What is Trauma Based Therapy?

Therapy offers a confidential and safe place for a person to talk to a professional about their thoughts, experiences, problems, or feelings. People who visit therapists may have experienced a situation that distrusts or impacts their thinking, feelings, or capacity to relate to others. An individual may likewise seek out therapy because they need a nonpartisan and safe place to discuss general life experience.

Many individuals seek out therapy: teens, adults, even therapists themselves. Everybody needs someplace they feel supported and safe. The job of the therapist is to help the person understand their situation, teach them strategies to express themselves, and cope with conceivably stressful situations. The therapists can likewise offer family or individual tools to help them manage challenging feelings, or harmful behaviors or thoughts.

What is Trauma Based Therapy?

Trauma based therapy is a particular way to deal with therapy that recognizes and stresses understanding how the traumatic experience affects a teen’s psychological, behavioral, physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. This kind of therapy is established in understanding the association between the trauma experience and the teen’s behavioral and emotional responses.

The aim of trauma based therapy is to provide strategies and skills to help your teen in better understanding, adapting to, handling memories and emotions attached to traumatic experiences, with the ultimate objective of enabling your teenager create a healthier and more versatile meaning of the experience that occurred in his/her life.

How Trauma Based Therapy Works

In trauma based therapy, interventions explicitly tailored to address the needs of adolescents and children going through psychological and emotional difficulties because of trauma are incorporated with humanistic, family strategies, and cognitive-behavioral. This therapy is short-term and usually lasts no more than 16 sessions, as over 80% of traumatized teens see improvement in this time.

Both teens and parents may able to process better thoughts and emotions identifying with a traumatic experience through trauma based therapy, which can offer those in therapy with the essential tools to ease the staggering thoughts leading to anxiety, depression, and stress. Trauma based therapy can help individuals who experienced trauma learn how to manage difficult emotions in a better way.

A safe and stable environment is offered to enable teenagers to disclose details of the trauma. It’s as of now, the learning theories of treatment are applied. Teenagers are shown how perceptions might be hindered and are given the tools to restructure those perceptions.

Trauma based therapy is a skills-based model, and it requires the parent and the teen to practice its components to be ideally effective. Teens and parents are normally asked to practice skills at home. The objective of this therapy is to enable both the kid and the parent to keep on building up their abilities and communication techniques in a healthy way.

Core components of trauma based therapy include:

• Parenting and psychoeducation skills
• Affective regulation
• Relaxation
• Trauma narrative
• Cognitive processing of the trauma
• In vivo mastery of trauma reminders
• Enhancing future safety and development
• Conjoint child-parent sessions

The success of trauma based depends heavily on a genuine, trusting, therapeutic relationship between parents and children. The therapist includes individual teen and parent sessions just as joint sessions utilizing family therapy principles. Including the non-offending parent in therapy can enable the parent to cope, and this likewise allows the parent to help the teenager in this treatment framework. Experts of trauma based therapy endeavor to give parents the skills and resources needed to help their kids cope with the mental implications of the trauma or other abuse.

Types of Therapy Most Often Used for Trauma

Three kinds of therapy have been demonstrated to help with trauma: Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TFCBT), psychodynamic psychotherapy, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). The following is a discussion of each, including what each is and how it functions.

Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TFCBT)

What It Is:

Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a unique type of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) utilized for individuals who have experienced trauma. It is specially formulated to address the thoughts related to the trauma. Normally used for children and teens, alongside their parents, as well as adult overcomers of trauma, TFCBT has been reliably proven effective at meeting the needs of people who have experienced trauma. It is a transient kind of therapy that normally lasts between 8 and 25 sessions, albeit further therapy might be required afterward to address secondary issues resulting from the trauma symptoms.

How It Works:

In TFCBT, the trauma victim learns about trauma and its impact. If the victim who has had a traumatic experience is a teenager or a child, their parent is likewise enlightened on trauma and taught parenting aptitudes that can enable them to understand and connect in healthy manners with their kid. Sessions might be held with the kid alone, the parents, and the kid and parents together.

The therapist teaches you relaxation techniques you can use during the therapeutic procedure as well as later on. The counselor asks you to discuss the experience to help you build up a trauma narrative that occupies your thoughts about the experience. You learn how to express your feelings properly. The cognitive part of the therapy includes looking at thoughts identified with the traumatic experience and learning to adopt more beneficial thought patterns.

Your counselor may recommend you revisit the location or kind of location where the event occurred, either, in actuality, or through virtual reality therapy. This is done steadily, with exposure starting gradually and more components of the scene being added a little at a time. The exposure enables you to confront the situation once more, this time, depending on coping skills you learn earlier in the therapy.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

What It Is:

Psychodynamic psychotherapy, a therapy created from earlier therapy techniques, is based on revealing the conflicts and content within a person’s oblivious mind. It assumes that issues developed from childhood experience. It additionally considers the impacts of interpersonal relationships on emotion thought, and behavior. This sort of therapy depends on the relationship that develops between the trauma victim and the therapist. The objective of this kind of therapy is principally to pick up insight.

How It Works:

If you’re in psychodynamic therapy, you discuss your symptoms as well as the traumatic event that led to them. You do this through the procedure of free association, which implies that you express whatever rings a bell, regardless of whether it appears to make no sense to you at all. Your therapist causes you recognize the defense mechanisms you use to protect yourself from feeling of misery. While these mechanisms can be useful from the outset, they shield you from tending to the horrible experience directly. When you get to the heart of the trauma, the idea is that you’ll have experiences that will help you resolve the contentions you have been feeling.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

What It Is:

EMDR is a relatively new sort of psychotherapy. It was developed with the objective of helping individuals process traumatic experiences in healthier manners. It normally helps a lot faster than psychodynamic psychotherapy or even psychoanalysis. It assumes that the psyche is continually moving toward psychological health unless something hinders that flow. The objective of EMDR is to expel that blockage.

How It Works:

The therapist some type of external stimulus to coordinate your attention outward. This can be eye movements, audio stimulation, or hand tapping. During this part of the session, you talk about the incident, your present pain, or imagine what your future will look while the therapist gives the external stimulus. Through this procedure, the therapist determines what to concentrate on during the second segment of the session.

In the last half of the session, the therapist tells you what part of your story to hold as a top priority as you track their hand movements with your eyes or follow some other kind of instruction. As you revisit thoughts and memories identified with the experience, you gain understandings that originate from within you alone. You understand that you have the quality that helped you survive. Your experience is transformed from a traumatic memory to a vision of your power.

Other Therapeutic Approaches for Trauma

Trauma therapy can include at least one of the above techniques, yet it can likewise incorporate a variety of different therapies. Simple, supportive therapy helps you feel safe while you deal with the trauma and change how you think about it. Hypnotherapy is sometimes utilized, though, there is little evidence that it is effective.

Another kind of therapy that is frequently utilized soon after a traumatic event occurs is psychological questioning. Known as Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD), this kind of therapy is used following a traumatic event to offer victims support and a chance to talk about the experience and talk about their emotions. This kind of therapy has been utilized recently for classmates of youth who have committed suicide, individuals who witnessed a terrorist attack or a mass shooting, and other high-profile occasions that may cause trauma.

While it bodes well that a debriefing would help individuals in such a circumstance, the evidence so far has not upheld it. Single-session debriefings have demonstrated no advantage in studies carried out after such occasions. If you survived a traumatic experience and got a debriefing, you likely need further therapy to overcome or prevent trauma symptoms.

Effectiveness of Trauma based Therapy

One may consider how successful trauma based therapy is. It is very helpful, and research has shown that teens who are experiencing the consequences of trauma can respond well. There have been eleven studies on trauma based therapy, and they all have demonstrated that it is very helpful for PTSD, depression, anxiety, and other side effects related to trauma. The more sessions one has, the more viable it is. This is on the grounds that trauma based therapy is designed around the mind of a teenager or child. They cope with trauma differently, and a therapist has to get into the head of those who are experiencing the trauma to confront it head-on.

So, there are a few limitations to trauma based therapy. It may not be appropriate for kids who have had conduct or other social issues that happened before the trauma. This may keep them from receiving the benefits of Trauma Based Therapy, and they may require an alternate way to deal with their issues.

If a teenager is suicidal or using drugs, they will most likely be unable to profit too. Or then again, their symptoms may worsen in the first place. It can still be very effective, but the issue comes when a teen or child is in danger. If done at the right pace, trauma based therapy can still be useful; however, there may need to be another methodology beforehand. Right now, Dialectical Behavior Therapy is a suitable solution. If a teenager has self-harm problems or issues with running away, there might be benefits, and it could help them stop bad behaviors. As should be obvious, trauma based therapy is very effective for teens and children who have trauma problems.

It very well may be hard for a kid to manage their trauma. Trauma can be a convoluted monster to defeat at any age, particularly when you are young. It can appear to be overwhelming, and you will be unable to comprehend your feelings completely. That is where trauma based therapy comes in. It can help to identify any problematic feelings you and your child may have, and afterward help alter it into something more beneficial.

A family can cooperate to take care of their issues, and this can enable the kid to figure out how to cope with the trauma. While it may be exceptionally testing to get over their trauma, therapy can help oversee it much better.

Therapy is suitable for different reasons, as well. If the child has an aspiration or a dream, a therapist can work with them to make an objective. A counselor can assist them with school, making arrangements for the future, or help with whatever other issues that they may have. There is no shame in speaking to one if you have a problem. It just shows that you are happy to concede that you have a problem, and you want to work on it. At our residential facility, Hillcrest, we have all that is required to help your teen overcome their trauma.