30 years ago, the belief was that the way to help one heal from trauma was to tell the story to someone who was safe and could validate our experience. What we have learned since then is that in telling our story over and over we often experience re traumatization and not healing. Below you will find new ways research has taught us to help survivors heal without being re traumatized because we have already lived through it once, we need not live through it again.

 

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: Shapiro)

This evidence based treatment is loosely based on the idea that when we go to sleep at night our brain takes all the pieces of our experience from that day, puts it together like a puzzle and moves it to the place in her brain that recognizes it has happened in the past. When we wake up the next day, we know we are starting a new day with new experiences ahead of us. Unfortunately, when we experience things that are outside of what our brains can manage, such as trauma, in order to survive, the memory of the traumatic experience is blown apart. Different pieces of those memories end up in different places in our brain which makes it impossible to create the puzzle to then put in the past.  This leaves us open to visual, auditory and experiential triggers in our everyday life that cause us to continue to suffer symptoms. EMDR uses primarily a moving light but also auditory tones and some tapping to help our brain pull together the pieces of the trauma story so that we can put it in the past where it belongs and move on without the haunting symptoms that may have plagued us for years.

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Sand tray

I will ask you to be open minded about the experience of sand tray, sand tray is not just for children. I work primarily with adolescents and adults and yet I have trays of figures and characters that can be used to help communicate, integrate and symbolically tell the story of what we have been through. This is a right brain activity. Our left brain provides narrative and works hard to make sense of things however trauma and our emotions live in our right brain. Sand tray allows for a gentle processing of feelings and experiences, often with no need for words.

 

Psychoeducation

Judith Herman was one of the first therapists to recognize the importance of sharing information with the clients we work with to help bring an understanding of what has happened to us and how it continues to affect us. Psych-education is a left brain activity, it provides a framework for understanding then neuro-biology of trauma, the effect of an overactive limbic system and why we have free floating fear that seems often to make little sense. It can be validating to understand nervous system dysregulation and how we can move from activating symptoms of PTSD to the paralyzing shutdown symptoms of our sympathetic nervous system. It is important to understand what it feels like to be in a trauma response and how to re-regulate our systems to bring about the ability to both feel, experience and make sense of our internal world.

 

Parts Work (Taken from Internal Family Systems Theory: Schwartz)

I believe we all have parts, whether that are seen as specific, separate parts of ourselves at different times in our lives or parts holding specific feelings and ideas, parts work offers us the ability to realize we can engage our adult or Janina Fisher’s “going on with normal life self” to help us connect with and understand all parts of ourselves that have helped us survive some very difficult experiences in the past that now need to be able to be recognized for helping us survive but can now share their experience and let go of the responsibility to simply survive. These parts of us are often stuck in a past that is both dangerous and lonely. Reconnection and safety can bring about internal change and new perspectives. 

 

Dissociation

Our minds have the amazing ability to help us survive overwhelming trauma by the use of a coping mechanism, unconsciously set up to manage intense negative feelings resulting from trauma/maltreatment. Our minds can separate us or parts of us from our knowing self. Unfortunately, this coping mechanism interferes with our brain’s ability to integrate these overwhelming experiences and feelings. This can often involve a profound fragmentation of the self and can show up on a continuum ranging from compartmentalization to dissociative identity disorder. Dissociation once employed by our brains, seems to lack an off switch. Understanding, managing and working with our dissociative parts and behaviors can help bring us back to a place of presence and connection both with self and with others. In my experience, where this is trauma there is some level of dissociation that needs our mindful attention, gratitude and awareness.