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What experiences might be traumatic?

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There is no rule about what experiences can be traumatic. It's more about how you and your body and brain react to them, your history, available resources, and what may be happening in your physiology.  Key influences may be diet, gut health, Traumatic Brain Injuries/concussions, and how others have responded to you as you have experienced your life and challenges.

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What's traumatic is personal. Other people can't know how you feel about your experiences or if they're traumatic.

You might have similar experiences to someone else but be affected differently or for longer.

It is essential to say that you are a survivor and have made it this far to get some help that may be beneficial.

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Trauma can include events where you feel:

• Frightened

• Under threat

• Humiliated

• Rejected

• Abandoned

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

• Unsafe

• Unsupported

• Trapped

• Ashamed

• Powerless

Ways trauma can happen include:

• Single or chronic,  ongoing events

• Being directly harmed or neglected

• Witnessing harm to someone else

• Living in a traumatic atmosphere

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

 

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

For those of us who belong to these groups, we may find it harder to overcome trauma. This can be because there is a lack of support available or because of stigma and discrimination.

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What is Trauma-Informed Therapy?

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Therapy provides a safe and confidential place to discuss personal experiences, thoughts, feelings, or problems. People who go to treatment may have experienced a situation that disrupts and/or impacts their thinking, mood, emotions, or ability to relate to others.  Many people seek out therapy: adults, children, families, and even therapists themselves.

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Everyone needs somewhere they feel safe and supported.

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The therapist's role can be to help the person gain more insight into their situation, may teach strategies for expressing themselves and their emotions, and cope with future potentially stressful situations. The therapist can also offer the individual or family tools to help them manage complicated feelings,  thoughts,  and behaviors.

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What is Trauma-Focused Play Therapy?

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Trauma-Focused Play Therapy is a specific approach to therapy that recognizes and emphasizes understanding how a traumatic experience impacts 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.

 

Trauma-focused therapy offers coping skills, evidence-based interventions,  and strategies to assist your child in better understanding, coping with, and processing emotions and memories tied to traumatic experiences.   The goal is to enable your child to create a healthier and more adaptive meaning of the experience and handle daily life challenges and stressors.

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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 beneficial to those who have experienced a traumatic event. By engaging in trauma-focused treatment, the client can learn more about what they are experiencing, how to address their concerns, and develop healthier coping methods.

 

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

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Learn About Trauma.

Trauma-focused therapy provides a space for individuals, children, and their families to learn about normal responses to trauma and, specifically, how a traumatic event has impacted them. This discovery and learning type helps the client digest why specific thoughts, feelings, and behaviors might occur, gives names and explanations to their experiences, and reminds the client that they are not alone in their experience.

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Re-Establish Safety.

A traumatic experience, by definition, violates the client’s sense of safety. This includes physical, emotional, psychological, and relational safety violations. A benefit of trauma-focused therapy is that it assists the client in re-developing internal (emotional, psychological, relational) and physical (perceived boundaries, felt sense, the environment) senses of safety through activities, evidence-based interventions, and discussions that target these domains.

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Identify Triggers.

Participating in trauma-focused therapy can help the client learn to identify, understand, explore, and express memories and feelings related to the trauma. Frequently, the client may feel or show reactions that appear to “come out of nowhere” or are out of proportion for an experience, but it may be that these are reactions to trauma reminders.

Another benefit of treatment is that the client can learn to recognize what experiences or feelings may be associated with traumatic reminders (also known as triggers) and work to be able to adapt their response over time more appropriately.

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Develop Healthy Coping Skills.

Trauma-focused therapy sessions aim to help clients discover skills and improve coping strategies to better respond to reminders and emotions associated with the traumatic event. Some of these skills include anxiety management, mindful coping skills, breathing,  and other somatic strategies that may decrease their symptoms. Developing these types of skills in response to trauma supports resiliency or assists the client in “bouncing back” from their experience.

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Decrease in Traumatic Stress Symptoms.

Engaging in trauma-focused therapy and working closely with the therapist can help the client develop and practice skills that help decrease traumatic stress symptoms and other mental health symptoms associated with the trauma. The client may experience decreased depression, anxiety, dissociation, trauma-related shame or guilt, and/or intrusive symptoms such as flashbacks and nightmares.

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Practice Trauma Processing or Integration.

Trauma-informed therapy aims to help the client regain power and control over past experiences by sensitively assisting them to re-narrate their story. Over time, the client may “process” or organize these unique experiences into their everyday life and make meaning of the event(s) and how they relate to the client's view of themselves and the world around them.

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How can EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, or Play Therapy help me or my child?​

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Oftentimes, when we experience trauma, it may skew how we respond to our environment, how we approach or avoid things,  and what we believe about ourselves.

 

It also affects how we store memories in our brains and our ability to learn and be successful with our peers.  

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Being overwhelmed by trauma may disrupt neuroception, potentially affecting the body's ability to differentiate between safety and threat in our environment.

 

This can cause the nervous system to get stuck in hyperarousal and over-perceive threat, creating strong emotional or physiological reactions that may be out of context with the situation.

 

The result potentially makes it difficult for trauma survivors to feel safe and be as successful as they could be in navigating their lives.

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Some potential benefits of these therapies:

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• Facilitate rewiring old attachment and threat responses and help create the space for slowing down and making different choices.

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• Help clear embodied traumatic symptoms such as bracing/tightness, vigilance, emotional reactivity, and anxiety.

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• Creating a safe space to cultivate inner calm, learn skills to regulate the nervous system, and develop a 'felt sense' of safety in the 'Now' instead of being a prisoner of the past or hostage of the future.

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