Trauma Therapy.
Serving all of Nevada, Arizona and Florida Virtually.
Have you experienced a life-altering event that you just can’t seem to make peace with? Wondering if you’ll be feeling this way forever?
Trauma Sucks.
Have you experienced something that keeps you from being the person you used to be? Do you have more stress, irritability or anger than you did prior to the event? Has it left you feeling depressed or hopeless? Have you lost sleep at night or experienced disturbing nightmares? Maybe you feel like you are re-living it, you're anxious, paranoid or on edge when that kind of thing is totally unnecessary? Do you feel guilt and shame even though everyone tells you it wasn't your fault?
Trauma (big or small) can completely change your everyday experience, and leave you feeling like life will never be the same. Highly emotional events, of any kind, can stick with you for years to come. The negative effects of trauma can disrupt your ability to emotionally regulate, sleep, eat or participate in every-day activities. In an attempt to avoid re-exposing yourself to the trauma, you may try to “bury” the emotional pain. You later find it spilling out, as emotional instability or detachment in other areas of your life, such as work, school or relationships .
You’re not alone.
Really, you're not. Most everyone will experience some form of trauma in their lifetime. Many traumatic experiences are seemingly small or common, so people write them off as normal or just “hard times”. For instance; divorce, losing a job, divorce of your parents, separation from a caregiver, verbal abuse, incarceration, medical procedures, and car accidents. Over half of US citizens will actually experience a major trauma in their lifetime. Most everyone will experience the loss of a loved one at some point. So, what’s the big deal then? Can’t we just ignore it? You’d think. And sometimes that works. But often it doesn’t.
Trauma that occurs in childhood or during the teenage years, if left untreated, can affect people into adulthood. And trauma experienced in adulthood can put a major wrench in your life plans. You were just coasting along, enjoying life, and then some life-shattering event occurred, and suddenly all of your usual tasks feel like total drudgery. You will find many people around you experiencing chronic anxiety, depression, stress, fatigue, anger management issues or insomnia, yet they are unaware of the connection between their past experiences and current distress. Honestly, experiencing a traumatic event without the side effect of unwanted psychological or emotional distress is pretty rare.
Some populations naturally experience much higher rates of trauma due to their job duties. Some examples are first responders or military personnel. These people face trauma daily and yet they are expected to somehow be immune to the side effects. We hate to break it to you, but a job title doesn’t make you immune to the wrath of trauma.
Trauma can be devastating, and if left untreated can sometimes affect a person for decades to come. Fortunately, Trauma Therapy was created just for this reason. There are plenty of evidenced-based interventions for trauma that can decrease your level of disturbance surrounding the traumatic event and help you get your life back on track. One of our favorites is EMDR.
There’s a way out of this mess.
With Trauma Therapy you can feel good again.
At Recovery Unfiltered we see people that are experiencing the effects of trauma every day. We do Trauma Therapy with people just like you. People who had all of their ducks in a row and are now seemingly derailed by a single event. People that used to sleep at night, that now lay in bed with their hearts pounding. We see those people. And we help them out of the mess that is their own mind.
I’m sure you're probably thinking, it would take a miracle for me to “Just get over it”. Im never going to forget this event. There’s no possible way I could feel better. We hear that all the time. And with trauma it can feel that way. It can feel hopeless.
But the reality is it’s not hopeless at all. We’ve got some super cool modalities such as EMDR and Parts and Memory Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Interventions, Narrative Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. That’s quite a few big words, and it’s not super important that you understand them all quite yet, because we don’t yet know which one is best for you. The important part is that you understand there are trained professionals out there that specialize in trauma therapy and are available and willing to listen to the stuff that keeps you up at night. Not only listen, but actively guide you toward healing.
Trauma therapy can look different for each person. Sometimes it’s about learning the skills to cope with emotional distress in a healthy way. It can also mean working with a trauma therapist to re-wire your brain, so you can see the shitty thing that happened to you as less than disturbing, and (believe it or not) maybe even completely neutral. Trauma therapy can also mean opening up about a scary thing in a non-judgemental and completely safe space. It can mean deconstructing and re-writing the problematic parts of the story in a way that better serves you and your future.
Maybe it feels like you have lost your identity since experiencing the trauma, or you now feel you identify as a person who has experienced this trauma. In those cases, part of Trauma Therapy might be learning to create a new and unique identity. Finding new meaning, purpose, maybe even a sense of spirituality (if that’s your thing).
Trauma therapy can be a game changer.
We are well versed in and understand the complexities of trauma. We are fully trained in trauma specific therapy interventions that work quickly to get you back on track so you can move on to becoming the person you were meant to be. For someone who has been feeling helpless amid their trauma symptoms, the interventions we use can seem like magic. Many of our clients tell us they wish they had started therapy sooner.
One of our go-to modalities for trauma is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). EMDR is a highly effective evidenced-based treatment for trauma. The department of Defense, Department of Veteran Affairs, World Health Organization, and American Psychiatric Association all stand behind the efficacy of EMDR as an empirically validated treatment of choice for trauma of all kinds. Four studies on EMDR show that people no longer met criteria for a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis after only 3-7 sessions of EMDR.
We utilize several other modalities and choose those that are tailored to your specific problems.
Your time with us will consist of an initial evaluation of your history and current trauma symptoms. You will identify your goals, or better said, what you would like to get out of your time with us. How will you know when you are done? Once we’ve figured out where you want to go, we will determine the best interventions to get you there. Next, we will create an agreed upon targeting plan, centered around the exact emotions, sensations, events or images that cause you distress. We measure your current level of disturbance using a scale from 0-10 and work toward lowering that number until you are where you want to be. We make it our personal goal to help you make your way back to a life free from trauma symptoms.
“Human beings are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma. I believe not only that trauma is curable but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening—a portal opening to emotional and genuine spiritual transformation.”
— Peter Levine-
Won’t talking about it just make it worse?
Certainly, talking about a traumatic event could bring up negative emotions you have been pushing away. Luckily, we don’t have any plans to send you down a path that requires you to tolerate negative emotions without the tools necessary to keep you safe. We will teach you tangible skills that will help you feel capable of revisiting the event without disturbing your life. If you ever feel overwhelmed during therapy, we can stop the intervention and turn back to the skills you have learned to emotionally regulate. You are always in charge. Clients typically leave their sessions feeling better than they did when they came in. If you decide not to pursue treatment for your current symptoms, chances are they will likely remain the same or even worsen over time. Deciding to pursue treatment is the first step toward relief from your current discomfort.
My problems are too big for trauma therapy.
We regularly see clients that believe their trauma is too big for help. They believe they are too far gone. Or, they’ve tried therapy before and didn’t see any change in their symptoms. Or they say something like “Sure, it’s a little less disturbing now, but it will never completely go away because stuff like this doesn’t ever get better”.
This is common. We can assure you, we have clients who have experienced life-shattering trauma and debilitating trauma symptoms, whom we have witnessed, move from incapacitated to thriving.
We have helped clients who assured us they were helpless. There is no problem too big for trauma therapy, and if there is a topic beyond our scope of practice, we will quickly refer you to a more appropriate trauma therapist in the field.
I’m afraid to tell you what happened.
We get it. Quite often, trauma is too scary to talk about, embarrassing, or riddled with guilt and shame. We will not push you to talk about anything you are not ready to talk about. If there are parts you don’t feel comfortable talking about, know that you can still heal from them without telling us the details. Your mind processes things without you needing to vocalize everything. The great thing about some of the interventions we use is you do not necessarily have to talk about everything in great detail to experience massive shifts in perspective. Your body and your mind remember the event, our detailed knowledge of the event is not vital to your success in therapy.
With all of this in mind, we want you to know that we have worked with people who have experienced very serious trauma, including victims of crime, war veterans, infidelity, domestic violence, people who have harmed others purposefully or accidentally, sexual assault victims and perpetrators, witness to death and suicide, and victims of natural disaster and terrorism. We are able to hold space for trauma of all shapes and sizes. We believe bad things happen to good people and also good people sometimes make bad decisions. We pride ourselves in being a safe space.
Often, people divulge information they have never admitted to anyone. Know that we are bound by laws surrounding confidentiality, which means we must abide by very strict regulations surrounding your personal information and we are unable to divulge anything you tell us in sessions except in the case of very unique circumstances (which we will discuss with you in our first session). We will send you this information with your intake paperwork so you can read over the security measures we take to avoid any breach of your confidentiality. Rest assured, your secret is safe with us.
What if the trauma is still happening?
Sometimes trauma is not isolated to one specific event. This can cause a person to be stuck experiencing one trauma after another. Some examples are domestic violence, verbal abuse, infidelity, being in the middle of a divorce or custody battle, first responders, military personnel etc. This is referred to as “complicated trauma”.
In these cases, trauma therapy can still be very effective in reducing trauma symptoms and helping a person to cope with the current situation, even if they are not currently willing or able to remove themselves from the trauma.
Today is a good day to start your healing journey.
If you have any further questions or you are ready to make an appointment, please give us a call. If we don’t answer, leave us a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can (seriously, we return every call). Your recovery is our priority. We offer a free phone consultation so we can learn more about you and your current symptoms to see if we would be a good fit.