After supporting countless clients reduce their anxiety and panic, I’m revealing the exact ways that trauma therapy can help you and improve your life. This blog post briefly describes what trauma is and what trauma looks like in your life, listing symptoms you may experience. It defines trauma therapy and describes two modes of treatment: Talk therapy and affective or body-based therapy. Finally, is goes into the details of these treatments and what a typical trauma therapy session might look like.

What is Trauma?

Trauma is an emotional shock that you experience as a threat to yourself in some way, or which overwhelms your capacity to integrate your emotional experience. More bluntly, your brain struggles to move trauma event details out of your limbic system (which processes emotions and memory) into the neocortex for long term memory storage. If you are interested in the details and research regarding how trauma impacts memory formation, check out my post, “What is Trauma and How Does Trauma Impact You?”

What does trauma look like in your life?

You might notice yourself worrying, trying to avoid certain thoughts, frequently thinking that you haven’t done enough or need to do things better. Your thoughts may come quickly, like they are racing. It can be difficult to think clearly, concentrate, and make decisions. You may struggle to stop thinking about certain topics, even when it causes you pain.

You may notice you are more restless, on edge, and short-tempered. You may feel isolated, like others don’t quite understand your experience, or like you have lost trust in other people or yourself. This experience can be lonely and you may begin to feel disconnected from yourself and the world around you.

Physically your body reflexively goes into the fight-or-flight response when you think about trauma memory. This automatic process is known as visceral reactivity. You get a jolt of adrenaline, your heart rate and blood pressure increase, your blood flows to your big muscle groups, and your muscles tense up. You are ready to fight or run away! You may feel shaky, sweaty, dizzy, nauseous, loose sleep, and experience digestive distress.

Repeating the stress response frequently begins to take a toll on your body. There are many negative, long-term health consequences associated with unresolved trauma.

What is Trauma Therapy?

Trauma therapy is a unique field of care that involves addressing the verbal, conscious aspects of trauma as well as subconscious aspects of trauma. That may sound odd—how can you process something unconscious? You can through body-based or affective treatment. Good trauma therapy involves creating safety, traditional talk therapy, and body-based treatments which reduce the visceral reactivity created by trauma. Let’s talk about what each of these components look like.

Basis for good therapy—Create safety!

The first step in therapy is always creating safety. You need to find a therapist you feel comfortable with and learn how to relax your mind and body. There is significant research demonstrating a positive relationship with your therapist improves your therapy outcomes, maybe more than what type of therapy you select (Dalenberg, 2014)! Once you have learned how to reduce your anxiety responses you can use these techniques and skills to combat anxiety or panic when you start to process your trauma. Trauma therapy requires that you actively think about your trauma, so you want to feel safe enough to face that fear.

Talk therapy

In talk therapy approaches, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) you focus on understanding what has happened and how it has impacted you. Your goal is to modify thinking and actions to diminish your trauma response. You might choose exposure therapy with successive approximation. Instead of avoiding the memories you choose to think about the memories in small steps, slowly increasing how much you process. You take breaks to calm your body and reduce anxiety until you are able to tolerate the trauma memory without experiencing overwhelming body sensation.

CBT focuses on gaining insight about how trauma created negative or inaccurate beliefs. For example, you might begin to think that, “The world is a dangerous place and I must always be on guard.” These beliefs create pain and anxiety in your day-to-day life. For example, you become suspicious of others, assuming the worst, and alienating yourself from a good support system. CBT has many tools to begin challenging inaccurate or maladaptive thoughts, replacing them with more accurate, adaptive thoughts.

Similarly, you may examine your behaviors, brainstorm new ways to respond, try these new actions out, and notice how the outcomes change. This helps you find ways of interacting that are more functional and adaptive.

Why Body-Based Treatment is Necessary

Some psychologists argue talk therapy does not fully resolve your visceral reactivity (Solomon & Heide, 2005; KuhfuꟖ, Maldei, Hetmanek, & Baumann, 2021; Leitch, 2007). If you will recall, trauma incidents overwhelm your ability to integrate your emotional experience. Neurologically your memories get “stuck” in the limbic system, failing to consolidate as long-term memory in the neocortex. While the information is stuck, your brain responds to it as though it is HAPPENING NOW. This is why you experience visceral reactivity—your brain thinks you have to physically respond to imminent danger.

Affective therapies involve body-based processing to, “unstick” muscle memories. they require that you pay attention to your body, noticing sensations you are experiencing throughout the day and also when trauma memories are triggered. This can be quite intimidating, but once you connect with your body and experience, you can process trauma on the muscle-memory level, transferring the memories out of the limbic system into the neocortex. This ends the intense cascade of affective/body experiences that occur every time you are reminded of the trauma.

Body-Based Therapy

There are many body-based therapies to choose from. Research indicates Brainspotting and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) have significant impact improving client’s subjective reaction to upsetting memories after just a single session (D'Antoni, Matiz, Fabbro , & Crescentini, 2022). Brainspotting and EMDR have demonstrated excellent psychological improvements which are maintained beyond the treatment session (Hildebrand , Grand, & Stemmler, 2017; Masson, Bernoussi, & Moukouta, 2017).

What Does a Trauma Therapy Session Look Like?

In a Brainspotting session you may decide to process a trauma that occurred. Brainspotting can be done with or without you talking about your trauma. You start by recalling what happened, activating the difficult emotions and affect that occur in response to the memory.

The next step is to notice what you are experiencing in your body (e.g. tightness in your throat, sensations, etc.) and rate your subjective unit of distress (SUD). You and your therapist jointly find a relevant eye position, or brainspot, as you allow your mind to process the sensations and heal.

Your thoughts may remain with the trauma, but they may drift to other concepts or ideas. Your therapist is neurobiologically attuned to your experience, offering calming support. Your therapist might use a multitude of eye positions and eye movements to assist you in processing your memory, “unsticking” it from the limbic system.

During Brainspotting you may notice body sensations, like heat, pressure, tightness, or pain located throughout your body. You may notice visual imagery, like flashes of memories, popping in and out of your mind’s eye. You may notice your mind making associations among events you have experienced. Many people stop speaking during Brainspotting, as they drop into subcortical processing.

You continue processing until your distress (SUD) decreases. Research demonstrates your mind and body start calming down (D'Antoni, 2021) and you are able to maintain a calm reaction to the memory after you have completed processing it (Hildebrand, Grand, & Stemmler, 201 7; Masson, Bernoussi, & Moukouta, 2017). This means when you remember this trauma, you won’t automatically shift into visceral reactivity with all of those unpleasant, tense symptoms. This likely translates into improved physical health.

Different people may spend more or less time engaging in Brainspotting, depending on their history, needs, and goals. For some people one session may feel sufficient. For others they may require a series of sessions to process their experience sufficiently, and they may want to address a set of different traumatizing events. If you are interested in learning more about Brainspotting, trauma therapy, or scheduling a session, feel free to contact me for a consultation.

References

Dalenberg, C. J. (2014). On Building a Science of Common Factors in Trauma Therapy. Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 15, 373-383.

D'Antoni, F. (2021). Brainspottingn Reduces Disturbance and Increases Heart Rate Variability Linked to Distressing Memories: A Piolot Study. Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology, 9(3).

D'Antoni, F., Matiz, A., Fabbro, F., & Crescentini, C. (2022, January). Psychotherapeutic Techniques for Distressing Memories: A Comparative Study between EMDR, Brainspotting, and Body Scan Meditation. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(2).

Hildebrand, A., Grand, D., & Stemmler, M. (2017). Brainspotting - The Efficacy of a New Therapy Approach for the Treatment of Posstraumatic Stress Disorder in Comparison to Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Mediterranean Jounral of Clinical Psychology, 5(1).

KuhfuꟖ, M., Maldei, T., Hetmanek, A., & Baumann, N. (2021). Somatic Experiencing - Effectiveness and Key Factors of a Body-Oriented Trauma Therapy: A Scoping Literature Review. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12.

Leitch, M. L. (2007). Somatic Experiencing Treatment with Tsunami Survivors in Thailand: Broadening the Scope of Early Intervention. Traumatology, 13(11).

Masson, J., Bernoussi, A., & Moukouta, C. S. (2017). Brainspotting Therapy: About a Bataclan Victim. Global Journal of Health Science.

What is Trauma Therapy and How Can it Help You?