Are Painful Past Experiences Impacting Your Life Today?
Have you ever wondered if your current emotional and relational challenges are due to trauma? Do you frequently struggle with:
- Over-giving, people-pleasing, and burning yourself out?
- Difficulty connecting to your emotions and opening up to others?
- Continually avoiding new opportunities and sabotaging new connections?
Maybe you often find yourself skipping appointments, turning down social invitations, and shutting off the outside world. Perhaps it’s difficult for you to stick to a routine and keep up with self-care. You might suffer from inattention, impulsive behaviors, and a general inability to regulate your emotions. To deal with all your challenges, maybe you constantly seek instant gratification and find yourself resorting to substances.
In the past, you may have thought these struggles were just part of “who you are”—you never really connected them to trauma. But now, perhaps you’re wondering if there’s something deeper going on, something that might warrant extra help.
When You’re Dealing With Trauma, It’s Hard To Form Meaningful Relationships
Because most traumas take place in the context of relationships, it’s normal to have a hard time connecting with others when you’ve been traumatized. If you grew up with an abusive or neglectful caregiver, you may have chronic trust issues and struggle to be your true self around others. And if you experienced sexual trauma, you might have difficulty being intimate and prematurely end relationships before they can really develop.
Not only can trauma lead to disconnection from others, but it can also create a sense of disconnection from yourself. You might dissociate or “shut down” frequently in order manage the overwhelm of your traumatic memories, as if you’re not really present in your body.
Healing from trauma means peeling back these layers of disconnection so that your body can tell the story it’s never been able to tell. At California Relationship Clinic, our compassionate, body-based approach to therapy can help you access the root of your trauma and move from a state of despair and loneliness to a state of connection and empowerment.
Questions About Trauma Therapy?
Trauma Isn’t Always Violent Or Earth-Shattering, And It Isn’t Always Visible To Others
We tend to think of trauma as the result of violent or cataclysmic events, yet the majority of traumas are attachment traumas (or relationship traumas) that happen under ordinary circumstances. Some people develop trauma because they grew up in a home where their needs weren’t met; others develop it because they experienced repeated microaggressions or discrimination in the workplace.
People who suffer from such traumas often lead functional lives—they’re able to hold down jobs, maintain relationships, and “get by” like everyone else. But deep down, they know something isn’t right. Even though their trauma may not be visible to others, they’re stuck in chronic patterns of people-pleasing, overexertion, and self-sabotage.
If you’re one of these people, it’s important to know that you’re not alone—there are millions of people who are also struggling to put the pain of the past behind them.
Healing Is Rooted In Community, Which Is Why We Need Each Other To Heal From Trauma
On your own, it’s hard to change core patterns that have been with you for as long as you can remember. The conditioning of trauma is incredibly strong and rooted in the unconscious, so you can’t just “think” your way out of it or overcome it by white-knuckling your way through the pain.
As a practice, this is why we emphasize co-regulation—having someone there to help you process your experience. What was missing at the moment of trauma was someone to help you make sense of what happened and stay regulated in the emotional aftermath. That’s what therapy provides.
After all, we are social creatures—we heal, grow, and thrive in the context of relationships and community. And when we have a compassionate professional who can help us process our trauma, new neural pathways can form in the brain and new behaviors can take the place of old ones, allowing genuine healing to take shape.
Reconnect With Your Resilience Through The Power Of Trauma Therapy
Many of our clients come to us after years of talk therapy. They feel confused and frustrated because, although they made many small improvements over time, they still feel stuck. The old feelings of helplessness and hopelessness are still there, as are beliefs like “I’m not lovable” or “I’ll always be alone.”
The problem is that they have never been able to access the trauma that lies deep within the body. And at California Relationship Clinic, that’s what we want to help clients achieve. Oftentimes, underneath states of “fight-flight-or-freeze” that trauma created, there are incredible amounts of emerging life force energy. Our mission is to help you connect with this energy so that you can improve your resilience. We’ll empower you to come back into yourself, reconnect with your body, and live a bolder, more authentic life.
What To Expect In Trauma Counseling Sessions
In the beginning of trauma therapy, we will help you slow down and focus on holding space for the experiences you’ve never processed or shared. We’ll allow all the different parts of who you are to surface, including younger parts that may have been wounded by trauma or suppressed because of how painful they are.
Along the way, we’ll give you time to be with your resources and encourage you to reach for the things that give you courage and nourishment. We’ll teach you breathing strategies, sleep container exercises, visualization techniques, and other somatic skills for grounding and emotional regulation. The goal is to co-regulate you until you are able to regulate yourself and manage your trauma reactions on your own outside of treatment.
What Approaches We Use To Help Trauma Survivors
Once a strong foundation of skills and resources is in place, we can begin working through the negative effects of trauma, using evidence-based approaches like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and the Trauma Resiliency Model (TRM). The goal of EMDR therapy is to help you reduce the emotional charge of your traumatic memories, allowing you to remember what happened without feeling distressed.
The Trauma Resiliency Model, meanwhile, focuses on helping you expand your capacity to tolerate a wide range of experiences. It is based on the idea that there are different “resiliency zones” that trauma survivors fluctuate between. The “high zone” is characterized by anger, anxiety, and impulsivity, while the low zone involves numbness, depression, and listlessness. TRM can help you track where you are between these zones and understand the way that trauma shows up in your body.
By getting in touch with your body on a deeper level, you can peel back the layers of emotional wounding that trauma caused and finally explore the story that your body has never had a chance to tell. This is an incredibly validating and empowering experience, one that can bring both short-term relief and long-term healing into your life.
You May Have Some Questions About Trauma Counseling…
Won’t talking about trauma in therapy just make things worse?
At California Relationship Clinic, we believe in taking trauma counseling slowly. We’re not going to dive into your biggest trauma on day one. Instead, we will focus on developing strong grounding and resourcing techniques so that you can feel safe working through the deeper layers of your emotional pain. What’s more, approaches like EMDR and TRM do not require you to discuss your trauma in detail—you are welcome to share as much or as little as you feel comfortable sharing.
What if I don’t fully remember my traumatic experience?
Oftentimes, when we don’t fully remember what happened to us, our bodies still remember. That’s why we still find ourselves defaulting to old stress responses years—or even decades—after a traumatic experience. In therapy, we’ll work closely with the body sensations of trauma so that you can process your experiences even if it took place in your early childhood and your memory isn’t entirely clear.
Does working with the body mean that touch will be involved?
No, it doesn’t. Body-based trauma therapy is more about tuning in to internal landscapes and understanding your own emotions and sensations better. Occasionally, we may use neuro-effective touch pillows and other sensory props to help you stay grounded as you process your trauma, but there won’t be any therapist-to-client touch involved.
From Lonely And Fearful To Connected And Empowered
Trauma does not define you. With the right guidance and support, you can tap into your body’s inner wisdom and connect with the incredible life force energy that lies beneath the scars of your past. To connect with one of our trauma counselors, book a free 20-minute consultation by using our online scheduler or calling 424-274-7745.