Trauma Therapeutic Services
Trauma Therapeutic Services
Specialization Treatment
Trauma occurs when the individual’s normal coping mechanisms fail to respond in the event of a crisis. Many people experience traumatic events, but for some, that trauma significantly affects their stress levels and overall quality of life long after the danger has subsided. In the workplace, home or community, this may include the death of a colleague or family member, divorce or abuse, or an accident (either in the workplace or outside). Following a crisis, the individual may exhibit symptoms that are dysfunctional such as becoming a danger.
Excess trauma without healing can lead to anxiety disorders, like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder steps in when you experience the effects of a prior negative experience which may overwhelm your body, mind, and emotions, often wreaking havoc in your nervous system. Traumatic experiences are stored in the body, resulting in changes in the brain and cascading down to changes on a cellular and chemical level. The traumatic event might have passed, but your body and mind still behave as if the traumatic event is happening now.
Your body and mind can heal and recover from trauma. With the help of a trained therapist, the traumatic event can be processed and contextualized, allowing PTSD symptoms to be alleviated. The haunting memories can lose their intensity and grip over your present life.
Symptoms of Trauma/PTSD May Include:
- Intrusive memories that sometimes seem as real as life
- Anxiety (learn more about anxiety therapy)
- Recurring distressing memories
- Intense nightmares
- Unpredictable emotions
- Flashes of anger, extreme moodiness, or irritability
- Strained relationships
- Physical symptoms such as chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, or fibromyalgia
- Depression
- Feeling of helplessness
- Guilt, shame or self-blame
- Jumpiness (quick to startle)
- Difficulty with short-term memory (poor concentration and attention)
- Extreme alertness (as if on the look-out for danger)
- Paranoia
- Isolation
- Feeling of unease
What is Trauma-Focused Therapy?
Trauma-Focused Therapy is a specific approach to therapy that recognizes and emphasizes understanding how the traumatic experience impacts your mental, behavioral, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. This type of therapy is rooted in understanding the connection between the traumatic experience and your emotional and behavioral responses. The purpose of trauma-focused therapy is to offer skills and strategies to assist you in better understanding, coping with, processing emotions and memories tied to traumatic experiences, with the end goal of enabling you to create a healthier and more adaptive meaning of the experience that took place in his/her life.
Working with trauma is a highly specialized area, which is why you must seek treatment from a trained and experienced trauma specialist.
Trauma Treatment for Children, Adolescents & Families
Our children, adolescents, and families face many severe traumatic events in their everyday lives. Some of these traumatic events can take the form of school violence and bullying, community violence, domestic violence, physical and sexual abuse. These traumatic events, in most cases, go unrecognized and untreated, which can result in rippling negative life events. We are committed to providing trauma-informed specialized treatment for children, adolescents, and their families using the latest trauma-informed treatment – Trauma System Therapy (TST)
- Home Intervention
- School and Community Intervention
- Criminal/Juvenile Justice system Intervention
Crisis Response Team and Crisis Intervention
In the unexpected event of a traumatic occurrence, TCHD’s crisis response team will immediately on-site conduct a needs assessment and provide psychological first aid to all members through debriefing sessions. From these assessments, the identification of those who immediately need support will be ascertained and managed. Our organization is committed to providing this specialist service in coordination with the management or family team such that the impact on the affected welfare is minimized.
Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR)
TIR is a rapid method (in comparison to traditional therapy) of effectively reducing traumatic stress from emotionally and/or physically painful events in the past. It involves re-experiencing past traumas in a completely safe environment, free of distractions, judgments, or interpretations.
As an intervention technique, TIR is both highly structured and client-centered. It is highly structured in that the therapist who is called a “facilitator” guides the client who is called a “viewer” repetitively through an imaginal replay of a specific trauma.
TIR’s uniqueness lies, in part, in the fact that a session continues until the viewer is completely relieved of whatever stress the target trauma originally provoked and any cognitive distortions (e.g., observations, decisions, conclusions) embedded within the incident have been restructured.