Hello fellow human beings. I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Certified EMDR Therapist, and EMDRIA Approved Consultant that specializes in treating emotional trauma. My hope is that this site will clearly explain my philosophies as a therapist to help you decide if I would be the best fit to show you how to meet your emotional needs. The following is a general introduction to psychological trauma, and how I treat the many ways it may manifest within a person. More about the types of therapy I use, and personal information about me can be found using the links at the top or bottom of the page.
What is Trauma and the Purpose of Trauma Informed Psychotherapy
Psychological Trauma has been defined in many ways, but is most commonly referenced and well known through the list of symptoms for the most well known diagnosis associated with the term trauma, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD). Many of the client’s that I have treated for other presenting symptoms such as depression, anxiety, panic disorder, phobias, or that maybe even don’t meet criteria for any specific diagnosis, but still struggle with maintaining healthy relationships, anger management, trust issues, social anxiety, or any other behaviors or extreme emotional responses that they identify as preventing them from living a more peaceful, genuine, functional life have most of the time discovered these symptoms to be rooted in a traumatic experience or experiences. When these traumatic experiences are identified and worked through successfully in therapy their associated symptoms tend to lessen substantially, and allow the person to function more adaptively under stress and feel more in control of their lives and how they respond to their emotions instead of reacting to them in ways that can be more detrimental to us long term. What seems to happen when someone experiences something traumatic is that the parts of their brain that triggers the fight, flight or freeze response, or what I call the protective Tripple F part of our nervous system is activated due to the detection of a possible threat. If the the emotionally disturbing components(beliefs, thoughts, feeling, emotions, images, sounds, body sensations) associated with the traumatic experience is not integrated and the symptoms do not dissipate or extinguish on their own, the parts of our brain that controls the Triple F response can become hypersensitive and trigger this response at times that there is not a physical threat, generating an emotional response that we may even ourselves perceive as being disproportionate to the current situation that in some way shape or form reminds us of a past traumatic experience. These extreme beliefs, thoughts, feeling, emotions, or body sensations are not always something we can make sense of with the parts of our brain that are meant to differentiate between actual potential threats to our physical safety(like a car driving towards us at a high speed) from non-physically threatening situations(like public speaking) as these parts of our brain are less accessible unless we learn to willfully access them when this mechanism in our nervous system malfunctions. Both can cause our Triple F system to switch on, however, for some the intensity of unpleasant emotions might be substantially more intense and persist, even in spite of us being able to acknowledging the extreme intensity as being disproportionate to a situation such as in the case of social anxiety. Most people feel somewhat uncomfortable about speaking in front of groups of people, but some may actually faint from the anxiety or have a panic attack that prevents them or makes it extremely difficult and challenging to do something we might want to. The purpose of trauma therapy is to allow the logical part of our brain that exerts functions like impulse control, and logical reasoning to re-engage in spite of experiencing any emotional disturbance so we can have to opportunity to choose how to respond to our emotions more adaptively and not have them control our behavior, so we can engage in emotionally difficult tasks.