Healing from Trauma

Pushing away the terror and sadness from the past…

Sadly, it’s essentially ingrained in your personality.

Coping with flashbacks…

Avoiding situations that resemble where you got hurt…

Distracting yourself with whatever you can…

But it won’t stop. You’re continually triggered, haunted by the past – and the shame, guilt, rage, and sadness that comes with it.

It’s too much to handle.

So, you turn to what numbs and makes you feel better: drinking, food, sex, substances, or other excesses. As you know, though, it’s a temporary fix. Once the “high” is over, the shame and anxiety flood your mind and body, leading you to do it again. And the cycle continues.

You’ve tried stopping on your own, but you fall back into the trap. Everything is closing in on you, and the anger and resentment build and build.

What happened wasn’t your fault, so why do you have to “disappear,” pouring yourself into work, people-pleasing, or other compulsions?

Talking about or reliving your trauma won’t help.

That often surprises people because that’s often the traditional therapy approach. It doesn’t work because trauma is stored in your body. The difficult situation you experienced at the time overwhelmed your nervous system, so the event wasn’t processed or metabolized in a healthy way.

When you talk about or relive the trauma, it only makes you feel worse. It brings you back to the worst of it – the terror, the images, the panic, and the nightmares.

You feel trapped – like you can’t escape. It reinforces the notion that you don’t feel safe ANYWHERE, including your own body.

The right therapy will help you learn to tolerate distress.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

EMDR therapy is a comprehensive and highly researched approach to healing past experiences that cause you emotional distress and are often the reason you engage in the things that numb you to feel better. In EMDR, you learn to develop skills to help yourself find healthy ways to approach situations in the future.

We prepare for EMDR by taking a history of traumatic and distressing events while giving you ways to help yourself cope more effectively with your distress through grounding exercises. We explore how the trauma has shaped how you feel and think about yourself and identify the negative beliefs you struggle with daily. We do this by gently going inside your body to locate the feelings and body sensations. Next to the negative belief, we develop the positive belief that you want to feel deeply about yourself.

The next phase in EMDR involves bilateral stimulation, a technical phrase for any body movement that is back and forth – right and left. This movement activates the two sides of your brain to work together to process the distressful feelings connected to the images and memories from your trauma. This is the eye movement part of EMDR.

This bilateral movement can be accomplished through moving your eyes back and forth, or other means like listening to tones timed for each ear, or simple movements like tapping your knees or tapping your feet right, left, right, and left in the timing I provide for you. We do this in a highly structured and guided way for brief sequences to allow your brain briefly to access the painful memories while you are using the healthy part of you to move through them. Generally, this allows you to tend to memories, present triggers, and anticipated future experiences. In the process, you will find new associations and insight into how the trauma and fear held you back while recognizing more health available to you.

After reprocessing, you will experience a vast decrease or elimination of the distress connected to the traumatic memory. You will experience greater insight, allowing you to create the changes you greatly desire for yourself and your life.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

Internal Family Systems is another comprehensive and researched-based approach that again accesses resources within your body and emotions to heal. In IFS, we recognize your ability for Self-leadership to learn to reintegrate wounded aspects of yourself.

We are multidimensional people with many different aspects or parts of our personalities. When we experience traumatic experiences, vulnerable aspects of our personalities become wounded. Naturally, defenses develop for us to get through the situation and carry on with our lives and situations.

In IFS, we use the feelings in our bodies to locate areas where the trauma and distress are held and then bring curiosity to the event. We mindfully learn to separate the defended part from the Self-lead part. Then, with curiosity from the Self, we go to the defense to learn directly from it the role it has played to help protect you from feelings of hurt and fears of being annihilated by the hardships you have endured.

I guide you to engage directly with the defense to learn what it has done to protect you through active imagination and dialogue.

The premise of IFS is that “all parts are welcome” and “all parts have good intentions.” In this way, we work around the trauma with the protective and wounded parts and allow you to process through them what your whole system has experienced in the hardship.

I guide you to heal the young, wounded aspects through active imagination so that you restore a healthy and loving relationship with these parts of yourself. Integrating aspects and parts that may have been disowned but still help power over you is a transformational experience that brings you to being more wholly yourself.

Tragic events have shaped you…

… and made you the person you are today. We will never change that, but we can alter their emotional hold on you with exercises and techniques that work with your nervous system and breathing.

You have many strengths and admirable qualities, including resilience. Just look at what you’ve made of your life despite the trauma you have endured.

Let’s leverage those strengths and use them for your healing. It would be an honor to be your respectful, compassionate guide.

Say goodbye to the pain, disgust, and shame. You can do this!

Call me today for your free consultation. Let’s talk about how I can help: (208) 843-3638.