empowerment, while allowing individuals to feel heard, respected, and validated. This approach emphasizes collaboration, choice, and cultural sensitivity, recognizing that each person’s experience of trauma is unique and complex.
By integrating trauma awareness into all aspects of therapy, trauma-informed care aims to foster healing, resilience, and recovery while minimizing the risk of further harm. It’s important to recognize that symptoms of trauma may occur immediately after the traumatic event or may be delayed, emerging weeks, months, or even years later. The severity and duration of symptoms can vary, and not everyone who experiences trauma will develop post-traumatic stress symptoms. In terms of treating trauma, at Epios Therapy we use various evidence-based approaches to treat trauma and help individuals recover from its impact. Here are some therapeutic approaches you may encounter throughout your treatment:
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
DBT emphasizes skill-building in areas such as emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. DBT is excellent at teaching practical coping skills while also assisting in curbing some of the maladaptive behaviors that come from coping with trauma. This is especially useful when treating CPTSD and approaching relationships that have been complicated due to trauma.
Psychodynamic Therapy
Treating trauma through a psychodyanmic lens allows us to explore unconscious processes and how past experiences influence current thoughts and behaviors. Since so much of trauma's impact is often not consciously observed, a psychodynamic approach gives us the ability to explore how trauma can manifest into areas of our lives that we had not noticed before.
Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy involves exploring and reshaping the narrative or story individuals have about their traumatic experiences. By reconstructing the narrative, we can gain a sense of agency rewriting how you may be viewing your life or past events. This can be an extremely empowering method.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Trauma-Focused CBT is a specialized type of CBT that isn't as cold as formal CBT yet still focuses on enriching the client's life with practical techniques. It involves cognitive restructuring, education about trauma, and the development of coping skills.
Attachment-Based Therapy
For individuals who have experienced early attachment trauma, attachment-based therapies focus on repairing and enhancing secure attachment patterns. This can involve exploring rules and roles learned in prior relationships and developing healthier attachment styles going forward. This approach is almost always utilized when treating trauma as one of the biggest ways trauma manifests is in how we interact with others.
Mindfulness-Based Therapies
Mindfulness-based approaches help individuals develop mindfulness skills to manage distress and promote emotional regulation. Sometimes utilizing acceptance and commitment strategies, we can work towards live in the present while no longer being held prisoner by our past. This is often a challenge at first but is often utilized after a there is a firm foundation of insight and coping strategies in place.
You don't have to face trauma by yourself
Seeking therapy for trauma can be a scary step to take but is one that can provide an immense amount of relief in your life. At Epios Therapy we strive to provide a safe and supportive environment to process your experiences, gain insight into your thoughts and emotions, and develop effective coping strategies. We are specifically trained in trauma-informed approaches and can offer evidence-based interventions tailored to the specific needs and goals of each individual to help navigate the complex and often overwhelming effects of trauma. Through therapy, we can learn to challenge negative beliefs and behaviors stemming from traumatic experiences, cultivate resilience, and reclaim a sense of agency and control over our lives. Additionally, therapy can provide validation, empathy, and a sense of connection, counteracting the isolation and shame often associated with trauma. Reach out today so we can work towards healing and integration, fostering greater emotional well-being, improved relationships, and a renewed sense of hope for the future.