Trauma Therapy & EMDR
There is a certain “alone-ness” after experiencing something few, if any, experience themselves. You are carrying the weight of what happened, but life still expects you to continue as if nothing is wrong. You are unsure of how or to whom you should talk about it. Or the very thought of talking about it may incite fear.
You may not recognize/understand the way you respond in certain situations now. And self-doubt grows the longer you feel like you just can’t “move on.” Everything feels different, though not much may have changed.
What happened marked your life in ways you didn’t expect. In counseling - and maybe with EMDR - we can make your past a part of your story, without it defining your entire life.
Understanding Trauma
Why Can’t I Just Get Past This?
You have experienced something difficult, but you can’t seem to move on. You wake up thinking about it - sometimes in the middle of the night. Sometimes, you notice your mood shift randomly during the day. You might feel more tired than usual.
You look around at other people who may have experienced similar things, and they seem fine. They don’t seem impacted the same way you do. You want to change your thoughts, but they don’t seem changeable.
The thing about trauma is that we don’t get to decide what traumatizes us or how we naturally respond to it.
Trauma happens when your nervous system experiences something as threatening or overwhelming, beyond what it can process at the time. You may have been in danger. Or the situation threatened your belonging, choice, relationship, identity, etc. When the threat occurs, the memory processing can become interrupted. The brain may store the memory maladaptively or incompletely. Think funhouse mirror…without the fun.
The memory then sits in a funky state, like an open app on a phone or a computer virus. Your nervous system may remain hypervigilant - looking for any indication that the event will happen again. Or it may shut down to protect itself from further injury.
This is a wonderful built-in protection feature until a trigger occurs. Then your brain’s alarm system wakes up with one goal - save your life - even if you aren’t really in trouble.
Essentially, your brain believes it is unfinished business. It is all so disorienting. The good news is that your brain is wired to finish what it started. With trauma counseling, and EMDR when appropriate, we can support that process.
Therapy Approach
What Trauma Therapy Looks Like with Christin
Whether your trauma stems from childhood experiences, relationship betrayal, abuse, incidents, medical experiences, or a single event, we can work with it. Together, we will slow everything down so we can understand what has happened at a deep level, rather than reacting to it. This is usually a deep dive helping you uncover the quiet core beliefs that you may not realize were re-written. This is where the meat of the work takes place.
Depending on your needs, we have several evidence-based approaches, including EMDR, to help your brain and nervous system process what happened. But often, just having a regular time and space where you can breathe and explore the incident in a contained way, is the main catalyst for relief.
FAQs
Questions About Trauma & EMDR Counseling
Because the memory is sitting in an incomplete state, your brain doesn’t believe the experience is over. Therefore, anything that reminds your brain of the experience - a sight, a smell, a sound, a feel in the air, an emotion - activates your brain’s alarm system. Before you know it, you have a pit in your stomach, your heart is racing, you feel short of breath, or you may experience anger, fear, or sadness like a cresting wave. With trauma counseling, we can support your brain to more fully process what occurred, lessening the physiological and emotional reaction you experience with normal everyday occurrences.
When you have experienced trauma, your brain may be living in a hypervigilant state. This means it doesn’t take a lot to activate its protection system which floods your body with racing thoughts and strong emotions. When this happens, the part of your brain responsible for fight or flight lights up. At the same time, the part of your brain responsible for impulse control, reasoning, and logic reduces activity. This is the part of trauma that can seem the most out of control.
With trauma therapy, including EMDR when appropriate, we can help reduce hypervigilance and support more regulated responses.
Your mind isn't trying to torture you. And the rumination is not a signal of weakness or inability to steer your own thoughts. Your brain is trying to protect you. At some level, it hasn't fully understood that you are not in danger. Counseling for a traumatic event doesn’t simply force the thoughts away. Rather, it helps your brain process the experience, so it no longer needs to keep bringing it back.
