Therapy for Trauma and PTSD

Truama Therapy Treatment for adults online and in-person near Portland, OR

The Road to Recovery: Exploring Effective PTSD Treatment Options

When you’ve experienced trauma, the last thing you want is to feel like that trauma or the perpetrator continues to have power over you. And yet, if you’re dealing with symptoms like hypervigilence, anxiety, avoidance related to the trauma and difficulty trusting yourself or the world then you may start to feel like there’s no escape from the trauma-even when it’s over. In order to feel like you can finally breathe deeply and live again, it’s important to use effective PTSD or trauma-related treatment interventions. Not just any old therapy model will work, so why waste your time?

If you’ve been to therapy before but are still having trauma-related symptoms, that may mean you haven’t address the trauma you experienced. Standard talk-therapy isn’t designed to be as effective for trauma. You need a trauma-specific intervention.

What qualifies as a trauma?

I am often asked how to define the term trauma, since it’s thrown around quite liberally these days. You may want to know if what you experienced is “bad enough” to come in for therapy. Or you are trying to understand how to make meaning of some negative experience you’ve endured.

My response is often that there’s a clinical definition of trauma-one used by professionals in the counseling field that has a set criteria to qualify for it. And there’s a general understanding of trauma for those of us who specialize in it. Clinically speaking, the manual clinicians and insurance companies use to define trauma includes a requirement for you to have experienced either directly or through witness, exposure or close personal contact an event involving actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence.

The symptoms people typically experience after having been exposed to a trauma may include the following:

  • distressing memories of the trauma that pop up without you meaning for them to

  • dreams that include themes of the traumatic events or have the same feeling you had during your exposure to the trauma

  • feeling like you’re still in the trauma-like it’s still happening today even when it’s not

  • a strong, negative emotional reaction when you’re reminded of the trauma you endured

  • an effort to avoid anything that reminds you of that terrible experience

  • a tendency towards depression and/or anxiety

  • a bad feeling about yourself like you’re not safe or you’re to blame or you’re powerless

  • shame

  • not having a sense of closeness with others

  • problems with concentration, sleep, anger or recklessness

  • feeling hypervigilent and easily startled

If you’re reading this and relating to many of these symptoms, but you never experienced a trauma as it’s clinically defined, you might be confused. How can you be dealing with all these symptoms without having gone through what the professionals define as a traumatic experience?

Well, because you went through something bad and the body doesn’t check the professional definitions to see how it should respond. It doesn’t care about that! It just responds the way every human responds when they go through something bad and many of those symptoms are listed above. So don’t dismiss your responses as inappropriate or not allowed. They’re just information to you that they need to be addressed and they’re not resolved.

I think about my kid, when he was young, and I cut his sandwich in half the hamburger way and not the diagnol way. Or I was handing him a banana and a part of it fell off. He was often tired or hungry or both, but either way, his little self could not regulate well and the distress of half a banana on the floor was too overwhelming for him. He responded the way he knew how-by crying and screaming and losing it.

My friend, if you’re having some of the above-mentioned symptoms, you’re just responding the way your body knows how. Come see me and let’s address it together. It doesn’t matter if your friend had a “much worse” trauma than you or if wonder if anyone in your life has a clue about how bad you’ve had it-either way, if those experiences still distress you then they’re worth addressing. I’ll be there on your brave journey, guiding and cheering you along.

Trauma Therapy Modalities I Offer:

Trauma Therapy Online: With each of the above listed treatment modalities, I am often able to offer trauma therapy treatment online. Accelerated Resolution Therapy and EMDR use eye movements to help you process the trauma, and I have a slick HIPPA-compliant online platform that I can use to do the eye-movements so you can have therapy from the comfort of your home. In my office, I have a “light bar” which is just a bar with a light that goes back and forth that you can follow with your eyes if you choose to do in-person sessions.

Effective Trauma Therapy Treatment

More often than not, people in the Portland-metro area reach out to me because I’m certified in EMDR therapy which means I’ve had advanced training and additional consultation in EMDR to help me guide you towards faster results and healing. EMDR is a proven and effective approach to treating trauma and has become increasingly popular, probably because it’s so effective. It is unique because it helps you have a dual awareness of both your trauma and your being in session and in the here and now. This is often achieved through eye movements or other forms of bilateral stimulation which helps you stay present. The result is often a significant reduction in the emotional and physiological distress associated with the trauma memory. It also can help you believe what your logic knows it true, but doesn’t feel true such as not every person is bad or that you weren’t to blame-you were the victim.

Like a lot of clinicians, I initially got trained in EMDR with the first level of training offered and started to use it with clients. However, I quickly realized that simply being basic-level trained in EMDR isn’t good enough for many clients who have had multiple experiences where they felt unsafe. Therefore, I have since completed the more intense level of requirements and several advanced EMDR courses in order to ensure that I deliver EMDR to you, my client, in the most effective way. I know a number of strategies to help you not become overwhelmed by your past so that you can get the healing and results you’re looking for.

In addition to EMDR, I often use IFS or Internal Family Systems therapy as a trauma therapy intervention. I typically combine these two approaches (EMDR and IFS) since they work so well together-especially for complex trauma. Combining the two approaches allows you to more gently and slowly address the symptoms you want to address without being too overwhelmed or dysregulated. I love this combined approach because EMDR is so effective for trauma and IFS makes sure that you, the client, have a voice in how fast we move and how much we address at any given time. I love to give you the control since, with taumatic experiences, you didn’t have it. To learn more about either EMDR or IFS, check out my pages dedictated to these two treatments.

If you have PTSD related to a one-time event, Accelerated Resolution Therapy, another effective trauma treatment modality, might be the right approach for you. Like EMDR, this approach is also a trauma therapy with eye movements. It’s more structured than EMDR and in that way, could arguably be less thorough in that you’re not reprocessing all the related material like with EMDR. However, another perspective is that it tends to be faster because you’re focused consistently on the traumatic event and the standard protocol for a session helps you process and lessen the emotions you have about the trauma generally in 90 minutes. Another key difference is that Accelerated Resolution Therapy (A.R.T.) calls for you to imagine the traumatic event to have happened differently-in a more ideal way (either never happened or turned out good). And while you know logically that this is not how things happened, because you imagined it differently it impacts your emotions about it and lessens the intensity of your related feelings about the event. Because this therapy is so focused on a specific event, I recommend it for one-time traumatic events rather than processing a terrible relationship you had with someone or trying to rework faulty ideas about yourself. These are better suited for EMDR.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been trained in several trauma treatment modalities. That’s important because people respond to PTSD treatment interventions differently, and what worked for one person may not work for you. That’s ok! Everyone is different-no shame in that. But just so you know, there’s many options we can use if you decide to work with me.

Check out my website pages on each of these modalities to find out more! Then join me to explore the road to recovery from trauma and uncover the most effective PTSD treatment interventions for you.

Validated methods.

Compassionate care.