TREATING TRAUMA:  New Techniques, Insights and Hope

In the last several decades, a great deal of progress in the treatment of trauma and PTSD has been made.  More validity has been ascribed to treatments that view symptoms of both chronic physical and emotional/mental pain as having roots in trauma.

The solace and relief offered by approaches using EMDR, Pain Reprocessing Therapy and other mind-body approaches are being taken more seriously by doctors, therapists and patients alike. For many sufferers, these approaches provide relief they've been unable to find elsewhere.

No one approach is right for everyone, but there are more possibilities and perspectives from which to approach healing and recovery than ever before. Susan specializes in guiding people through the often difficult and idiosyncratic
process of figuring out what the right help for them is and moving towards wellness.

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The video above shows us the universality of how love, patience, understanding and commitment from one creature to another, figures into the healing process.   In our scientific age, the idea that relationships have such power is still minimized by our expectation for finding wellness in a pill or a technologically enhanced procedure of one sort or another.  The relationship between healer and patient, therapist and client, human being and human being, requires time, trust and painstaking specificity.   As The Little Prince teaches in St. Exupery's classic book, it takes time to "tame a friend." 

-WHAT IS TRAUMA?

Trauma can be defined as any experience that causes us to become overwhelmed in helplessness, pain and/or horror and which subsequently remains unresolved, leaving people with symptoms from anxiety to flashbacks, hyper-vigilence to depression.  


RESEARCH AND GROWING UNDERSTANDING

When I started my training as a healing professional in the 1990's, Judith Herman's “Trauma and Recovery" had recently been published.  Herman's book presented crucial insights into the struggles of people who had experienced traumatic life experiences.  Whether the trauma was caused by childhood abuse, catastrophic loss, exposure to war, violence and/or destruction or more subtle crossings of the crucial boundaries between Self and Other, the impact over time of these experiences
on people’s psyche and physiology was undeniable. 
 
A few decades later,  Bessel van der Kolk’s, “The Body Keeps the Score” and other useful books up the ante and explain how much more is now understood about trauma and healing. With the successful development of EMDR, better pharmaceuticals and other treatments and the insight provided by sufferers of trauma themselves with regard to how they have been able to heal and improve their lives our ability to help people relieve their suffering and heal can be more successful than ever.

We increasingly understand how fragile we ALL are to experiences of loss, injury and interpersonal violation.  What was once ascribed to personal weakness is increasingly accepted as understandable and appropriate reactions to traumatic experience and its impact on our nervous systems and complex psychological functions.  We now know how resilient human beings can be and that the healing process is inherent to our biological make-up, but also that we need support and guidance to find our way through our personal healing processes.

THE RIGHT HELP for TRAUMA

If you have experienced trauma in the past or have symptoms that cause you distress, discussing it with a mental health clinician who specializes in trauma may be useful.  My ability to treat each client as an individual while bringing broad knowledge of the causes and treatments of trauma, including EMDR*, Psychodramatic role playing and mind-body healing modalities makes me uniquely qualified to treat clients suffering in the aftermath of traumatic experience.

*See Susan's Article, EMDR: Treating Trauma in the 21st C., for more on EMDR.