Trauma doesn’t have to be a near-death experience.

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 or 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, this happens 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 struggling with the symptoms that may arise following an incident where we could not fight or flee. Our body naturally wants to come back to baseline, but we often prevent ourselves from fully processing the experience by holding back, constricting, or limiting our normal response. As a result, we get stuck or frozen in the experience and our body continues to re-experience these traumatic events through nightmares, flashbacks, and chronic hypervigilance. If you’re stuck in a trauma, you haven’t come back to baseline. Learning to recognize your body’s needs and the somatic techniques that can help release and regulate can be particularly empowering.