What is Holistic Trauma Therapy?

 

So earlier this month we educated you about holistic therapy. Now we want to discuss holistic trauma therapy. Before we dive into holistic trauma therapy, we have to understand what trauma is. Trauma is a mental health condition in which people experience a variety of symptoms following a traumatic event. These symptoms include flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, avoidance, and changes in mood and thinking. Trauma typically happens due to the experience having an impact on how you cope and function.

 

There are different types of trauma that can happen throughout one’s life. The different types are as follows:

• Abuse
• Assault
• Car Accident
• Death of someone close to you
• Divorce
• Abandonment
• Imprisonment
• Natural Disasters
• Injuries
• Rape
• Serious Illness
• Violence
• Witnessing any of the different types of trauma already listed

 

Some of the symptoms of trauma are as follows:

• Intrusive Thoughts: thoughts that continuously occur when you have a reminder of the traumatic event trigger you.
• Hypervigilance: This is when you are very aware of your surroundings. You tend to be more on guard and very protective due to your body trying to protect you from any threats or danger.
• Hyperarousal: This is when you are very on edge. Anxiety is taking over, and you are then put into fight or flight mode. Typically, with this symptom you will have an exaggerated startle response like a loud noise happens and you jump.
• Avoidance: you will avoid any people, places, or events that will trigger any reminder of the traumatic event
• Loss of Interest: you lose interest in things you enjoyed doing before the traumatic event or you will start to push people away due to becoming detached from others.
• Negative Beliefs in Others or the world: You tend to feel as if no one can be trusted, the whole world is dangerous.
• Consistent Negative State: You may feel shame, guilt, sadness, or anger due to the event.

Other symptoms include:

• Sleep Disturbance
• Irritability or Angry Outbursts
• Concentration Issues
• Reckless or Self-Destructive Behaviors
• Blaming Yourself for The Consequences of The Event
• Inability to Feel Positive Emotions

 

Now that we have an overview on what trauma is and the symptoms you could experience, let's talk about how Enlightenment Counseling can help with your trauma in a holistic way.

 

First, we focus on holistic care. This means treating you as a whole person with mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual needs that are also within social and cultural aspects. These different aspects all intersect, interact, and affect each other and need to be treated as a whole rather than individually. We know that there is so much more to you than just your symptoms. We make sure that every part of your life is taken into consideration when treating your trauma.

 

Next, we are a trauma informed practice. Throughout your treatment with us from start to finish we are mindful that you have experienced trauma that is the cause of what you are experiencing today. We work to heal you in and out rather than just treating your symptoms.

 

Finally, we are all about healing. We are healing centered in our practice. I mean our slogan is Find Your Path to Healing. We focus on finding your path to healing by helping you understand that trauma doesn’t define you. You have more to offer. We pull in all of your strengths, abilities, and resources to help create a path to a place of enlightenment.

 

All of these aspects are combined with the therapies that we offer. The therapies we use to treat trauma are exposure therapy, cognitive processing, trauma narrative, trauma release exercises, and combining all of these things with our integrative, mind-body, and somatic therapies.

 

The following are descriptions of the different types of trauma-based therapies we use in our practice.

• Exposure Therapy: This type of therapy helps you overcome things, activities, or situations that cause fear or anxiety.
• Cognitive Processing: This is a type of cognitive behavioral treatment focused on helping you through your thoughts that are "stuck" about a traumatic experience.
• Trauma Narrative: This is a psychological technique that helps you make sense of the experiences you have suffered.

 

Check out our Holistic Therapy blog to get more information on our integrative, mind-body, and somatic therapies.

 

Holistic Trauma Therapy can be very beneficial when someone is dealing with symptoms of trauma. It can help you to process your feelings and emotions and process the event itself. Sometimes facing the trauma head on in a safe space is the most beneficial thing you can do for yourself on top of learning coping skills to help you function better on a daily basis. Some other benefits of holistic trauma therapy are as follows:

• Reduce fear or avoidance
• Improve coping skills
• Build Trust Again
• Challenge Negative Beliefs
• Offer Validation

 

When you begin holistic trauma therapy there are some things to take into consideration.

1. Are you ready: What is your commitment level? You have to be committed to wanting to change your current state in order for the treatment to be effective for you. It takes a lot of work to get back to a stable way of functioning and that work falls on you.
2. Risks: Always know that things will get worse before they get better. If you start to open up your trauma and process it, you are going to feel "icky". It will not be a fun time, but it will be therapeutic. Sometimes negative thoughts can take over due to everything being relieved again. Sometimes safety plans (an agreement with therapist if you have plans for suicide) are put in place to help keep you safe from harming yourself.
3. It’s a Process: Therapy in general is a process but that is especially so when trauma is involved. We want to make sure that you have a good foundation of coping skills and techniques to help manage your symptoms such as emotions, and behaviors before we dive into the heavy stuff. This is key to making sure you are safe but also to help you function better rather than the trauma taking over, and you lose ability to function. 

 

Overall, we hope that you found this blog beneficial. We hope that it will give you a good idea of what trauma is and how we go about treating it. There is so much that goes into holistic trauma therapy.  If you found this blog educational follow us on social media to keep updated on our practice and different holistic therapies that we plan to provide in the future.

What is Holistic Therapy?

 

If you have been following us on social media or checked out our website, you will know that Enlightenment Counseling is a holistic practice. We focus on holistic therapy and holistic trauma therapy as well. So, we thought why not provide an education post that explains what it is that we do with holistic therapy.

First, we have to understand what holistic therapy is. Holistic therapy addresses the mind and body to support your mental health and healing. It helps to bring in all the layers and aspects of yourself into therapy. At Enlightenment Counseling, we work to combine mental therapy, emotion therapy, and physical health into helping you heal. We

treat you as a whole person with mental, physical, emotional, spiritual needs that within social and cultural aspects.

These different aspects all intersect, interact, and affect each other and need to be treated as a whole rather than individually. We focus on finding your path to healing by helping one understand that trauma and or mental health illness doesn't define us. We have more to offer. We pull in all your strengths, abilities, and resources to help create a path to a place of enlightenment. Enlightenment, as we see it, means to find peace in all areas of your life. This is the overall goal of holistic therapy.

Next, we take a look at what holistic therapy can help with. Holistic therapy can help with many different mental illnesses. Specifically, we like to focus on treating the following mental illnesses,

• Trauma
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Emotional Difficulties
• Stress

Now let’s focus on the benefits of holistic therapy. There are many benefits to using holistic therapy. Holistic therapy promotes overall wellbeing. As we have mentioned, we are trying to get to that place of enlightenment which is finding peace in all areas of life so holistic therapy can help us to get there. Holistic therapy uses a whole-body approach that addresses mental, physical, and spiritual health. We love the whole-body approach because so often you see that people think you should only focus on the mental aspect of treating mental illness but the issue with that is there are so many other aspects going on in your life that contribute to how you are feeling mentally. If we treat all of those things, you have a better chance of healing as a whole. The final benefit that we see beneficial is that holistic therapy helps you to see different connections between aspects of your life and how it affects your health and wellness. This one is huge because we struggle at times to have that self-awareness that says hey this is happening because of x,y, and z. If we see the connections that everything has in our lives, then we can take steps to make changes and heal.

Finally, lets look at the different therapies that we offer at Enlightenment Counseling that are Holistic focused and help to understand how each therapy can help you overall. These therapies are broken down into different categories based on what they help. The categories are integrative therapy, mind-body therapy, and somatic therapy.

1. Integrative Therapy is an individualized, holistic approach to therapy that combines ideas and techniques from different therapeutic techniques of thought depending on the unique needs of a client. The main integrative therapies we focus on are as follows,

 

Holistic Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is first. This therapy has many different aspects that we use to provide Holistic focused CBT. The following are all the techniques that make up holistic focused CBT,

• Strengths based: This approach focuses on your internal strengths and resourcefulness, rather than on your weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings.
• Solution Focused: This is a type of therapy that places importance on discussing solutions than problems.
• Creative Therapy: This one-use art forms such as dance, drawing, or music to help treat your mental health
• Body-Mind Work: This approach uses therapies that use the body to affect the mind, such as yoga, progressive relaxation, meditations mindfulness and hypnosis.

 

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: Talk therapy that helps you learn to acknowledge, bear, and put into perspective your emotional lives.

 

Motivational Interviewing: helps people resolve ambivalent feelings and insecurities to find the internal motivation they need to change their behavior.

 

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy: skills training to improve emotional regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, distress tolerance and mindfulness.

 

Insight-Oriented Psychotherapy: help you understand how past experiences can affect your current behavior.

Techniques used:

• Free association
• Dream Interpretation
• Exploration of Past
• Interpretation of symptoms
• Confrontation
• Psychoeducation

2. Mind-Body Therapy is a different technique designed to enhance the mind's positive impact on the body. The main mind-body therapies we focus on are as follows,

Meditation Practices is a big one that we like to use. We find it helpful because meditation can help to regulate yourself. The following are different types that we recommend to our clients to use,

• Body Scan Meditation
• Concentrative Meditation
• Mindfulness Meditation
• Loving Kindness Meditation
• Breathing Meditation
• Grounding Meditation

Guided Imagery: This therapy focuses on mental images in order to evoke feelings of relaxation, is based on the concept of mind-body connection.

 

Mindfulness Techniques: It focuses on learning how to be more aware of thoughts, feelings, emotions, surroundings, and situations, and to reduce automatic responses.

 

Breathing Exercises: These exercises focus on your breathing and help you to self-regulate using breathwork.

 

3. Somatic Therapy is a body-centric approach that works by helping to release stress, tension, and trauma from the body. The main somatic therapies we focus on are as follows,

Stress Management is something that we all struggle with. This is very helpful when looking at a holistic approach. The following are different techniques we use to manage your stress holistically,

• Task Management: This is used to help manage your tasks better and provide yourself structure by creating a schedule or routine with your daily tasks
• Stress Journaling: This technique is used as a mind dump. It allows you to journal about whatever comes to mind that is stressing you out.
• Mood Tracking: We use mood tracking to help notice patterns in your mood throughout your day to determine if there are other environmental or social aspects to your mood shifts.
• Relaxation Techniques: These techniques are used to help create relaxation from stress such as grounding, self-soothing, and muscle relaxation.
• Self-Care Practice: We always recommend finding different self-care practices to add into your daily or weekly routine to manage your stress. This could be a bubble bath or a nice dinner. Check out our blog on self-care for more ideas.
• Mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy: This is a therapeutic technique in which we use practices like meditation and yoga to help reduce stress levels. 

Trauma Focused Therapies are the different types of trauma-based therapies we use in our practice. The following are different techniques we use to work through trauma holistically,

• Exposure Therapy: This type of therapy helps you overcome things, activities, or situations that cause fear or anxiety.
• Cognitive Processing: This is a type of cognitive behavioral treatment focused on helping you through your thoughts that are "stuck" about a traumatic experience.
• Trauma Narrative: This is a psychological technique that helps you make sense of the experiences you have suffered.

Overall, we hope that you found this blog beneficial and follow us on social media to keep updated on our practice and different holistic therapies that we plan to provide in the future.