Trauma is our neurobiology’s way of protecting us when we are overwhelmed.
Imagine burning your hand on a stove. Normally, your brain processes the pain, tags the experience with surprise and fear, and puts a time stamp on it. From there, your brain puts the memory of burning your hand into your memory bank of past experiences. Now, whenever you see a stove, that memory, along with all of your other memories of experiences with stoves, comes up and reminds you to be careful.
Now image, instead of burning your hand, you burned the entire right side of your body. The pain is excrutiating, the shock and terror overwhelming. So overwhelming in fact that the brain is unable to give the experience the proper cognitive context, understanding, nor a time stamp before it goes into your memory bank. Now, whenever you see a stove, you go into a blind panic, and without a time stamp on the memory, you experience the the shock and terror as if you are reliving the event instead of remembering it.
This is trauma. Left untreated, it can last an entire lifetime. It can also be progressive: in the above example, the person over time can find themselves avoiding anything associated with stoves, like kitchens.
Psychotherapy deals with trauma by helping clients understand their experiences, build cognitive and emotional resources, and reprocess traumatic memories so that they become useful instead of overwhelming. This is done in a safe way so as to not trigger the client into a traumatic episode.
Client safety is the primary consideration when dealing with trauma. I cannot emphasize this point enough: merely reliving a traumatic event does not help the client “get over it.” In fact it does the opposite: reliving a traumatic event reinforces the trauma.
In addition to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy, Narrative Therapy, and Existential Therapy, I also use Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Transpersonal Therapy, and Psychodrama to understand and processing trauma in a safe and effective manner. Get started today.