Is PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) preventing you from living your best life?
Does it feel like life is passing you by while you expend all of your energy just trying to get through your days without losing your shit?
Is COVID making your PTSD symptoms worse?
If so, are you thinking about PTSD treatment?
The internal struggle of PTSD is so much harder than it looks from the outside. While to others, you may just appear socially withdrawn, there’s an entire world of fear and anxiety unfolding within you. You don’t want to feel like a burden to your friends and family so you keep quiet and soldier on.
With social distance measures in place, your sense of isolation and feeling disconnected from others may be heightened. As a result of COVID, coupled with your PTSD symptoms, you may notice feeling a lot more tired than usual and/or checked out and spacy.
Despite feeling so exhausted, you may avoid sleeping because you have nightmares.
Perhaps you’re feeling either more numb or more sensitive to triggers. Or both.
You probably live on high alert and without warning, you suddenly start to feel afraid of everyone and everything.
You may worry that because of your trust issues, you’ll never be able to have a normal relationship again.
You wish you could forget the past, but PTSD makes it impossible. You feel like a prisoner in your own mind.
Perhaps your PTSD symptoms cause you to engage in negative coping behaviors that provide short term relief but no long term, sustainable solutions. Coping mechanisms like emotional eating, increased drug or alcohol use or just zoning out for hours watching tv are possible signs that your trauma has hijacked your capacity to deal more effectively.
If you can relate to any of the above, your PTSD symptoms could be getting worse.
“What’s wrong with me?”
Sadly, we hear this too often from our clients who have experienced trauma. You may be wondering if the hard stuff that you’ve experienced in your life can even be called “trauma.” You may be in your head thinking, “What happened is not that big of a deal. Other people have it way worse.”
Dealing with the aftermath of traumatic experiences can be challenging. This is true whether you are dealing with shock trauma or complex trauma.
Shock trauma is defined as a particular event or experience that happened one time or a number of times within the same context. Shock trauma events include things like going to war, being assaulted, surviving a natural disaster or getting into an accident like falling off your bike or crashing your car.
Within the context of relationships, complex trauma occurs with repetitive incidents such as in the cases of abuse, neglect, family dysfunction and domestic violence. With complex trauma, the prolonged stress from living in these kinds of environments negatively impacts your ability to feel balanced and grounded.
Unfortunately, about half of all adults experience trauma in their lifetime and it is one of the biggest reasons that people seek therapy out in the first place.
Fortunately, with a skilled, compassionate and experienced therapist at your side, trauma and PTSD don’t have to be a life sentence.
Get your life back
Regardless of the kind of traumatic experience(s) you have survived, PTSD treatment can help you reclaim joy, connection and ease. Here at Somatic Therapy Partners, all of our clinicians are trained in treating trauma.
And, as our name indicates, we are devoted to providing leading edge and other somatic approaches to healing. With trauma, we know that you can’t just think your way out of what happened or your symptoms. A somatic approach to healing is holistic and integrative as it incorporates your body as an ally in the healing process.
We know it can be hard to seek out treatment and ask for help. We understand the emotional pain and shame often associated with traumatic events and we want to walk with you on your healing path.
Your life doesn’t have to be a constant struggle as you try to manage your symptoms. More than anything, we don’t want you to be alone in the process. We know that recovering from trauma is real and we are committed to helping you get your life back!
How does PTSD treatment work?
Here at Somatic Therapy Partners (STP), we know that treating any form of trauma must include the body as part of the process. We provide a safe, accepting and compassionate atmosphere coupled with trained trauma specialists to help you decrease the symptoms of PTSD.
Because of our body-centered approach to treating trauma, therapy includes things like:
- helping you establish a felt sense of safety in your body,
- teaching you self-regulation and grounding skills,
- understanding your nervous system and how to take care of it,
- increasing your mindful awareness of self and environment and
- learning how to listen to your body so that you can respond more effectively.
We also provide therapeutic touch methods to help bring your nervous system back into balance.
Due to COVID, STP provides both in-person and remote sessions. However, for therapeutic touch methods, those sessions can only be done in person.
Over time, as your PTSD symptoms decrease and your ability to feel grounded and regulated increases, you will feel more confident that you can handle life’s challenges and continue to move forward in meaningful ways in your life.
You might be just about ready to reach out for support but you’ve got concerns or questions…
Is online PTSD treatment as effective as in-person sessions?
Especially if you are looking for PTSD treatment for shock trauma events, online therapy is a great fit.
Clients who do online sessions report online therapy as meaningful and effective, especially for learning how to listen to your body, practicing grounding and self-regulation skills and feeling connected to someone. The added benefit of doing PTSD treatment online is that you are in control of your environment and you don’t have to battle traffic or deal with parking.
Will I have to re-tell everything that happened? What if I don’t want to?
Excellent questions. No, you won’t have to re-tell traumatic events if you don’t want to. As a matter of fact, while we care about what happened to you, we care more about protecting your nervous system than we do hearing about the details of the hard stuff. Most of the time, we encourage clients NOT to tell us everything that happened in one sitting, especially during our first session together because we know that when you talk about the hard stuff, your body re-lives those events in the present time.
What we do instead of asking our clients to tell us about their trauma are things like slowing down the pace of the re-telling, pausing to practice awareness and grounding as needed and focusing on certain parts of the narrative instead of the whole thing at one time. In this way, we protect our clients from getting too hijacked or overwhelmed. We have worked with clients in successfully resolving their trauma without them ever having told the whole story.
Why the somatic approach to healing from trauma?
Trauma isn’t just about the overwhelming event that happened to you. Trauma is also about the changes in your brain and nervous system that occurred as a result.
Early/developmental trauma actually changes the brain structure and impedes the optimal growth of the brain and nervous system. The ACEs study completed in 2013, shows a correlation between childhood trauma and greater risk for lifelong health problems.
Shock trauma can hijack your adrenal system, the system that pumps adrenaline and cortisol into your body, such that too much or too little of these important hormones are available for daily functioning.
Because trauma of any form changes the functioning of your body, it only makes sense that your body needs to be a part of the healing process.
We are here for you
Here at Somatic Therapy Partners, our clinicians are trained in two leading, body-based approaches to trauma resolution: Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. We are committed to helping you overcome trauma and getting you back to living your best life.
Reach out soon. There is so much love for you here!