Trauma Therapy
Traumatic events, whether a one off event of a series of events, can leave us feeling broken and shattered down to our core. It can make us feel like we don’t fit in or belong anywhere, like we are too different and too broken. As though everyone else knows what they are doing, and who they are and we just, don’t.
The effects of trauma can be long-lasting and all encompassing. It can make you feel completely alone, like no one else knows what you went through, or what it feels like to have lived through it. It can trigger feelings of panic and anxiety, thinking no where and no one is safe. If can feel as though the world is a very big, very scary place and we don’t know how to exist within it.
It can make it difficult for us to trust in relationships, with friends, family, or partners and even with ourselves. If can make us feel dirty, ashamed, guilty and angry, often all at the same time. It can lead us to feelings we have no self-worth, and no right to happiness.
Trauma is messy, frightening and lonely.
But you are not alone.
As a qualified and experienced Trauma Therapist I have supported and helped individuals to recover from and heal themselves from the impacts and affects of their trauma. Having worked with survivors of abuse, domestic violence, acts of crime, rape, bullying, major accidents and traumatic deaths, I know that it is possible for things to get better. Even when you are sitting in the depths of darkness, and feel like noone else can ever understand or help. I will sit in it with you until we can find a way forward.
What is Trauma Therapy?
Trauma therapy can seem daunting, what might involve, what will you have to say, what if it’s too much? All valid and scary questions.
If you are thinking about starting trauma therapy, then it might help to know a bit about what to expect before you start. I follow a well-establish, heavily researched, three stage trauma therapy model, outlined below. Each stage of this moves as slowly as we need to and can take weeks, months or even years depending on where you are and what you need.
Trauma robs us of our sense of safety, internally in ourselves and externally, within the world. This makes everything feel overwhelming and out of balance and leaves us feeling like we can’t cope.
The first step to recovering from this is learning to feel safe again, or for some of us finding this for the first time. It is about letting our mind and body find somewhere to rest without fear and anxiety.
Stabilisation is regaining control of our emotions once they have become overwhelming. Coping strategies after trauma can include; self-harming, eating disorders, alcohol and drug dependency as well as risk -taking behaviour. These strategies help us to not feel the feeling linked to the trauma because they are too much.
Stabilisation teaches us to establish healthier, and safer strategies for managing overwhelming emotions, so that when the trauma work starts we have ways of coping without causing ourselves harm.
Without these two things in place, real trauma recovery cannot start.
Safety and Stabilisation
Often times what happened to us has been locked down, never told to anyone. Maybe we didn’t have space or time to talk about it, maybe it was too much to talk about or no one was around to listen.
Sometimes even we aren’t quite sure what happened. That is completely normal, during a traumatic event our brain shuts down some of it’s thinking processes because it’s only focus is on survival. Meaning memory processing changes and our ability to recall the event can be difficult.
Once we have established safety, and we have strategies in place to manage our emotions then we can begin to unpick what happened and what it has meant to us.
This is a slow process, going at a pace which is gentle and safe. Allowing you time to let out all that you have been carrying, and share the burden of what you went through with someone else.
Here we can look at what the consequences have been for you, after what happened. We can see how it has impacted each part of your life, and shaped the person you are today.
Taking this story out of the darkness, giving it space and putting it back together in a better way is what gives ourselves permission to take up space and take back our own power.
Storytelling and Processing
Growth, Healing and Recovery
Trauma recovery and healing, means learning who we are in the world again after we have learnt about ourselves.
It stole so much from you, it took away the life you might have had, the childhood you deserved and the happiness you have missed. Finding a new way forward means recognising who we are now, and what our place in and with the world means.
What are the hopes and dreams of this new version of ourselves, what can our future look like now, and how can it be different from the past?
It is believing in hope, in ourselves and in a future worth having, and now it is getting to design that future for ourselves.
You have no control over the trauma that happened, you cannot go back and change it and you can’t take it back. But, you do have control over what happens next.
Trauma took away our power, our control and left us powerless, helpless and alone. Not anymore, now you get to choose, you get to take back your own power, write your own story, make your own decisions. Now you get to build and create the life you want, for you, because no matter what has happened in the past, the future is yours.
Contact Me
Interested in working together? Please provide your details in the contact form, and I will be in touch shortly.