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What does trauma therapy look like?
A lot of psychotherapy done today, especially in the US, is present or future focused. Many modern therapists focus on moving forward over processing the past. For many situations, this works, and for many clients, it's the right way to do therapy.
However, trauma therapy requires that clients access and process past traumatic events. Trauma becomes trauma because of emotional content around the traumatic event that has not been cleared from a person's mind. Through trauma therapy, this emotional content is processed and clients are able to heal more completely from the trauma.
Trauma therapy can be emotionally and psychologically taxing on clients. For this reason, Caleb treats trauma therapy a lot like learning to swim. Clients will start in the safety of shallow waters, learning the basics and getting comfortable with the process. Slowly, at your pace, therapy will move into deeper and deeper content, until eventually you are able to confront the deep waters of your past.
Caleb's number one rule for trauma work is to "Start and End with safety." Clients can be assured they will never be pushed beyond what they can handle in any given session.
Caleb's Trauma Approaches
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is one of the most evidence-based approaches to treating trauma and has surged in clinical usage in the last decade. EMDR involves focusing on disturbing or upsetting memories while following "Bilateral Stimulation" (BLS, left to right eye movement, tapping, or sounds). By holding the dual attention of the memories and the BLS, clients are able to reduce and resolve the emotional content associated with the trauma memories.
Visit the EMDR International Association's Website to learn more.
Prolonged Exposure Therapy
Prolonged Exposure (PE) helps clients deal with the natural avoidance that can result from trauma reactivity. Avoidance is a common response to trauma. Avoiding stressful situations helps us feel less discomfort in the moment, but often leads to issues down the road. PE focuses on confronting this avoidance in a safe and gradual manner. By talking about the feelings and facing the situations you've been avoiding, you allow your mind to begin to heal.
The National Center for PTSD site can help you decide if PE is right for you.
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) is a version of PE tailored for children and adolescents. This approach focuses initially on building and strengthening skills that help clients handle big emotions and unhelpful thoughts. Children then use these newly learned skills to begin processing their emotions through a Trauma Narrative. A Trauma Narrative is the client's trauma story, told by them in a way that resonates with them. This can be a written story, a series of paintings, a collection of poems, or any other creative expression of emotions and thoughts. Through creating and sharing their narrative, clients express, process, and resolve their traumatic memories.
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Assessing the Evidence
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