Trauma Recovery
(for kids, teens, and adults)
” Trauma is the moment where you realize the world isn’t safe anymore.”
Jonathan Decker, Cinema Therapy
Kids and Teens
using Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT)
Suffering a traumatic event is hard enough.
But when your child suffers a traumatic event, it is UNBEARABLE.
Few things can cause a parent more turmoil and helplessness than watching their child suffer after a horrible event, like physical abuse, sexual abuse, witnessing domestic violence, or experiencing a tragedy.
As a parent, it’s hard to know what to do and what to say. And your kid is feeling the same way – definitely.
And you, as the parent, are also suffering from complex thoughts and feelings. You can practically feel the distance between you and your child growing larger.
Therapy helps with recovery.
There’s a therapy treatment that helps your child and you to heal. It’s called Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (or TF-CBT). This powerful evidence-based trauma treatment model is a complete, start-to-finish program that works with your traumatized young one and the caregiver (parent, grandparent, guardian, etc.).
You will receive step-by-step guidance through a proven model that’s helped thousands of families heal from one of their most difficult chapters and leave therapy stronger than ever before. TF-CBT is an empowering, non-aggressive approach that works! Some kids and their caregivers worry that right away, the therapist will “go for the jugular” and try to get them to dish all the gory details of the traumatic event. With TF-CBT, you can sigh in relief because the approach is measured, gentle, and respectful of your kid’s story.
Before we talk about the traumatic event, there are many gradual steps to ensure that you and your child feel equipped with all the necessary knowledge and tools to face it safely. Discussing trauma can be complex and intimidating, but TF-CBT can help make the process more gentle, fun (yes, fun!), and empowering.
Therapy helps make trauma more bearable.
Trauma isn’t just about what happened. It’s also the thoughts about what happened.
TF-CBT is powerful because it is more than just “talking about it.” It gets to the root of the pain: the distressing and unpleasant thoughts and feelings in the event’s aftermath. That’s where the healing happens.
You and your kid can learn to relinquish the guilt, shame, and other unhelpful patterns holding you back.
Don’t keep letting this sweep under the rug! You and your child deserve to get out of this dark cloud and heal. Contact us today for a free consultation, and let’s get started!
Adults
No, not me!
You wanna know what the biggest thing we hear from adults who suffered trauma is? On a regular basis, it goes something like this: “I don’t think that what I went through was ‘trauma.’ I know other people who’ve had much worse things happen to them!”
I (Matt) said the same thing after I finished cancer treatment. It took me almost two years after I was cancer-free to admit that I suffered from trauma… after I started having panic attacks.
Our brains are equipped with what we like to playfully call “safety features” that do lots of things, like minimizing an event to protect us while we’re going through something disturbing, dangerous, or extremely stressful.
When a traumatic event occurs, it completely disrupts that safety feature, and now you’re in “fight, flight or freeze” mode every day – and often out of nowhere. The experience can become so intense you lose sleep, suffer nightmares, blow up at others, start over-checking everything, and try avoiding everything that might trigger another episode.
The memories of what happened pop up, and you can even lose sight of where you are! And these triggers can happen from literally anything: sounds, smells, colors, or a lyric in a song. You might feel the only way to quiet it all down is by staying incredibly busy or washing the memories down a liquor bottle.
This isn’t a way to live, and fortunately, there are now so many ways to get relief without having to turn to substance abuse, avoiding everything, or workaholism.
Understanding trauma from personal and professional experience…
We (Amanda and Matt) have spent the better part of our careers helping hundreds of people work through the challenges that come with traumatic experiences. We’ve worked with at-risk youth, many of whom were in foster care and suffered abuse and neglect.
Within the last few years, we’ve worked primarily with active-duty military members who suffer from several trauma-related symptoms.
Personally speaking, we (Amanda and Matt) faced Matt’s cancer treatments together nearly a decade ago. We know first-hand what it’s like to face something truly out-of-the-blue and terrifying. And we also know what it’s like to deal with the aftermath of traumatic events.
Everything we teach, we do or have done ourselves.
Here’s how we help:
Heal the past
Is talking about the traumatic event necessary to get effective results? The short answer is no. There are a variety of ways to self-regulate and manage intrusive memories and thoughts when they pop up.
But revisiting what happened in a safe, objective environment can be incredibly healing and powerful. Healing the past is confronting the events and letting go of the unhelpful thoughts and beliefs that are holding you back.
Access the present
Learn extremely effective mindfulness and somatic techniques that help you manage difficult thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations when they pop up. You will learn tools from therapies like Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Trauma-Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (TF-ACT). These techniques are easy to learn, easy to practice, and often you see an improvement quickly.
Build the future
The skills and techniques might not make much sense unless you know what kind of life you want. As you heal from the past and master techniques to handle difficulties when they show up, it’s time to look ahead and take steps to build the kind of life you want. What kind of person do you want to be? What do you value, and what matters to you?
Don’t keep letting this hold you back from the life you want! You (and your child) deserve to get out from under this dark cloud, heal, and move forward to a brighter future.
Contact us today for a free consultation, and let’s get started!
