PTSD and Trauma Recovery

Talking about it worked – until it didn’t.

You thought you’d put ‘it’ behind you. You must be “doing it wrong” because it’s still there.

Experiencing fatigue, body aches and tension, stomach aches, pelvic pain, or headaches, you have trouble sleeping, eating, concentrating, and finding the motivation to do anything.

It hurts when people dismissively tell you it’s all in your head. There are moments when you catch yourself “staring into space.” You wonder if there is something that can help you.

When was the last time you felt at ease? You’re trying – but it’s so frustrating.

Your body keeps the score.

Everything that’s happened to you or that you’ve felt becomes stored in your body. Storing up all that stuff can make you feel zoned out.

The anxiety that you feel is so deep that it’s in your bones, creating a lump in your throat, knots in your stomach, tightness in your chest, and tension in your neck.

The weight of the world seems balanced on your shoulders. You can’t breathe, feel fatigued, and sometimes, so scared that the hair on your arms stands up. You don’t feel comfortable in your skin.

These are all expressions that tell us what we hold in our body, and it’s often the troubling body symptoms that demand our attention so we will get help.

Trauma also impacts relationships.

Trauma can make you feel terrified of abandonment, intense fear of rejection, unsure who you are outside relationships, and wanting to get close to someone and then pulling away when things get serious.

What you desire in a relationship can change depending on how you feel – causing you to ping-pong between roles as rescuer, victim, and persecutor. Sometimes, you want to be in control or rescue your partner or friend. At other times, you are highly dependent on others. That ping-ponging creates an inability to be in a calm, stable relationship.

You keep picking ‘red flag’ partners you know will cause pain. Moreover, you deeply distrust everyone and see people as all good or all bad, with difficulty tolerating the messy in between that characterizes the reality of healthy relational functioning. You end up distancing from, or smothering. Relationships fail.

Often you feel like an imposter.

You are in survival mode.

When the body senses we’re in danger, it gets out of the new part of the thinking brain and goes into the more primitive parts of our brain to survive. If our body thinks it’s in danger, it goes into fight/flight/freeze or fawn to protect us. All our energy goes toward survival.

We don’t need to solve math problems, digest, or be present or vulnerable in a relationship. We need to stay alive.

Helping overcome a desire to stay in survival mode is where talk therapy falls short. We ask our survival body to think when our thinking brain is unavailable. Our body is structured to protect us and help us survive. You aren’t doing anything wrong.

Therapy can help with trauma recovery.

Phase 1 (Work begins) – I’ve dedicated my career to helping people move out of survival mode and into thrive mode. I utilize evidence-based treatments, including EMDR and Internal Family Systems. I also honor the enormous wisdom I’ve learned from my clients. Examples include Buddhist and Christian Contemplative ideas on mindfulness, Hindu and African-American mourning and grief rituals, and Toltec Shamanism.

We can often work through acute-single incident traumas within a few months.

Phase 2 (Recovery) – Over time, I realized that early childhood trauma and neglect require more than just EMDR. Deeply ingrained personality and character patterns result from complex trauma, and stepping out of these ingrained patterns is hard. Often, well-meaning friends (or even therapists) will tell us to do what feels natural, but sometimes, what feels natural is a trauma response baked into our nervous system to help us survive. We need to be encouraged to step into roles that feel uncomfortable.

For example, dramatic relationships with constant ups and downs may seem normal to our nervous system. It may not feel ‘right’ to be in a calm, safe relationship. Sometimes, friends want you to feel good and say, “You do you.” I’m the guy who questions that and encourages you to lean into healthier relationship patterns, even if they feel uncomfortable.

We can work toward an earned secure attachment style, but not if we keep doing what we’ve always done!

Changing embedded patterns is part of the process.

I have excellent pattern recognition. Unfortunately, there is a lack of education in graduate school and trauma training about personality/character dynamics, so I had to educate myself on what these patterns mean.

Over the past two years, I have received monthly consultations from a respected psychodynamic psychologist and read dozens of books on attachment theory, object relations, transactional analysis, and personality disorders.

I am now able to utilize my pattern recognition in concert with a deepening theoretical knowledge to help my clients shift out of harmful relationship patterns in addition to processing trauma.

Reality Check!

Working through trauma alone is not the answer.

We can make considerable changes in a matter of months with trauma processing and symptom reduction. Still, for early childhood trauma and neglect (complex trauma), the more profound work involved in Phase 2 personality exploration can take years.

Regardless of the time spent, the journey is well worth it!

I’d be honored to walk with you on this healing journey. Contact me today for more information on how I can help.