PTSD & Trauma
If you’ve experienced an event in your life that you can’t quite shake – something that comes up often, causes flashbacks or nightmares, or makes you feel shaky, tearful, or sleepy whenever you think about it, you may have experienced a trauma.
Sometimes, traumas occur during combat or a serious car accident. Other times, it's when we have a bad fall, a negative or non-consensual sexual experience, or even a “holyshit that almost happened” near disaster.
There are several treatment strategies I use to help people process and heal from all levels of traumatic incidents. Two treatments in particular I’d like to highlight are:
Prolonged Exposure Therapy
Prolonged Exposure therapy (PE) is a highly effective evidence-based treatment strategy for PTSD. It involves talking through traumatic experiences and challenging the avoidant tendencies that often come from trying to manage the emotions following a traumatic incident. Combining PE with acceptance-based behavioral skills can be particularly effective in that it allows clients to process their traumatic memories while learning helpful strategies for managing their day-to-day symptoms.
Somatic Experiencing
The somatic experiencing theory of trauma suggests that trauma symptoms result from the incomplete processing of an incident in which we could not fight or flee. Our body naturally wants to come back to baseline, but we often prevent ourselves from doing so by holding back, constricting, or limiting our natural responses. As a result, we get trapped in the experience and our body continues to re-experience these traumatic events through nightmares, flashbacks, and chronic hypervigilance. Somatic techniques that can help release and regulate these symptoms can be extremely empowering.