Trauma Therapy
Have You Considered Mindfulness-Based Trauma Therapy?
Do you experience symptoms of trauma and PTSD in your life?
Has a traumatic event kept replaying in your mind, creating discomfort, distraction, and unease on a daily basis?
Have you wondered if your body’s reactions to stressful life circumstances or familiar triggers are all related to past trauma?
If you’ve experienced a traumatic event at some point in your life, you probably feel exhausted from dealing with fight or flight responses, anxiety, timidity, and other distressing symptoms. Perhaps you’ve tried talking about your trauma experiences with a counselor and felt like those attempts fell short of providing relief. You might wonder how a mindfulness-based approach to trauma therapy with a somatic therapist could be the change-maker in your healing journey.
Trauma Symptoms Are Recognizable In The Body And Mind
No matter how alone you feel when your distressing feelings and memories come up, there are familiar signs and symptoms that people have in common when they’ve experienced trauma.
Physically, you could feel a sense of dread or unsafety, keeping you at the edge of your seat. You may have panic reactions, such as a rapid heartbeat, sweating, and shallow breathing. You may get angry easily, or become emotional without understanding the triggers. You may also struggle with sleeping, leading to a cycle of fatigue
Mentally, in addition to consistent anxiousness or fear, you may dissociate when in uncomfortable situations or go into auto-pilot mode, disconnecting from your environment and those around you. You could have compulsive or obsessive thoughts and get overwhelmed easily. You may “people please” out of fear of making others upset or a fear of abandonment, and ignore your own feelings and needs as a result.
Trauma can feel like an overwhelming hurdle for your nervous system to recover from. But a specialist who addresses your specific needs and considers your whole body symptoms can help you break free from your trauma responses and live life on your terms again.
Trauma Is, Unfortunately, Very Common
According to the World Mental Health Survey Consortium, nearly 70 percent of people have experienced a traumatic event in their lives.*
Sometimes, our trauma stems from our family of origin through issues like emotional or physical abuse, creating a sense of unsafety that permeates into our lives through adulthood. Trauma can come out of nowhere as well, like from an illness, accident, or natural disaster, creating a sense of fear that we never had before and now don’t know how to live with. It can also come from dysfunctional adult relationships that leave us feeling afraid to connect with others again.
Treating trauma or PTSD with body-based methods has not been fully recognized, with choices like medication or talk therapy being common treatments—but not always the most effective ones. However, if we focus on what happens physically when we experience triggers or recall traumatic experiences, approaches like sensorimotor therapy and trauma-informed mindfulness can be effective treatments.
The Nervous System Has Ways Of Showing Us We’re Dysregulated
Trauma responses can show up as shaking, yawning, and other physical movements, which is how the nervous system discharges stuck energy left over from traumatic experiences. Trauma recovery requires us to provide a space for the body to come into homeostasis, allowing memories to be processed with a sense of safety.
People often try to make sense of what happened to them by using coping mechanisms that downplay the impact, like through denial and pretending they’re fine. People may not even know that they are demonstrating the symptoms of trauma or PTSD, or maybe they have undergone an ineffective counseling method and figured they’re stuck with their symptoms.
Healing trauma needs the assistance of a therapist who can facilitate the body's natural healing process. If this resonates with your experiences, as well as your hopes for a sense of renewal from your past trauma, I invite you to read more about my therapy practice.
[*] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4869975/
Somatic Modalities That Focus On Grounding And Safety
Therapy at my practice involves less time talking about your experience and more time being “with” the experience, and allowing it to be processed, discharged, and integrated. We will explore different forms of somatic therapy, interspersed with trauma processing, but if sessions ever feel too heavy, we can dial back our discussions and focus on grounding again.
The somatic modalities I use to treat trauma include:
Hakomi Therapy: This treatment method helps build a foundation of mindful exploration into their body’s experience for deeper understanding and deeper insights.
Sensorimotor Therapy: While very similar to the Hakomi Method, this builds on that framework, making room for discharging stuck nervous system energy associated with traumatic experiences.
Brainspotting Therapy: This modality of processing trauma is a modification of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) where we can access trauma at a deeper level by finding a spot in the visual field that corresponds with key memories. The author of Brainspotting, David Grand, has been known to say, “Where you look affects how you feel.”
It is possible to discover freedom from the trauma you’ve experienced. By learning the skills to be aware of your body’s experience, and by discovering safety and grounding, it is possible to process difficult experiences and find some level of freedom from trauma’s hold over your mind and body.
Healing From Trauma Begins By Addressing Total Body Symptoms In Therapy
My primary intention when starting trauma therapy is to have you feel safe and secure. Once a level of safety is established, we will reflect on your painful experiences, and give you a chance to process trauma that is stuck in your body.
When sessions begin, I’ll get to know you better and will meet you where you are in terms of your readiness to discuss traumatic events and memories. It takes time to determine what you are open to, as well as what your skill level is regarding body awareness. I usually start with trauma-sensitive mindfulness and grounding practices, and we will explore how trauma impacts you physically.
Part of the process involves acknowledging internal and external resources you have in your life that can come to your aid or provide support when experiencing trauma symptoms. Some examples of external resources can be having supportive friends and family, and engaging in healthy hobbies or social activities. Regular self-care practices such as exercise, meditation, and time in nature can be external resources as well.
Having stable internal resources might mean being compassionate with yourself, or understanding and practicing mindfulness. If you don’t have supportive resources established in your life, we can work together to help you develop them.
You Might Still Have Concerns About Trauma Therapy…
I am skeptical about the effectiveness of mindfulness-based therapy for trauma.
You might feel skeptical about using a body-oriented approach to treating trauma, because popular stereotypes of therapy are about talking about your problems, and more common forms of dealing with symptoms are by using medication. However, trauma is a nervous system response to overwhelming threats, which can be effectively addressed by working with the body. Although somatic treatment may seem "woo woo," findings from neuroscience have validated its effectiveness as a means to work with trauma. **
[**]https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/somatic-therapy/
I am worried that talking about my issues in therapy will make things worse.
It is totally understandable that you don't want to revisit painful memories in psychotherapy, especially if you haven’t reflected on your experience for a long while, like if your trauma took place in childhood. However, once you have developed the skills of mindfulness and grounding, it is possible to revisit the experience and process the uncomfortable sensations and emotions related to it. These body awareness skills will lower the impact of the traumatic memory and its symptoms. Processing trauma may feel daunting and scary, but there is a way through.
I am concerned that it will take a long time for therapy to make a difference.
In my experience, what takes the longest time to establish in therapy is feeling safe enough to allow yourself to revisit uncomfortable feelings. If one stays open to learning new skills to be with your body experience, it is possible to have breakthroughs in less time. While it can take time to get to know each other and to learn some new skills, it is possible to discover some sense of freedom from trauma if one allows oneself to be open, curious, and courageous.
Let’s Discuss How My Trauma Therapy Practice Can Help
Reach out through my contact form or email me at dj@davidjavate.com to schedule a free 15-minute consultation to discuss how body-based trauma therapy can make a big difference in your healing journey.
Trauma therapy sessions are $200 per 60 min session, $250 per 75 min session.
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