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Does The Past Ever Feel Too Present In Your Life?
Has a traumatic experience in your life affected
your ability to focus on the present?
Perhaps you’re having flashbacks, racing thoughts, or panic attacks.
Maybe you feel unable to trust others, or even yourself.
The trauma you’ve experienced may have left you with low
self-esteem, shame, or a sense of uncertainty about your future. Sometimes, you may even blame yourself for your past.
When you’re living with trauma, it often seems like you can’t center yourself, like you’ll snap at a moment’s notice or panic at the slightest hint of stress.You may feel irritable all the time or overly self-critical.
Or perhaps you feel a general loss of identity, as if trauma has made you disregard certain elements of who you are.
You may have shrugged aside long-held desires for fear that they’ll re-traumatize you if you engage with them. For instance, if you’ve experienced sexual trauma, you may find it hard to have a fulfilling sex life, because sex makes you relive traumatic memories.
Or if you underwent a bad break-up or relationship in the past, maybe you spend a lot of time over-analyzing and avoiding intimacy in your current relationship.
If you want to improve your self-esteem, tap into your creative power, and feel comfortable in your body, we would love to get you started.
Working together, we can help relegate painful memories to their rightful place and equip you with real-life skills that will empower you to face your future with assurance, joy, and peace of mind.
The Spectrum Of Trauma Runs Deeper And Stretches Wider Than Most People Realize
Virtually everyone has experienced trauma, whether they know it or not. And every kind of trauma is serious and warrants care,
even if it doesn’t “feel” serious.
From mental abuse and child neglect to natural disasters and racism, the spectrum of trauma runs deeper and stretches wider than is commonly believed.
Feeling alone can be traumatic.
Current events, such as COVID-19 or systemic oppression,
can also lead to symptoms of trauma.
Oftentimes, what makes living with trauma so difficult is not only the painful experience itself—or how “serious” it is—but the lack of support many survivors experience.
Without proper support, the effects of trauma are often elusive and confusing, impacting the brain on a subconscious level.
This is why self-awareness is so vital to the healing process.
Knowledge is power, and if you don’t know what’s going inside of you, it can feel terribly disempowering.
Unfortunately, mainstream culture often exacerbates this problem by encouraging us to ignore the parts of ourselves that are wounded or in pain. Because trauma often inhibits us from moving forward in life, we’re taught to ignore the aspects of our identity affected by it. In order to get ahead in life, in other words, we feel compelled to “vote part of ourselves off the island.”
Ignoring emotional wounds, however, never pays off.
By brushing trauma under the rug, we often fail to see how it affects us on a day-to-day level.
You might experience:
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Sleep disturbances
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Lack of appetite
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Depression
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Perfectionism or
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General irritability
without knowing that it all stems from trauma.
If you want to expand your self-awareness and overcome the emotional pain holding you back in life, we’d be honored to help out.
Trauma Therapy Helps You Play To Your Strengths
And Explore What Brings You Joy
Let’s be honest here: no one wants to sit around all day talking about their past. In sessions with us, you won’t have to.
Yes, part of trauma therapy is examining the past to uncover unprocessed emotions and exploring how past relationships and events have impacted your lifestyle today. However, our practice is more oriented toward the present and the future.
We want to help you stay rooted in the moment and create a template for self-care going forward.
To that end, trauma counseling with us is anything but rigid. Our goal isn’t merely to alleviate your symptoms—we want you to experience joy in your life.
Rather than just create a laundry list of coping skills, we’ll seek to make your passions and hobbies a part of your healing journey.
If art, movement, or music brought you happiness as a child, for instance, we can integrate expressive arts into the process. We want you to play to your strengths and use them as leverage against traumatic stress.
In this way, our approach seeks not just to remove pain,
but also replace it with what brings you joy.
Our approach to trauma therapy is individualized for each client. Typically, we spend the first session assessing your individual needs. Afterwards, we can meet with you for 60 minutes once a week. The plan is flexible, however, and if you need extra care, we can occasionally meet with you for several hours on back-to-back days. Depending on the symptoms you’re struggling with, we may even conduct a PTSD assessment near the beginning of your treatment.
There are many approaches and modalities we draw from, but for trauma therapy, we rely heavily on Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. At its core, EMDR taps into the brain and body’s natural healing mechanisms, safely and effectively mitigating the emotional wounds left over from trauma. This method will help dispel the negative sensations and images associated with bad memories and rewire your brain to see your past in a healthier light.
We may also bring in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT). The approach seeks to identify, challenge, and replace harmful self-beliefs that have been spawned by events in your past. Finally, we often utilize mindfulness techniques, such as meditation, movement, or deep breathing, to help you find stillness in the midst of your stress.
No matter how hopeless you feel right now,
you are capable of greater things than you realize.
Most people severely underestimate their own ability to cope, only to wind up surprising themselves.
Here at Wilcox Wellness, our hope is that you experience the same.
We want to hold for you what you can’t hold yourself—
to act as a release point for your pain and a stepping stone towards greater freedom and growth.
You may have some questions about trauma treatment…
Will trauma therapy take years?
Some people recover from trauma after as little as six sessions. For others, it may take three to six months, or even a year or two. Ultimately, how long counseling takes is often dependent on what new needs arise in the midst of treatment. For instance, if you get into a new relationship after experiencing trauma in a previous one, you may want continued counseling to help you navigate your new relationship. In the end, however, you only have to be in counseling for as long as you want to be.
Will trauma counseling make me feel worse?
Informed consent for treatment is a huge priority here at Wilcox Wellness. We’ll never make you do something you don’t want to. That said, when trauma therapy is done properly, it does not re-traumatize you. Although we may explore tough issues together, there will be lots of preparatory work beforehand. The first few sessions will be spent getting to know you, understanding your goals, and ensuring you are comfortable enough to begin this journey together.
Am I alone in my trauma?
Because few people want to talk about their trauma, many go about believing they’re alone in their struggles. Having worked as therapists for years now, however, we can say with assurance that this is not the case. If you have any doubts, we encourage you to join one of our group therapy programs. In group sessions, clients are continually amazed at how many other people have similar life experiences. We can include group therapy as part of your individual trauma treatment plan if you’d like.
We Can Hold For You What You Can’t Hold Yourself
If a traumatic experience has impacted your sense of self-esteem or self-confidence, we can help build your emotional resiliency in ways you never dreamed.
To connect with a trauma therapist from our team,
you can email us here or call us at 860-266-6098.
All of our trauma counseling sessions are exclusively online.