Trauma Therapy
Cost: $175/hour
Do you feel constantly overwhelmed and on high alert? Are you struggling to complete day-to-day tasks? Are you having a hard time sleeping? Do you find that you get anxious, angry or sad easily and don't know how to stop your body from reacting this way? If you answered YES to any of these questions, trauma therapy is the treatment option for you.
Trauma causes our system to become easily overwhelmed and it can react with emotions such as anger, anxiety and low mood. You will learn strategies to help regulate your system and help calm it down when it's overwhelmed. You'll also learn why your experiences have the affect they do on your system and understand how to manage this so it doesn't impact your day-to-day functioning using Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT).
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Trauma Therapy FAQs
Your questions about trauma therapy in West End Ottawa answered
Trauma therapy is an umbrella term for any type of therapy used to treat trauma. In this context I use it to distinguish the other types of therapy I use from EMDR.
In trauma therapy we will examine the patterns you developed as a child to help you stay safe. Often these patterns end up no longer being effective later in life but you continue to use them because you never learned anything different. We will look at your attachment patterns to help understand and re-shape them.
Another part of trauma therapy involves teaching you to create and enforce boundaries that help keep you safe and healthy.
We will also dive into emotions and emotional regulation. Often people who have experienced trauma struggle to understand and label their emotions. They also struggle to regulate their emotions because they don't feel safe and are easily triggered into a trauma response. I will teach you how to identify your emotions and strategies to help you regulate them more effectively.
Trauma therapy is different from EMDR because we don't re-process the trauma.
CPT is a structured form of therapy used to treat trauma.
CPT helps you understand how a traumatic experience has impacted the way you think about yourself, others, and the world. After trauma, it’s common to develop unhelpful beliefs (for example, “I’m not safe” or “It was my fault”). CPT works by helping you to identify these thoughts, challenge them, and replace them with more balanced perspectives.
CPT helps you learn practical skills to:
- Make sense of what happened without becoming overwhelmed,
- Reduce feelings like guilt, shame, fear or anger,
- Shift stuck patterns of thinking, and
- Regain a sense of control and safety in your life.
If we're doing CPT, the average length is between 12 to 16 sessions.
If we're doing more talk-based trauma therapy, it can take longer depending on how much trauma you've experienced.
