Too often, the people who suffer the most from post traumatic stress disorder are the least likely to acknowledge its impacts on their lives and seek help.
Part of the body’s response to trauma is to downplay its significance, to keep from reliving the experience and to avoid being retraumatized.
“I just want to move on,” they might say.
“Time heals all wounds.”
“I want to live my life.”
But sadly, often as they try to do these things and allow their wounds to heal on their own, they find that the trauma has become an integral part of their life.
It impacts their coping mechanisms, makes it impossible for them to relax, and rewires their hormonal stress response in a thousand damaging ways.
They fight to justify their choice not to seek therapy. Therapy is just paying someone to listen to you, after all; how much difference can it make?
And sadly there are therapists who do little more than offer a sympathetic ear.
Fortunately, there are also therapists who are specially trained in PTSD treatment who do much more than listen to your problems. In New Jersey, trauma therapy is available that offers amazing new tools that will make a measurable difference in your day to day experience of life–if you put them into practice.
A therapist does offer a trusted listening ear to help you process the events that created your trauma responses.
Just speaking of these experiences out loud can be surprisingly cathartic in some cases.
But sometimes you don’t want to go over every single detail with someone. That approach can be harmful and retraumatizing in some cases.
Fortunately a trained therapist can recognize the signs that an approach is doing more harm than good. They will know better than to push you too far in reliving the traumatic incident.
Instead of digging deeper and deeper into the past, many therapists today are emphasizing actionable steps to help you process and manage your trauma responses in the moment.
If your trauma is manifesting through addictive behaviors, your therapist can help you recognize these cycles and give you better coping mechanisms.
If you are experiencing anxiety in specific situations, the therapist can help you to defuse the fear and tension that surround those circumstances, and use a technique such as exposure therapy that will slowly retrain your nervous system that you are now safe and have no need for fear.
A good therapist isn’t trying to keep you in therapy indefinitely. They will want to see you begin to implement the tools they teach you and then be able to move forward independently, confident that the trauma is no longer holding you captive.
Perhaps your therapist has been helping you with anxiety that you experience in a given context. You have learned to manage your stress response in that situation and successfully navigated some intense exposures.
Then one day you unexpectedly become triggered in a different context–but instead of spiraling you are able to implement the tools that the therapist taught you before, and find that they are applicable in many circumstances.
When you are able to take the tools that help you in specific contexts and apply them to other situations, you will know that therapy has worked and that you may soon be ready to leave the program.
The application of these tools of personal growth to real life situations is the end goal of all trauma therapy, and will make significant positive change in your everyday life.
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