What is Trauma-Informed Therapy?

Therapy is trauma-informed when it takes into account all of the events and experiences leading up to the point where a client walks into your office. Trauma-informed care considers how an individual has had to adapt to conditions throughout their life in order to survive and how those survival instincts are still in play today. As a trauma-informed therapist, we would consider:

• Expectations placed on a client by caregivers, their culture, peers, etc. and how those expectations were reinforced.

• How caregivers responded to a client’s emotions when they were younger. Was their caregiver receptive to, avoidant of, or critical of their emotional expression?

• Significant transitions such as moving, divorce, caregiver incarceration, etc.

• Threats to survival during childhood and adolescence, including food scarcity, housing insecurity, and threats in the community.

And the list goes on from there. In essence, when we’re talking about trauma, we’re considering anything that creates an emotional response significant enough to change the way we think, behave or feel generally and/or in a specific context.

Why Should We Consider Trauma in Therapy?

In my view, the way that someone has adapted to hardship and adversity in life reveals much about the position someone is in today. When we experience an adverse event, we adapt not only to that event, but we prepare for it to potentially happen again and do what we can to prevent it.

The trauma responses and how they are stored and reinforced

For example: Consider someone that grew up with emotionally unpredictable parents who could, at the drop of a hat, go from calm or mildly irritated to explosive, loud and threatening. This person might adapt by avoiding expressing their own emotions or avoiding others when they begin to express an emotion out of fear that they might be exposed to that danger again. They might engage in people-pleasing behaviors to keep people happy as their instincts drive them to keep themselves safe from what those emotions might lead to.

As this person ages, they might not speak up for themselves in the workplace and might have difficulties with deeper connections in relationships as they avoid subjects that evoke uncomfortable emotions. They might find that they can’t be assertive and set boundaries with other people, finding that they are being “walked all over” regularly. All of this can culminate to result in distress that brings them to therapy.

What if I Don’t Have PTSD? Is Trauma-Informed Therapy Still Important?

Yes! Your current experiences don’t tell the whole story of who you are or why you are feeling the way that you are. We don’t exist in isolated moments. We share the same body as the person we were when we were 6, 13, 24, etc. so understanding what our bodies adapted to and how can tell us a lot about what we’re experiencing now. Like I tell a lot of my clients: We don’t stop being the kids or teens we were at some point. We just grow up. Because of that, our experiences, again, don’t exist in isolation just because we’re older.

If you’re in therapy for depression, we can learn about the history of the messages that circulate during depressive episodes and find resolution. If you’re anxious, we can learn about how your anxiety has assisted in your survival and have compassion for it before finding new ways to adapt. If you’re grieving, we can process through your expectations for that grieving cycle and find ways of empathizing with the emotions you’re experiencing.

Trauma-informed therapy is important whether you have experienced what we typically consider trauma or not.

How to Find a Trauma-Informed Therapist

Luckily, trauma-informed therapists are often open about them being trauma-informed and may practice trauma-informed therapies like EMDR, internal family systems, somatic experiencing, cognitive processing therapy, etc. If you are curious about if a therapist is trauma-informed, it’s also perfectly acceptable to ask them questions like “How do you approach trauma,” “Do you ask about childhood, upbringing, etc,” or “What modalities do you utilize in therapy?”

You can also complete the form on our “Contact” page to be connected with a trauma-informed therapist with Comeback Counseling: Trauma-Informed Therapy! We don’t currently have a waitlist and are ready to help.

Finding someone that views you as the entirety of who you are is important and it’s what we all deserve as clients.