Trauma Therapy

Has A Traumatic Experience Changed The Way You Live?

Are you reliving past traumas preventing you from developing and maintaining secure attachments with others? Do you keep recreating patterns of unhealthy relationships? Have you felt trapped in a loop of heightened emotions, feeling angry, anxious, or unsafe? 

Are you experiencing upsetting dreams and trauma-related nightmares? Perhaps you have experienced abuse, neglect, or even an act of terror that has impacted your ability to feel relaxed and at peace with yourself and others. Or maybe your fear of abandonment and rejection has led you to feel insecure, hopeless, and detached in the relationships you enter. You probably even try your hardest to avoid thinking or talking about past traumatic events.

Trauma Symptoms Manifest Differently From Person To Person

Trauma can have mental, emotional, or physical effects on you. Maybe you’re experiencing negative thoughts about yourself, the people around you, or the world in general. You may feel shame or guilt about what happened to you. You probably have difficulties feeling positive emotions, and often feel hopeless about the future. 

Many people with a history of trauma can feel on guard, and develop insomnia, GI issues, and chronic pain. Most people also lose the ability to concentrate on tasks, have memory problems, emotional or angry outbursts, and constantly feel irritable. 

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) comes with a wide range of symptoms including depression, anxiety, ADHD, and addiction that often go undiagnosed.  If left untreated, symptoms can worsen and even lead to destructive or harmful behaviors.  

With the help of therapy, you can heal from trauma and/or PTSD symptoms, regain control of your life, and form healthy, fulfilling relationships with yourself and others.

Trauma Therapy Can Help You Let Go Of Your Pain And Feel Whole Again

When you are battling the negative effects of trauma and/or PTSD, your life can feel overwhelming and hopeless. However, with the guidance of a trained professional counselor, you have a chance to identify your trauma and learn how to process and heal from it. 

At Fairfield Counseling Center, we provide a confidential space where you can eliminate the shame and self-blame that stem from past traumatic experiences. Having a therapist allows you the freedom to discuss your fears and struggles with PTSD, without fear of judgment. We can diagnose and effectively treat your PTSD through trauma-informed care. 

Our aim is not only to provide a supportive environment but also to teach you the skills to self-regulate your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and develop secure healthy attachments, and navigate challenging situations as they come. With our support and guidance, you will learn how to prevent the past from controlling your thoughts and emotions.

Trauma Treatment Approaches

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) are three of the most common approaches we use in trauma therapy.

CBT for trauma is effective in helping you to challenge unhealthy thought processes and negative emotions connected to trauma. Using this approach creates more self-awareness and increases emotional insight to reshape your perception of traumatic experiences and your ability to cope with them. It allows for a more balanced way of thinking.

Because PTSD is a debilitating condition that results in frequent reminders of traumatic events, using CBT helps educate you about common responses to trauma and allows you to confront them instead of avoiding them. With CBT therapy, we can teach you how to identify Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) associated with your trauma triggers, their impact on your mood, and how to stop them. Because traumas can cause cognitive distortions, CBT treatment focuses on cognitive restructuring and adaptive thinking. 

Using Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), we can help you identify, examine, and change negative thoughts related to trauma and PTSD  and recognize how those thoughts affect your feelings and behaviors. The pivotal part of CPT treatment is addressing ways of thinking that might keep you “stuck” and get in the way of recovery from PTSD and other problems. 

Some of the goals of CPT treatment include reducing distress about memories of the trauma and emotional numbing, decreasing the feeling of being “on edge,” depressed, anxious, shameful, or self-critical. Other CPT topics address trust and safety issues, problems with intimacy, self-esteem, and power and control. 

PTSD happens when something impairs the body's normal healing process following stress. Problems are frequently brought on by a person's assumptions about how and why the traumatic incident occurred. CPT focuses on how you perceive the traumatic event and your subsequent experiences. The goal of CPT is to help you in creating more constructive and reasonable views about past traumatic experiences.

EMDR therapy is a treatment approach that helps you to reprocess emotions and physical sensations by processing past trauma in a safe environment. The aim of EMDR is to experience healing in not just the mind, but the body as well.

EMDR therapy is designed to resolve unprocessed traumatic memories in the brain. For many clients, EMDR therapy can be completed in fewer sessions than other treatments. EMDR therapy is a treatment approach that helps you to reprocess traumatic memories, beliefs, emotions, and physical sensations associated with them in a safe way.  

This treatment approach encourages the patient to briefly focus on the traumatic memory while simultaneously experiencing bilateral stimulation (typically eye movements or sound) to minimize the emotional distress associated with the exposure. EMDR trauma therapy is a structured therapy that  occurs in eight phases including, history taking, client preparation, assessment, desensitization, installation, body scan, closure, and reevaluation of treatment effect. 

Though the results don’t happen overnight, our treatment methods can teach you the proper techniques to feel relief and heal from the trauma you experienced. With the help of an experienced trauma therapist at Fairfield Counseling Center, learning how to self-regulate, feel whole again, and regain a sense of fulfillment and joy in your life is possible.