These days everybody seems to be throwing around the word trauma. Big 'T' little 't' we all seem to know it. And truthfully, given the state of the world, trauma fits. According to a study by the National Institute of Mental Health in 2022, it was estimated that more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness. That's 59.3 million people living in the US. With increasing visibility into world problems, the pace at which we share information, and the race to reach the top, we seem to be living in a chronic survival state.
Understanding Trauma: Definition and Impact
The American Psychological Association defines trauma as any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person's attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning. When someone has a traumatic experience, the memory is often paired with a physiological state of hyper-arousal, more commonly known as fight-or-flight. As human beings, we are primed to remember scary or adverse events.
How Trauma Shapes Our Worldview
When we experience a traumatic event, or prolonged exposure to adversity, paired with an intense state of physiological hyperarousal, our ability to trust in others and the world shifts. Trauma often challenges an individual's view of the world as a just, safe, and predictable place.
The Foundation of Trauma-Informed Therapy: Cultivating Safety
Being a trauma informed therapist means learning to cultivate safety. Safety in the physical space, safety within the co-creation of a container, and safety within the client therapist relationship. Being a trauma informed therapist means learning to create safety and grounding within ourselves so that we can show up as a solid object. Understanding ourselves through our own work and an ongoing commitment to self-care is essential. From this place we can offer an anchor for co-regulation, a place of relational tether from which the client can explore and sometimes re-live painful material.
Our Trauma-Informed Protocol at Presence of Mind Therapy
Beyond safety, trauma informed care is grounded in protocol. At Presence of Mind Therapy we start with informed consent to ensure that the client understand the therapeutic process. We provide psycho-education and nervous system regulation skills as a foundation for deeper trauma work. We want folks to be internally and externally resourced to be able to tolerate trauma processing. Once we are certain that clients are supported we facilitate processing over many sessions. Often this processing is non-linear, as is the nature of trauma. Overtime clients come to understand their trauma differently. Clients come into a new relationship with their trauma and at some point perhaps find new meaning and even purpose. As always, we meet our clients with acceptance and compassion, modeling mindfulness and self-care along the way.
