PTSD and Trauma Recovery
The Kind of Trauma You Already Know You Have
Abuse. Accidents. Violence.
Last year, or long enough ago that nobody asks about it anymore.
The memories and the sensations invade your space, all the time.
Disconnecting works, as long as you’re okay disconnecting from yourself, from other people, and from your life.
The Trauma No One Warned You Was Trauma
The birth of a child starts an exciting stretch of a family’s life.
It leaves a wound in the mother, or the baby, or both.
A medical procedure solves the physical ailment it was meant to solve and leaves something else behind.
Checkups, immunizations, even therapies register in the automatic survival system that is the common root of your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being.
You Had a Good Childhood and Life Still Overwhelms You
Something in those years disrupted your sense of being safe and secure in who you are, slowly enough that nobody caught it happening.
A mom who yelled, a dad who waved it off, a house where you were raised to buck it up or keep an explanation ready for everything.
They were doing what they knew, and every one of those years still asked more of you than a nervous system that young had yet grown the capacity to handle.
Capacity is the whole of it, which is why two people walk out of the same afternoon and hold it differently for the rest of their lives.
Change What Those Years Taught You to Believe
Your ability to come back down got flooded, and your survival system has been running things ever since.
Cognitive Processing Therapy, the method I’m certified in, examines what those events taught you to believe, and what those beliefs have been doing to your feelings, your behavior, and your body.
Telling me the story from start to finish is not part of this.
Talk about the trauma and the brain thinks it’s happening again, so we work on what it left you with instead.
Grow Beyond the Hacks
The workarounds you invented got you this far, and they’ve shouldered more than anyone gives them credit for.
A checkup stays a checkup, and a raised voice stays a raised voice.
Regulation comes back first, and your emotional system finally has something solid to build on.
The waves keep coming, you address what’s underneath them, a new perspective shows up, and the ups and downs of living stop running you.
Be the One the Cycle Stops With
Start with a free consultation and find out what recovery would actually involve for you.
Email reaches me at Lcphd@hushmail.com and my Psychology Today listing takes messages.
By phone, a voicemail is the only way through, because my line screens out calls that leave nothing behind. Somebody in your family line gets to be the one who stops this, and you’re already the one reading about it.
