It’s estimated that over 224 million adults have experienced at least one trauma. It’s prevalent, albeit horrifying. After trauma, your world can feel unsafe, and then anxiety makes your body feel unsafe too.
The good news? It’s treatable, and we specialize in helping you cope. Trauma therapy can help you make sense of your trauma history and feel more grounded in your life. When trauma happens, you need trauma-informed and competent therapy to support your recovery.
This month, we’ve been sharing blogs about trauma therapy and what that process is like. Today we are excited to share more about our therapists and their approaches to trauma healing.
What Does Healing From Trauma Look Like?
Usually, when beginning trauma therapy, you may often feel overwhelmed, stuck, scared, sad, or even numb. You may express that relationships feel difficult, life feels like just too much, and every little thing seems to impact you in big ways. Trying to find peace, hope and joy feels nearly impossible. These are the same things my clients share with me when beginning therapy. However, as time in therapy goes on, you may start to experience healing both externally and internally. Let’s take a look at what external and internal healing may look like in therapy.
External Healing
After going processing through trauma therapy, I start to see clients experience healing in their relationships and life overall. I specialize in betrayal trauma and sexual trauma, both of which lend themselves to being highly relational in nature. As a licensed marriage and family therapist, the external context of my client’s life is important in order to determine how my clients desire to heal holistically. I take time to understand my client’s family and relationship history in order to understand how those relationships factor into my client’s experience of trauma. I work with couples, teens, families, and individuals to provide a space for external healing in the therapy process.
Sometimes my client’s trauma is from their family or prior relationships and sometimes those relationships serve as protective factors in the midst of trauma. Either way, we all tend to carry pain from our childhood that affects our present day-to-day functioning. Practically speaking, I help my clients determine a “pain cycle” which details what each client feels in their moments of pain, how they cope, and how their coping may impact those around them. Coping is not wrong or bad since it is what we do to survive, but sometimes there are better ways for us to cope. I help you find self-regulating truths you can use so you can walk in peace in your relationships. Once my clients start to experience healing externally, I tend to see my clients feel:
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Regulated
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Empowered
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Connected to others
Internal Healing
Sometimes clients come into trauma therapy feeling like their relationships are in decent shape, but they are still struggling internally. Maybe you had a single incident trauma (i.e. car crash) or you have been in therapy for a while and are still feeling anxious or depressed and not sure why. This is when being an EMDR therapist comes in handy with my clients. You can visit these blogs to learn more about EMDR and our approach at Woven, but essentially it is an evidence-based psychotherapy practice meant to reduce symptoms of traumatic memories and events. Through the use of EMDR, I have seen clients go from feeling not good enough, unsafe, and unworthy to feeling proud of themselves, knowing how to keep themselves safe, and growing in their self-esteem. I can tell that my clients are experiencing internal healing when they start to feel:
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Confident
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Safe
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Worthy
When clients start to feel confident, safe, and worthy, I notice that their anxiety and depression tend to decrease, they have a greater understanding of their triggers and how to regulate them, and they have a strong sense of self that allows them to go after whatever it is they want in life.
The course of trauma therapy looks different for everyone. Your healing journey depends on what experiences you’re bringing to the table, and the hope is that you will walk away feeling like your relationships are healthier, your sense of self is strong, and your experience of trauma does not have to determine your every move or have the last word.
