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What experiences might be traumatic?

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There are no strict rules regarding which experiences can be seen as traumatic. It largely depends on your personal history, the resources available to you, and the physiological factors that influence your reactions. Key factors that may impact your response include diet, gut health, traumatic brain injuries or concussions, attachment trauma, and the ways in which others have reacted to you throughout your life and challenges.

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Trauma is a deeply personal experience, and no one can fully understand how you feel about your own experiences or whether they are traumatic. Your unique perspective and emotional response are both valid and significant.

 

While you may share similar experiences with someone else, the effect those experiences have on you can vary greatly and last for different lengths of time. You are a survivor, and your decision to navigate your traumatic experiences in a safe and supportive environment showcases your bravery and resilience.

 

Everyone processes trauma differently, influenced by their individual life experiences, varying levels of internal resources, and attachment histories.

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Trauma can include events where you feel:

• Frightened or terrified

• Under threat

• Humiliated

• Rejected

• Abandoned

• Invalidated, for example, your feelings or views have been dismissed, minimized, or denied.

• Unsafe

• Unsupported

• Trapped

• Ashamed

• Powerless

 

Ways trauma can happen may include:

• Single or chronic, ongoing or historical events

• Being directly harmed or neglected

• Witnessing harm to someone else, hearing about harm or life threat

• Living in a traumatic atmosphere

• Being affected by trauma in a family or community, including trauma that has happened before you were born.

• Bullying or social rejection

• Medical or physical illness 

• Moral Injury

 

Some groups are more likely to experience trauma than others and experience it more often. They include:

• People of color

• People who have served or who are serving in the military

• People who are in prison or have been in jail in the past

• Refugees and asylum seekers

• LGBTQIA+ people

• People experiencing poverty

• Children

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Many individuals, whether they belong to certain groups or not, may struggle to overcome trauma. This struggle can stem from various factors, including a lack of perceived or actual safety and support, personal attachment history, specific circumstances or opportunities, as well as stigma and discrimination.

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What is Trauma-Informed Therapy?

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Therapy offers a safe and confidential space for individuals to discuss their personal experiences, thoughts, feelings, and challenges. Many people seek therapy because they have faced situations that disrupt their thinking, mood, emotions, health, self-perception, or ability to connect with others. A wide range of individuals may pursue therapy, including adults, children, families, and even therapists themselves.

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Everyone deserves to feel safe and supported. Our body and mind function better under stress with proper support and meaningful connections with ourselves and others.

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The therapist's role is to help individuals gain insight into their situations, as well as their attachment and trauma histories, and understand how these experiences influence their decisions. The therapist may teach strategies for using coping skills when feeling triggered, expressing thoughts and emotions, communicating boundaries, and addressing emotional needs with others. Additionally, the therapist can provide individuals or families with tools to manage and cope with complex feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, helping them navigate future potentially stressful situations.

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What is Trauma-Focused Play Therapy?

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Trauma-Focused Play Therapy recognizes how a traumatic experience may impact a child’s mental, behavioral, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. This type of therapy is rooted in understanding the connection between the trauma experience and developmental, emotional, and behavioral responses. It involves using play as a medium for the child to express and process their feelings and experiences in a safe and supportive environment under the guidance of a trained therapist.

 

Trauma-focused therapy provides coping skills, evidence-based interventions, and strategies to help your child understand, process, and manage the emotions and memories associated with traumatic experiences. The goal is to enable your child to create healthier and more adaptive meanings of their experiences, allowing them to better handle daily life demands and stressors.

 

Play therapy may include a parenting skills component, helping parents recognize and respond to their child's needs through the lens of the nervous system. This approach fosters a validating environment and provides the structure, stability, and support necessary for your child's autonomy, optimal growth, and development.

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Read more on the Play Therapy page.

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Benefits of Trauma-Focused Therapy

Trauma-focused therapy can be highly beneficial for individuals who have experienced a traumatic event. Through this type of treatment, clients can gain a deeper understanding of their experiences, learn how to address their concerns and develop healthier coping strategies. The advantages of trauma-focused therapy go beyond these immediate results; it can also help clients re-establish a sense of safety, identify triggers, and comprehend their body's response to trauma. This process contributes to a more comprehensive healing journey.

 

 

The following are a few examples of the benefits of trauma-focused therapy:

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Learning about trauma and how it can affect you.

Trauma-focused therapy provides a supportive environment for individuals, children, and their families to understand typical responses to trauma and how traumatic events may have affected them. This therapeutic approach helps clients process their experiences and normalizes the specific thoughts, feelings, and behaviors they may encounter. It offers terminology, validation, and explanations for their experiences, reinforcing the idea that they are not alone in what they are going through. You are part of a community of survivors who share similar experiences and feelings.

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Re-Establishing safety, both perceived and actual.

A traumatic experience, by definition, undermines the client's sense of safety and overwhelms their ability to cope. This can involve violations of physical, emotional, psychological, and relational safety. One significant benefit of trauma-focused therapy is that it helps clients re-establish a sense of safety in these areas—both internally (emotional, psychological, relational) and physically (through perceived boundaries, felt senses, and the environment). The therapy involves various activities, evidence-based interventions, and discussions aimed at addressing these domains. Additionally, the therapist acts as an "empathic other," providing extra resources that support the client in potentially processing their experiences in a safe and supportive manner.

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Identifying triggers and understanding the nervous system's response to them.

Participating in trauma-focused therapy can help clients identify, understand, explore, reprocess, and safely express their memories and feelings related to trauma. Clients often report emotional or physical reactions that seem to arise suddenly or feel disproportionate to the current situation. It can be helpful to recognize that these reactions may be responses to reminders or triggers related to past trauma.

 

Neuroception, a term coined by Dr. Stephen Porges, refers to an adaptive survival strategy that enables our bodies to detect safety and threats in our environment, in other people, and within our own bodies. This process does not engage the "thinking parts" of the brain; instead, it relies on our historical experiences. Our bodies possess a deep biological imperative for survival that may not accurately distinguish between potential threats in the present, influenced by past experiences.

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If we have encountered more safety in our lives, our bodies will be inclined to seek safety. Conversely, if we have faced more threats, our bodies will be predisposed to perceive threats. These past experiences shape our approach to life, reflecting our internal models of "how the world works." Essentially, our bodies function as associative learning machines, wired to keep us safe. Read more here.

 

Research suggests that when we encounter situations that feel unsafe, our bodies automatically engage in defensive responses to ensure our safety. These responses can include mobilizing the nervous system in various ways, such as fighting, fleeing (running away), fawning (people-pleasing), freezing, disconnecting, or dissociating.

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The good news is that our bodies inherently want to return to a state of calmness and already know how to achieve that. By processing trauma and understanding how the nervous system works, individuals can gain valuable insights into how their trauma may impact their ability to perceive others as sources of safety. This understanding can help with emotional and nervous system regulation.

 

As Deb Dana has argued, our interpretation of the world around us—essentially, our "story"—is shaped by the state of our nervous system.

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One benefit of treatment is that clients can learn to identify the experiences or feelings linked to their traumatic reminders, commonly referred to as triggers. Over time, they can work on recognizing these triggers and adapt their responses to be more relevant to present situations rather than based on past experiences.

 

Additionally, helping the body reprocess traumatic events can increase the Window of Tolerance for both perceived and actual stressors. This process can also lead to changes in the approach and avoidance patterns individuals exhibit in their daily lives.

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Developing healthier and more adaptive coping skills.

Trauma-focused therapy sessions are designed to help clients identify and personalize coping skills, improving their responses to reminders and emotions related to traumatic events. Some of these skills include anxiety management techniques, mindful coping strategies, and breathing exercises that can promote a sense of calm. Clients are encouraged to engage with others or approach parenting through an understanding of the nervous system, as well as to utilize various somatic strategies to reduce symptoms and enhance overall satisfaction in their lives. By developing and applying these skills in reaction to trauma, clients can build resilience and recover from their experiences more effectively.

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Potentially decrease traumatic stress symptoms.

Engaging in trauma-focused therapy and collaborating closely with a therapist to address attachment issues can help clients develop and practice skills that may reduce symptoms of traumatic stress. This process can enhance their engagement with others, redefine their self-concept, and improve other mental health symptoms related to trauma. Clients may experience a decrease in feelings of depression, anxiety, dissociation, trauma-related shame or guilt, as well as intrusive symptoms like flashbacks and nightmares. Additionally, they may report increased happiness and joy, feel more confident in setting and expressing boundaries, experience greater energy and motivation, enhance their overall sense of well-being, and make choices that better align with their own goals and values.

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Integration of the past into a coherent narrative.

Trauma-informed therapy focuses on helping clients regain a sense of power and control over their past experiences. This approach assists clients in integrating their narratives and understanding that these experiences do not have to influence their thoughts, emotions, or choices in the present. Over time, clients can "process" or organize these unique experiences, allowing them to inform their everyday lives and find meaning in the events that have shaped their views of themselves and the world around them. As someone wise once said, the past is a place of reference, not residence.

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How can EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, the Safe and Sound Protocol,  or Play Therapy help me or my child?​

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Often, when we experience trauma, it can influence our responses to our environment, shape our approach or avoidance of certain situations, and impact our self-perception. Trauma also affects how we store memories in our brains, our ability to learn, focus, and orient ourselves to the safety of human voices, as well as our success in interacting with peers. 

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​Some potential benefits of these therapies:

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• Facilitate the rewiring of old attachment styles and threat responses.

• Create a space for slowing down and making different choices.

• Help clear embodied traumatic symptoms such as bracing or tightness, vigilance, emotional reactivity, and somatic complaints like stomach aches or headaches, as well as anxiety.

• Assist the body in learning that "being safe is safe" and cultivate a genuine sense of inner calm.

• Teach skills to regulate the nervous system and develop a 'felt sense' of safety in the present moment rather than being a prisoner of the past or a hostage of the future.

• Engage in successful defense mechanisms in the present regarding past traumatic events that made us feel powerless.

• Facilitate corrective emotional experiences of safety and connection with people, places, and things that may have been perceived as threatening due to past traumatic experiences.