You’ve been carrying this weight for too long
Trauma can make us feel unsafe, out of control, or paralyzed, impacting how we relate to the world and ourselves. We may feel trapped and unsafe in our own bodies and in our own mind, trying to find ways to distract, soothe, or numb ourselves, as we try to escape the stress or the fear from our own thoughts, emotions, and relationships. Many times we don’t know why we’re feeling this way, leaving us more confused and helpless.
Trauma can become embedded in our personality and in life itself. It can make us and break us at the same time, especially when we experienced childhood trauma in important relationships, including emotional abuse or neglect from those we loved, trusted, or depended on. As a result, you may find yourself avoiding relationships and intimacy, feeling reactive towards others without understanding why, living afraid of closeness or rejection, having a hard time trusting others, or feeling unable to set boundaries.
Trauma can also impact how you feel about yourself. You may go through life with an ongoing sense of anxiety or depression, trying to meet other people’s expectations at the expense of your own needs, feeling disconnected from your own emotions and desires, questioning your self-worth, and trapped by the belief that you have little power or agency to change. Here is where therapy for trauma can help.
How can trauma therapy help?
Trauma treatment can help you recognize and understand these reactions and patterns, as well as working through their root causes. Sometimes it will be necessary to establish a sense of safety in your own body as you embark on the journey to explore and make sense of your emotional experience. This process will unfold at a pace that you can control, with the support of a trusting and non-judgmental trauma therapist.
Trauma therapy can be challenging. Working with our therapists in Chicago you can experience a safe space to explore the difficult emotions of trauma, allowing you to find new ways of relating to yourself and others. We cannot change the past, but we can change the relationship we have with it.
What is Trauma?
What defines trauma is not an event or situation itself, but your subjective experience and the effects of such experience on your mind and body. Trauma is not about something that happened in the past, but about how it lives with you in the present.
Sometimes we might react to specific triggers, such as a place, a situation, a physical sensation, or a type of interaction. These triggers evoke a past experience in our mind and we will feel a sense of threat or unsafety. Our body after trauma will turn into fight (for example, reacting with irritation or anger), flight (for example, avoiding or leaving a situation), or freeze mode (for example, when we shut down or feel paralyzed). Trauma impacts our ability to regulate our emotions since we don't choose to respond in these ways. Trauma counseling can help navigate these difficult feelings.
Types of trauma
There are multiple types of traumatic experiences, which might lead to different forms of trauma treatment. What they share in common is that they overwhelm, in some way, our capacity to cope and make sense of them as they are happening. Three types of trauma include:
Shock trauma can be the result of experiencing or witnessing a specific event, such as having an accident or a sudden medical condition, going through a natural disaster, or witnessing gun or war violence.
Interpersonal trauma happens in relationship with other people. It includes a range from one-time situations with strangers, to experiences over months or years when both people are related in some way. The impact can be more severe when the perpetrator is someone we know and trust, when we go through this betrayal alone, when we are blamed for what happened, when help is not provided, or when we are not believed. These are common experiences that define childhood trauma and how therapy can help.
Identity trauma can take place when our individual characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation, that are the basis for psychological, emotional, or physical abuse.
You Don’t Have To Do It Alone.
What is Complex Trauma?
Complex trauma involves experiences, events, and circumstances that interfere with our emotional, psychological, and sometimes physical development. It typically involves chronic traumatic experiences in ongoing relationships with others. Therapy for this kind of trauma involves appreciating the complexity of how trauma lives on within us. While it can start during adulthood, complex trauma is often based on our earlier experiences, so childhood trauma therapy can help. Complex trauma does not require a big event but can be embedded in the fabric of our relationships and the environments where we grew up.
Complex trauma is characterized by patterns of inconsistency, including childhood neglect, abuse, rejection, or abandonment. We may have felt chronically unseen and unheard, growing up in a home where feelings were not expressed or allowed. Or we may have lived in constant fear that our parent’s love and attention would be withdrawn or was conditional, needing to attend to their needs and their mood. Trauma therapy can help you get to the root of these relational experiences.
What happens when we grow up?
When we become adults, complex childhood trauma can compromise our personality, sense of identity, and self-worth. It can impair our capacity for emotional regulation, self-acceptance, and self-compassion, and undermine our ability to develop and sustain intimate, emotional, or vulnerable relationships with others. We may keep our feelings and needs to ourselves, ignore them, or deny them, and believe that we must prioritize other people’s needs. As a result, we sometimes feel alienated and disconnected from our feelings. Or we might feel out of control constantly, trapped by the intensity of our emotions a deep sense of injury and rejection from others. These multiple layers make trauma treatment more important.
People who have experienced complex trauma do not typically come seeking therapy for complex trauma in itself. They might come for depression, anxiety, addictions, relationship issues, or low self-esteem. They may want to believe that what happened was not that important, not a “big deal,” but minimization is usually a form of denial, a common protective mechanism to defend ourselves from overwhelming feelings our mind could not tolerate. Sometimes we only become able to recognize the traumatic nature of our experiences, to truly think and feel their depth and complexity, after we start working through them in trauma therapy.
Working with our complex trauma therapists in Chicago
Trauma counseling at Fermata Psychotherapy starts by working together with your trauma therapist to create a non-judgmental and safe environment, where you can explore the depth of your experiences without feeling overwhelmed. It is a process that requires time, patience, compassion, and attention to your body and your emotions. You will be able to understand how these past experiences still live with you in the present, infiltrating your feelings, thoughts, and relationships. Complex trauma treatment often involves finding a sense of safety in our own bodies, so that we can process our experiences and mourn the pain and losses we endured.
Trauma and Complex Trauma therapy can help you to integrate your experiences into a renewed narrative of your own life. Complex trauma can become part of our personality and identity, so understanding who you are can be part of the process. The goal is not to deny what happened or to forget that it did, but to accept our journey, heal our wounds, and expand the way we feel about ourselves and our story. Trauma counseling. especially childhood trauma therapy, is not an easy process, but it is a journey you don’t have to do alone. Complex trauma healing is often at the root of personal growth, and can help you improve your relationships and live a more authentic, centered, and fulfilling life. Our trauma therapists in Chicago can support you through this journey in person or via telehealth.
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Banner photo credit: Tiago Bandeira