Trauma Therapy
What is trauma?
Traumatization is stress frozen in place –locked into a pattern of neurological distress that doesn’t go away by returning to a state of equilibrium. Traumatization promotes ongoing disability that can take many mental, social, emotional and physical forms.
Much like stress, trauma is experienced uniquely by each person. Traumatized children have impaired wiring in the brain’s limbic system and altered levels of stress hormones, resulting in anxiety, depression, and self-regulation problems. Effective treatment and parenting rewires the limbic system and reduces the biochemistry of stress.
What kinds of experiences can be traumatic?
The ability to recognize emotional trauma has changed radically over the course of history. Until recently psychological trauma was noted only in men after catastrophic wars. The women’s movement in the sixties broadened the definition of emotional trauma to include physical and sexual abuse of women and children.
Now, the impact of psychological trauma has extended to experiences that include:
- Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, etc.
- Physical assault, including rape, incest, molestation, domestic abuse and serious bodily harm
- Serious accidents, such as automobile or other high-impact scenarios
- Experiencing or witnessing horrific injury, carnage or fatalities
Other often overlooked potential sources of psychological trauma include:
- Adoption
- Falls or sports injuries
- Surgery, particularly emergency, and medical interventions especially in first 3 years of life
- Serious illness, especially when accompanied by very high fever
- Neurological disruption caused by experiences in the womb
- Birth trauma
- NICU after birth
- Hearing about violence to or sudden death of someone close
- An auto accident considered minor by adults
- The breakup of a significant relationship
- A humiliating or deeply disappointing experience
- Forced separation very early in life from the primary caregiver
- Chronic mis-attunement of a caregiver to a child’s attachment signals (“mal-attachment”)
- Moving, changing schools, or change in life circumstances
- Bullying
- Isolation/lack of healthy attachments
- Sudden loud noises for babies or young children
- Recurrent medical issues early in life for example: Ear infections, asthma, seizures, reflux, allergies
- Caregivers with insecure attachment styles of their own or unresolved baggage of their own
- Genetic predisposition
FAQs
We have learned through neuroscience that various well-intentioned and unavoidable situations could possibly have a negative impact on the attachment of a child.Necessary medical interventions, chronic ear infections, asthma, stress for the mother during pregnancy, difficult birth, and hospitalization, especially in the first three years, could affect a child’s ability to trust adults.
“Even in utero and after birth, for every moment of every day, our brain is processing the nonstop set of incoming signals from our senses. Sight, sound, touch, smell, taste—all of the raw sensory data that will result in these sensations enter the lower parts of the brain and begin a multistage process of being categorized, compared to previously stored patterns, and ultimately, if necessary, acted upon.”
Pre-genetic disposition may also impact a child’s emotional development and self-regulation ability, children who are genetically wired to be more anxious may possibly interpret facial expressions and body language in a negative manner.
According to Seigel and Hartzell, (2003) a parent’s own unresolved issues from their childhood may impact their ability to effectively respond in parenting, causing them to become frozen in their ability to adapt to their own role of caring for their children in a clear and consistent manner. This has the potential to have a generational effect in parenting. We genuinely believe that parents do the best that they can with what they have been given (through their childhood experiences). If parents do not know how to meet their children’s needs because they did not experience this, they need to be shown.
Neuroscience has revealed that brain plasticity is possible throughout life. This provides an opportunity to rewire the brain and the response to relationships.
Awareness is such a powerful tool and parents are generally eager to learn, it can be helpful to be shown by someone who has the knowledge either through professional training, research, or experience.
We can learn to re-wire the brain through pattern-repetitive behavior that will forms new connections (new blueprints in our brain). Parenting psycho-education is vital for helping parents learn to attune to their children’s needs, how to regulate them (mind and body) and how to form healthy attachment relationships that will serve as a resiliency factor throughout the lifespan.
Alvarado, (2008)
“when relationships hurt, we learn not to trust in relationships, whether at work, school or home.” we work with people to help change the blueprints that people carry with them to form new understanding about people and the world around us.”
This is a core belief for our therapists in our center and is the foundation of our work.
Even if your parents loved you, they may not have been capable of meeting your needs.
As babies, when we reach out and no one reaches back, when we express needs and no one listens, we often give up. Or if our caregiver is present some of the time and neglectful or abusive at others we become confused and keep reaching, keep hoping someone will be there.
In this process, we decide things about ourselves, such as “I must be unlovable” or “something must be wrong with me.” We then begin a lifelong quest to either avoid real intimacy or to find it, but when it shows up, in our desperation, we often unconsciously push it away. This longing and/or dissatisfaction often leads to anxiety, depression, co-dependency, addictions, fear of intimacy, rigidity, and wanting to hurt or be hurt as well as a failure to thrive as adults.
The brain remains flexible throughout life, nonverbal communication retains the capacity to change. Studies in people over age ninety show us images of mature brains that continue to produce new neural pathways at a time when older pathways are dying.
The same experiential and social factors that profoundly shape the brain initially can also be instrumental in repairing the causes and symptoms of stress related disorders.
How therapy helps
Trauma intervention is needed to allow the brain to process the event to prevent triggers of emotions in the future. All ages can benefit from therapy to process the trauma through neuroscience there is evidence of the plasticity of the brain to heal until death.
Trauma is a sensory experience and it is an experience like no other, commonly marked by a state of terror and powerlessness. Individuals of all ages can experience trauma, including infants and children.
Even when we do not consciously recall our trauma experiences (because of our age or protective functions such as repression) our body holds the memory, as does our mind. Regardless of the level of perceived intensity of effect on an individual, treatment promotes resilience later in life.
Traumatizing events can take a serious emotional toll on those involved, even if the event did not cause physical damage.
