Trauma Therapy
Stop Suffering! Start Treatment for Trauma
ICHANGE is a leading provider of trauma recovery therapy. Whether you’re suffering from behavioral addiction, drug addiction, or struggling in your marriage and family relationships, we can often find a traumatic event which is preventing the type of healthy growth you’re looking for in adulthood. PTSD can be a factor for people who’ve faced obvious traumas, like those in war, but there are smaller traumas, which can also affect you like PTSD.
Smaller Traumas Causing Severe Pain
It’s not hard to identify big traumas in your life. War combat, a car accident, abuse, death, and divorce all carry the weight of something that can leave a lasting impact in your life. Many of our clients seek therapy when they face these life-changing events.
It can be harder to recognize the seemingly smaller events that leave a mark–Painful relationships, subtle rejection, or chronic neglect can be traumatizing as well. Often the pain of these types of occurrences is not intense, but it goes on for a very long time and can have just as much of an impact as one or two of the “big” traumas.
Does it feel like the impact of the past is overwhelming the present? If you’re feeling this way, it’s a good indication a significant event has occurred, which needs to be treated by a trained clinician.
Recovery from Trauma and PTSD
Some of the classic signs of PTSD can include:
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Extreme fear, helplessness, or horror in response to witnessing an event.
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Reoccurring thoughts about the traumatic event, or worries about what might happen that you can’t shut off, without a sense of recovery.
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Acting or feeling like the traumatic event is still happening.
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Sensitivity to things that remind you of the traumatic event.
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Persistent efforts to avoid anything related to the original trauma.
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Difficulty falling or staying asleep.
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Changes in appetite.
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Increased emotional agitation and anger.
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Hypervigilance (always being on the lookout for the next horrible event).
These signs aren’t just occasional occurrences that you can shrug off. They can interfere with what is important to you. They can occasionally knock you down for a while after you have a flashback.
Sometimes the effects of trauma are subtle but get more intense as time goes on. What started as a small fear can grow into a paralyzing terror that keeps you from living your life. Relationship dynamics that you never thought twice about can take on a whole new dark meaning and feel very disturbing. These strange symptoms are not happening because you are crazy–They’re occurring because your nervous system is in overdrive and starting to struggle to keep up with what your life demands.
Survival Mechanisms
Reactions to trauma are the ways that you survived the initial event. At the time, they were what you needed to be safe and maybe to even stay alive.
When this adaptation to a traumatic event starts creeping over into other parts of your life, hurting instead of helping you, it’s time to get help.
Trauma and PTSD don’t just live in the mind; they take root in the body and actually alter how the nervous system responds to everyday experiences–This is completely treatable!
EMDR Treatment
Our clinic is one of the very few service providers of EMDR, one of the newest and most promising treatment methods for trauma. It can seem like Science Fiction when you hear about how it works. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing replicate the brain’s natural mode of processing information and healing. Rather than reliving the trauma, your mind can reboot, and adequately handle the traumatic event through this innovative new treatment method.