TRAUMA OVERVIEW

Trauma is dealing with an abnormal situation that shatters the self into fragments of emotional, cognitive, spiritual, behavioral, and inter/intra-personal relationship challenges. Trauma that cannot regain a sense of personhood requires intervention to regain wholeness. Integrative treatment can help bring the pieces back together and produce personal growth.

           Practice includes trauma-informed care, Attachment-focused on the relationships and bonds between people. An attachment-based approach can be used in individual, family, couple, and group therapy, with both children and adults, to helps clients mend or recover from fractured family relationships; Spiritual Integration and religious values can play a major part in human life, spiritual values should be viewed as a potential resource in therapy rather than as something to be ignored. During the assessment process, it can be ascertained how certain beliefs and practices of the client can be a useful focal point for exploration; Evidence-Based practice is the integration of the best available research with clinical expertise in the context of patient characteristics, culture, and preferences.

Trauma can be healed- Restored to health or soundness, cure, to ease or relieve, to experience relief from emotional distress.  Anxiety, distress, and trauma symptoms are a normal response to an abnormal event. They are the bodies way of communicating that something is wrong and needs care. Intervention can help restore thoughts, emotions, belief systems, and behavior to be restored in health. This healing can be possible with the understanding of trauma effects on the brain and synergistic connections to cognitive, physical, psychological, physiological, and spiritual (values) intervention and integration. Treatment Phases include safety, symptom relief, memory retrieval, facing the truth about the past, present and major issues of the present, relationships, reclaiming the body, and recreating life.

Trauma can rewire the brain functions and alter normal brain development that may cause the brain to get ‘stuck on a particular developmental milestone that hinders maturation into other cognitive, behavioral, emotional, or spiritual growth. Trauma affects the mind, body, soul, and spirit of a person and attacks personhood, destroys relationships, and silences the voice. Fear becomes the controlling factor in the lifestyle of the individual and avoidance of life is manifested. Education along with therapeutic interventions and theory with weekly homework assignments (workbook, journaling, creative expression, exposure therapy) will be a required process.