Trauma Therapy & Counselling

Trauma occurs when a person experiences a threat to self causing high levels of stress and fear.

Our trauma therapy expertise has helped many clients manage and overcome past trauma’s and PTSD to live normal happy lives. This stress response can become frozen in time even when the danger is no longer present. This can impact your feelings of safety in the world and with others; it can result in intimacy issues; it can damage self-esteem, self-worth, trust in yourself, trust in others and the world. It can make you wonder if you have as much control as you might have once thought you did. This is where effective trauma therapy & counselling can help you in gaining control back.

Trauma Therapy Can Help With Trauma That Originates From:

• Crime victim
• Experienced a Natural Disaster
• Serious illness diagnosis
• Accidents (i.e. plane, car)
• Abusive relationships (physical, mental, sexual, emotional, verbal, financial, etc.). This can be in romantic relationships, with your parents, with a boss, as an adult or a child, and so on
• Witnessed violence or threat of violence
• Sudden death of someone close to you

Trauma Therapy Can Help You Overcome the Following Trauma Symptoms:

• Isolating yourself from people
• Overwhelming and out of control feelings (anger, frustration, irritability, sadness)
• Numbness – not feeling emotions
• Sleeping more often or less often
• Changes in eating patterns
• Flashbacks of the trauma
• Disassociation (not feeling connected to your body or the world around you – could experience a loss of time)

Trauma Therapy Can Help if You’ve Experienced These Types of Trauma

Attachment Trauma: The Influence of Childhood Trauma

This type of trauma occurs in childhood in children who experience emotional, sexual or physical abuse, neglect, abandonment and so on. Due to these negative experiences the child learns to view the world and other people as unsafe and the child is prevented from feeling safe and secure.  This hinders the adult child’s ability to comfort themselves in later years of life.

A child usually learns a sense of safety and security from their caregivers. From them they learn how to calm their emotions when they are distressed. When a child feels uncertainty and danger they seek proximity and safety to a caregiver. A secure attachment occurs when a caregiver is there to comfort, valid, support, reassure and ease distress to re-establish a sense of security for the child. These secure attachment experiences teach the child how to regulate emotions in response to distressing events. The child learns how to calm themselves through the experience of having a caregiver calm them down.

Unfortunately, caregivers can also create a sense of stress, fear and anxiety in children when they are not treated well. Or, a caregiver might not be able to be a secure attachment figure that helps the children to learn to regulate their emotions. If this sounds like your childhood, trauma therapy can help teach these necessary skills.

Emotional Abuse

Emotional abuse is a confusing term.  It can be hard to make sense of it.  Emotional abuse is about power and control. The purpose is to control another human being.  It impacts self-respect and causes damage and pain that is not visible the way physical violence is.  This makes it harder to see, be aware of, acknowledged by oneself, and the friends and family of individuals who are being abused.  It is often more difficult to treat emotional abuse than it is to recognize and treat physical abuse as a result.

Examples of Emotional Abuse:

• Name-calling
• Put downs
• Mindgames
• Withholding affection as a punishment
• Isolating someone from other people
• Punishing or threats to punish
• Criticizing to control
• Shaming, blaming, criticizing
• Refusing to communicate
• Lying
• Scaring someone on purpose

Recommended Reading

“Life After Trauma”