What goes into trauma recovery in Virginia Beach, VA?
“Thinking” your way to improved emotional, relational, and behavioral health falls woefully short.
There is no denying that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been useful in helping people understand their feelings on a rational level through talk therapy. Unfortunately, there are a few limitations with this approach to heal the effects of trauma. Cognitive approaches are concerned with a “top down” process which engages a specific part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. But the prefrontal cortex is just one chunk of the elephant where trauma recovery is concerned. The cognitive brain doesn’t fully reach the deeper, emotional regions where old, blocked emotions and protective responses are stored and triggered. These areas of the brain include the brainstem, hypothalamus, thalamus, and basal ganglia structures.
Your brain goes through too many hoops for your survival for cognitive approaches to completely resolve trauma. When the brainstem is overcome by relational trauma for instance, survival is the top priority. Survival looks like more than just thinking your way out of a bad situation: it’s in your muscles when they tense up; it’s the impulse to flee from a situation; it’s the simultaneous, blink-of-an-eye sensations, behaviors, and cognitions that were long-established since the original traumatic experience. These survival strategies only become more fixed as time goes on without assistance. Often times, what you thought was conscious is bumped into the unconscious automatically. This is incompatible with purely trying to change thoughts into “positive” ones.
Brilliant, cutting-edge trauma psychotherapy in Virginia Beach, VA!
Effective trauma therapy in Virginia Beach, VA encompasses the mind, body, and spirit. During recovery, you cultivate what was missing from the traumatic experience with the help of resources. Pace yourself here: think about what you really needed at the time and what you didn’t get. To name a few answers I hear from people, you likely didn’t get enough love. You likely were made to feel that you are to blame for the experience. You likely were forced to forget your true essence before the traumatic experience occurred, and make unfair deals for survival on your own. You didn’t have enough resources, internally or externally.
Resources are available to help you restore unconditional self-love and dispel self-blame, as well as remember who you truly are outside of the effects of trauma. Not in a side-stepping way, but in a way that allows and accepts all parts of yourself without suppression. You meet your pain with gentleness instead of judgement. You seek and receive the support you needed all along to confront the unpleasant realities of life.
I help people resource and reprocess trauma using Accelerated Resolution Therapy, Trauma Model Therapy, and the basics of Comprehensive Resource Model. Trauma recovery is a creative, scientific, and relational process that is paced where you are. I’ve got the right training that honors your specific needs and capacity; whether you are looking for rapid recovery or more of a steady long-term commitment to your healing, my therapy approaches allow for natural cognitive changes to occur either way.