Coping with Trauma

As trauma therapists, we help people overcome past hurts. We refer to these hurts as “trauma.” Trauma can be an event or a series of events that are hurtful or scary. 

Examples of traumatic events include:

​

• experiencing or witnessing physical, sexual, and emotional abuse

• dealing with a family member with an addiction or mental health problems

• experiencing or witnessing violence in the community

• natural or human-made disasters and forced displacement

• sudden unexplained separation from a loved one

• poverty

• discrimination

• childhood neglect

​

Trauma can impact a person’s quality of life. Even something that happened in childhood can carry over to adulthood. Addressing trauma helps a person come to terms with what happened. Trauma impacts people in different ways. One of the ways trauma harms is by creating difficulties.

These include: 

​

• struggling to build and keep healthy relationships

• feeling distrust for others

• feeling unsafe with people or certain types of people

• difficulty accepting self

• inability to set healthy boundaries

• uncertain of how to communicate needs

• experiencing shame, particularly in intimate relationships

​

If you feel that any of these experiences apply to your life, addressing trauma may be very helpful to you. TraumaTherapy helps people in treatment access their inner child in order to resolve repressed trauma and promote healing. River Christian Counseling helps individuals overcome past trauma and address other mental and emotional health concerns.  We facilitate and promote success in helping clients achieve improved well-being. Trauma therapy is effective even when dealing with deep-rooted maladaptive thoughts and behaviors. The process is gentle and safe, so therapeutic goals can be reached without re-traumatizing the person in therapy. The approach relies on the innate ability of the mind and/or body to heal itself.  Individuals who participate in traditional talk therapies may have found it difficult to cope with trauma or mental health concerns for a long time, sometimes years. Traumatic experiences which impact children during early development can have profound and lasting effects. Because the mind develops interactively with the environment, trauma in childhood can affect how the individual views the world for the rest of his/her life. Critical to how a child responds to trauma neurologically is the ability of the parent or adult caregiver to mediate the experience of trauma for the child. Trauma therapy can help people rewire their neural systems in such a way as to encourage positive and constructive handling of events that may have previously resulted in a negative reaction. Doing so may help individuals avoid rehashing painful experiences repeatedly.