Trauma-Informed Therapy Explained: Techniques and Benefits

If you are dealing with the effects of trauma, reaching out for support is the best way to regain a sense of safety and control in your life. A trained and experienced therapist focuses on creating a secure environment where you can heal from trauma and find greater peace. Liz Chelak equips you with coping skills and strategies to deal with the challenges of trauma. Liz focuses on developing a personalized approach to trauma treatment, blending therapies to meet your unique needs. She helps you understand what is trauma-informed and trauma-focused therapy and how it can promote healing and resilience.

Trauma can be defined as any event or series of events that overwhelm you and leave you unable to cope. It often results in feelings of emotional distress, helplessness, and vulnerability.

Trauma can result from various experiences, including:

• Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse
• Neglect
• Natural disasters
• Accidents
• Witnessing violence
• Military combat
• Loss of a loved one
• Chronic illness
• Near-death experiences
• Oppression and discrimination, including systemic discrimination
• Racism
• Generational trauma, such as slavery & colonization
• Homelessness
• Poverty
• Incarceration

Trauma varies significantly in its effect on individuals. It can change the way you think or regulate your thoughts and emotions, as well as your capacity for emotional and psychological self-care. It can impact your life, thoughts, mood, and relationships and disrupt your sense of security. Trauma can reshape the brain and nervous system, leading to dysregulation and symptoms like depression and anxiety.

Everyone responds to trauma differently. While some may move forward without enduring negative consequences, others may struggle and experience traumatic stress reactions. How you react to past trauma is deeply personal. Behavioral health challenges can become an obstacle in relationships, careers, and other areas of life. Substance abuse, mental health issues, and other risky behaviors have also been related to traumatic experiences.

Timely treatment and care can prevent trauma from affecting your mental and physical well-being and quality of life. Therapy offers a confidential and supportive environment for individuals to communicate with a mental health professional about personal experiences, thoughts, feelings, or challenges related to the traumatic experiences they have been through.

What Is Trauma-Informed Therapy?

Trauma-informed therapy refers to the approaches taken by mental healthcare providers when engaging with patients to implement an effective treatment process while avoiding traumatization. It involves accounting for the trauma and its impact on the patient’s behavior, mental health, and ability to engage in treatment.

Trauma-informed therapy is a collection of guiding principles that identify the deep impact of trauma that is often overlooked and underreported. It determines the consequences of experiences that threaten an individual’s sense of safety and well-being. Trauma-informed therapists recognize that past trauma can have a lasting effect on an individual’s life, understand the sensitivity to trauma-related issues, and acknowledge they may have different needs.

Trauma-Informed vs. Trauma-Focused

Despite their similarities, trauma-focused and trauma-informed are two different approaches to mental health treatment and therapy. Trauma-focused care delves into comprehending the effects of trauma in your life. It aids in processing these traumas and identifying the coping mechanisms developed as a result. As indicated by its name, it concentrates on the traumas.

On the other hand, trauma-informed care is more of an overarching approach than a specific therapy and acknowledges the pervasive impact of trauma. This approach can be applied in various settings, even when you are not directly addressing your trauma. Its primary goal is to prevent re-traumatization.

Both types of approaches require a thorough grasp of trauma. However, while trauma-focused care is centered on addressing specific traumas, trauma-informed care involves an understanding of how trauma can impact all aspects of life.

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Types of Trauma-Informed Treatment and Techniques

Various types of trauma-focused and trauma-informed treatments are available that are also referred to as trauma interventions. It is important to note that no single intervention type is better.

These treatments address the diverse needs of individuals that vary significantly depending on their age, the type of trauma they have been through, their setting, culture, or their geographical locations.

Modalities commonly used in trauma-informed treatment are:

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

It is a form of psychotherapy that utilizes bilateral stimulation. When combined with focusing on the traumatic memory, it can diminish the emotional intensity of the memory. As a result, you can start healing from the fear and distress associated with the traumatic memories. With time, exposure to these memories can decrease the negative reactions to them.

Narrative Exposure Therapy

It is a therapeutic approach that focuses on treating trauma-related disorders. NET aims to contextualize the various elements associated with fear, including sensory, emotional, and cognitive memories of trauma, within your specific life context. As you understand and effectively process traumatic memories and recognize what happened in your life, you can learn to emphasize your self-worth and resilience.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy

It is designed to equip you with the right skills to manage your emotions, enhance interpersonal relationship and skills, tolerate distress, and practice mindfulness, which helps you deal with trauma. DBT empowers you to cope with better emotional resilience, and create more adaptive responses to triggers.

Brainspotting

It targets trauma, distressing mental health struggles, and lingering emotional distress by pinpointing, processing, and releasing them. As you concentrate on specific eye positions linked to distressing issues, you can ease the emotional and physical tension related to these issues. This therapy helps to reprocess negative experiences and reshape emotional responses.

Prolonged Exposure

It helps you gradually face and address trauma-related memories, emotions, and situations you have been avoiding. It decreases distress resulting from trauma slowly as you confront your trauma memories in a safe and therapeutic environment.

Trauma-Informed Expressive Arts Therapy

This therapy utilizes expressive arts therapy, which encompasses a combination of art, music or sound, dance or movement, enactment or improvisation, as well as storytelling or narrative, play, and imagination to facilitate recovery and healing from trauma.

Somatic Experiencing

This approach treats trauma that centers on the body. For some people, traumatic experiences can manifest as physical symptoms and lead to physical issues like bodily tension, increased heartbeat or breathing, and nausea. Somatic experiencing focuses on managing the physiological manifestations of trauma, promoting a sense of control.

How Does Trauma-Informed Therapy Benefit You?

Trauma-informed therapy focuses on understanding, compassion, and empowerment during the therapeutic process. It recognizes that as trauma affects everyone differently, healing will also be unique for them. Each person will have to take their unique journey, which builds resilience and safety in therapeutic relations and ultimately leads to recovery.

Here are some of the ways a trauma-informed approach can benefit you if you have experienced trauma:

Learning About Trauma and Its Impact

Trauma-informed therapy offers a supportive environment to understand typical reactions to trauma, particularly how it has affected you. Your therapist provides information about trauma, its common symptoms, and available treatment options. By knowing what trauma is, you can better understand the reasons behind certain thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and how they occur.

Reestablish Safety

Trauma can disrupt your sense of safety, which can include violation of physical, emotional, psychological, and relational safety. Trauma-focused therapy can help you rebuild your sense of emotional, psychological, relational, as well as physical environment, and sensations safety through targeted activities and discussing these areas. Therapy can validate your experiences and provide the understanding and acceptance you need to start healing.

Identify Triggers

Trauma-informed therapy can help you recognize, comprehend, explore, and articulate memories and emotions linked to the trauma you experienced. This treatment encourages you to identify which experiences or emotions might be triggered by reminders of the trauma, and you will learn to respond to them more effectively over time.

Develop Helpful Coping Skills

You can enhance coping strategies and acquire skills to manage trauma reminders and emotions. By learning techniques to regulate emotions, manage stress, and improve relationships, you can navigate future challenges more effectively.

Trauma Processing or Integration

Your therapist helps you carefully process traumatic memories and experiences in a secure and controlled environment. They will employ a range of techniques like cognitive restructuring, exposure therapy, and narrative processing to integrate your trauma.

Fewer Traumatic Distress Symptoms

A trauma-informed therapist can make you learn to better regulate your emotions and reactions as well as better manage and express your feelings. The goal of therapy is to decrease emotions of fear & distress around emotional triggers that stem from trauma. Your therapist encourages you to build coping skills to work through difficult feelings, sensations, and emotional reactions as they arise.

How to Find Out if a Therapist Is Trauma-Focused?

While there are no state or national regulations that provide specific definitions for trauma-informed providers or therapists, therapists’ training or certification in various trauma-informed practices qualify them to handle trauma-focused cases.

These training or certifications include:

• Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (CCTP)
• Trauma-Informed Yoga Certification, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Certification
• The Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) Certification
• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Certification
• Somatic Experiencing (SE) Certification

Several states are progressing towards implementing credentialing processes to ensure therapists have the right education and training in trauma-informed practices to help individuals. You can also ask a therapist about their training, specialization, and experience to determine if they can offer the best guidance to people exposed to trauma.

A trauma-informed therapist listens to your narrative and offers compassionate support as you share your experiences. They understand the significance of pacing in trauma to help you manage emotions without being overwhelmed. A trauma-focused therapist prioritizes your comfort level, self-care, boundaries, grounding techniques, and resources to support you in the best possible way.

Liz Chelak is a certified clinical trauma specialist and considers your needs and preferences to collaborate on treatment goals in therapy. She realizes how trauma can impact your life and employs various tools and treatments to facilitate healing while safeguarding against further harm. With her compassionate support and guidance, you can look forward to validating your emotions and starting your journey to healing and growth.