TRAUMA THERAPY
Has A Traumatic Experience Diminished Your Sense Of Safety?
Are you struggling to put the pain of the past behind you? Is there an experience that’s left you feeling anxious, vulnerable, and overly reactive to stress? Do you find yourself struggling with:
An inability to trust others?
Repeated patterns of self-sabotage?
Feelings of fear, guilt, and shame?
Maybe you’re chronically worried about your safety or the safety of others because of difficult experiences in your past. Perhaps your fears cause you to isolate and turn down social invitations, leading to loneliness and self-deprecation. Maybe you’ve long tried to bury your trauma, but as time has gone on, it’s become increasingly clear that it still affects your life. As a result, you may be thinking it’s time to see a trauma therapist.
Trauma Can Impact Your Ability To Form Healthy Connections
While some traumatic events can be life-threatening and overwhelm your ability to cope, the truth is that the majority of them are fairly mundane. You may have experienced a toxic relationship, neglectful parenting, a chronic illness, or the loss of a job. All of these experiences can deeply impact your wellbeing. They can diminish your capacity for connection and intimacy and hold you back from pursuing your hopes and dreams.
The good news is that you don’t have to continue feeling stuck and hopeless. At Dr. Ann Marie Semich Counseling Group, our compassionate, evidence-based approach can help you process and resolve your trauma and live a fuller and more vibrant life. We offer trauma therapy services for kids, teens, and adults who are looking to find healing from trauma.
Trauma Happens When We Are Too Overwhelmed To Cope
Our bodies are designed to withstand certain levels of stress, but sometimes in life, we all have experiences that are beyond the human threshold of what we can handle. When this happens, our bodies go into survival mode—we are flooded with stress hormones to the point of extreme actions like fighting, fleeing, or freezing. This can affect our nervous systems long-term, creating heightened sensitivity to everyday events long after our traumatic experiences have passed.
If you think this describes you, you are not alone. Roughly 70 percent of Americans have experienced trauma, and when you consider how many cases go unreported, the percentage is probably much higher (1). Many people have experienced trauma, whether in childhood or adulthood, and many of them have also found healing and relief through the power of therapy.
We All Have A Profound Capacity For Healing
Although our bodies are programmed to go into a “fight, flight, or freeze” response in the wake of traumatic events, they are also programmed to recover. Trauma is not a life sentence—as debilitating as it can be, it’s possible for old wounds to be reprocessed and new pathways to form in the brain. Research has shown that in-depth approaches like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and IFS (Internal Family Systems) are capable of resolving trauma symptoms with startling efficacy (2) (3).
Above all, the number-one factor in anyone’s journey of overcoming trauma is their support system. When you have supportive and caring people around you, it’s much easier to work through the pain of the past and feel grounded in the here and now. For most people, this support begins with therapy.
Therapy Can Help You Break Out Of Survival Mode And Heal From Trauma
When therapy is done, many clients tell us that they feel lighter, less reactive, and more present in their lives. The things that used to bother them don’t bother them anymore. They feel more connected to those around them and have the confidence to pursue relationships and friendships that once felt out of reach.
We want you to experience the same kind of empowerment. Our therapists are trauma-informed and have years of experience helping people of all ages reduce their symptoms and recover from distressing life experiences. Our team provides therapy for survivors of sexual abuse, emotional abuse, grief and loss, childhood neglect, and many other forms of trauma. We draw from a wide range of evidence-based treatment methods and combine our expertise with a deeply empathic approach.
What To Expect In Trauma Counseling Sessions
The first step of therapy is building a supportive and trusting therapeutic relationship and identifying the areas of your life impacted by trauma. Next, we’ll focus on equipping you with new skills and resources for managing the trauma responses that are held in your body. Once these skills and resources are in place, we’ll dive deeper into the underlying causes of your trauma symptoms.
To do this deeper work, our counselors often utilize EMDR Therapy, which uses bilateral stimulation techniques to help you reduce the emotional overwhelm associated with trauma. We also use Internal Family Systems (IFS), which can help you identify the protective mechanisms that are preventing you from healing your emotional wounds.
The beauty of approaches like EMDR and IFS is that they don’t require you to share the details of your trauma in sessions. EMDR allows you to process your experiences nonverbally, through the use of tapping exercises, and IFS focuses more on the parts of you wounded by trauma than your experiences themselves. So how much you choose to share is entirely up to you.
Ultimately, the goal of therapy is to help you break free from the guilt, shame, fear, and anger that stem from trauma. We will help you restore trust in yourself and others, rebuilding your capacity for healthy connections. We will also empower you to be more in control of your life so that you can live fully and freely instead of feeling stuck in the shadow of the past.
You May Have Some Questions About
Trauma Therapy…
How effective is online therapy for trauma?
Since 2020, our practice has been seeing clients virtually with great results. Clients often appreciate the benefits of online therapy, such as being in the privacy of their own home and not having to commute to sessions or sit in a crowded waiting room. Online therapy is safe, confidential, and compatible with approaches like EMDR and IFS.
What if I don’t remember exactly what happened?
It’s not necessary to recall all the details of your traumatic experience. The body holds onto traumatic distress even when the mind doesn’t fully remember. So by taking a body-based approach and using nonverbal methods that get right to the source of trauma, your memories will get processed whether you remember them or not.
How long will it take to heal from trauma?
Therapy is not always a quick fix. It’s an investment of your time with great long-term benefits, and every step is progress toward your ultimate destination. That said, it’s possible to find relief from trauma fairly quickly through IFS and EMDR therapy, since these approaches allow for deeper processing and faster resolution of symptoms.
The Things That Used To Bother You Don’t Have To Bother You Anymore
With our support, you can finally put your trauma behind you and experience relief in your mind and body. To learn more about our comprehensive approach to trauma treatment, we encourage you to connect with us by filling out our contact form.
https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/
https://www.thenationalcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Trauma-infographic.pdf
https://ifs-institute.com/resources/research/internal-family-systems-ifs-therapy-posttraumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd-among
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