Therapy for Trauma and PTSD
Truama Therapy Treatment 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?
Trauma Therapy Modalities I Offer:
EMDR Therapy
EMDR + Internal Family Systems Therapy (usually done together for complex trauma)
Accelerated Resolution Therapy
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.
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. 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.