We are Trauma-Wise

Here at Green Mountain, our counselors commit to being trauma-wise. To unpack this, we first need to define trauma. 

It is estimated that around 70% of adults across the world have endured at least one traumatic event. Examples of traumatic events include but are not limited to: 

• Childhood abuse or neglect

• Exposure to death

• Grief and loss

• Injury

• Natural disasters

• Sexual/ emotional/ physical violence or abuse

• Life-threatening illnesses

These events may lead to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is characterized by symptoms like:

•  intrusive memories

•  fear and avoidance

• increased arousal symptoms due to memories and triggers of traumatic events

• negative alterations in cognitions and mood. 

Experiencing trauma may or may not lead to PTSD. However, even if your trauma does not lead to this disorder, it can be highly distressing to your life or daily functioning. Beyond the above examples of traumatic events, many of us have experienced what are called “little t traumas” - a breakup, loss of a pet, experiencing bullying, job loss or rejection, personal esteem issues, or other overwhelming emotional experiences. Although these little-t traumas do not fit into a formal definition of trauma, these events may still cause intense distress to the mind, emotions, and body.

In general, trauma overwhelms the nervous system, causes feelings of helplessness, despair, agitation, horror, and fear, and may lead to negative symptoms such as stomach or back pain, emotional swings and outbursts, substance abuse, overeating, and nightmares or flashbacks. 

If you find yourself feeling stuck, unsure how to cope with debilitating emotions or physical symptoms, and perhaps feeling hijacked by your emotions, you may be experiencing the impacts of trauma. No matter how big or small your pain is, you are worthy and deserving of healing and restoration. Trauma does not have the last word: there are several research-proven and effective ways to treat trauma that can lead to hope and change. 

Therapies for Trauma:

Often in trauma treatment, traditional talk therapy is not effective, as this type of therapy relies on cognitive processing. Trauma is stored in the body, and it leaves impacts that people cannot always consciously or cognitively process talk through. Instead of talk therapy, body-based modalities that can help reprocess and release trauma. 

EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a research-based approach which allows clients to relieve traumatic events and reprocess the feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations associated with the trauma. This approach is structured and relies on the establishment of a positive therapist-client relationship, relaxation techniques, and stabilization for the client to then re-experience the trauma. During EMDR, the client will follow the therapist’s fingers along the horizontal axis. This process allows clients to experience long-lasting emotional healing and release. 

SE: Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-based approach that focuses on resolving psychophysiological symptoms. Rather than focusing on cognitive, thinking-based experiences, SE focuses on a clients’ internal sensations. Through the process of building awareness of the arousal caused by trauma, clients can begin to reduce this arousal through tolerating, accepting, and identifying their bodily, emotional, and physical traumatic responses. As a whole, this therapy style helps build resilience and self-regulation. Clients do not have to relive their traumatic memories, as this approach is indirect, gentle, and gradual. In practice, SE may look like observing shifts in breathing, posture, checking in on feelings of lightness, heaviness, or dizziness, and employing breathing or grounding exercises throughout therapy.

BSP: Brainspotting (BSP) is a brain-wise and body-aware relational attunement process. BSP is a focused treatment method that works by identifying, processing, and releasing core sources of emotional/body pain, trauma, dissociation and other challenging symptoms. BSP employs the visual field to find eye positions which correlate with emotional or physiological experience. Simply put, a BSP therapist will guide clients to find eye positions that correlate with what the client wants to process. From this eye position, the client practices focused mindfulness. This type of body-based processing leads to healing within the non-verbal, non-cognitive portions of the brain (the subcortical brain). Clients may experience a release from BSP, as the brain is being healed at a deep level. 

Trauma-Wise versus Trauma-Informed

Trauma-informed is a common buzzword in the realm of therapy. Generally, this phrase means:

• Understanding of how trauma shows up in individuals, communities, and families

• Recognizing the signs and symptoms of trauma

• Cultivating a sensitivity to not re-traumatize individuals in their counseling journey

Here at Green Mountain Counseling, we prefer the term, “Trauma-Wise”. To us, trauma-wise means the following:

• Continually growing our knowledge and understanding of trauma through reading, lectures, and trainings

• Not just having tools for trauma, but discerning the timing and type of tool to use for each client

• Normalizing our clients’ symptoms and casting a vision for hope and health

• Placing less emphasis on labels or diagnoses, and rather using trauma-wise as a lens to understand why clients may have the emotions and reactions they do in any given situation

As a whole, wisdom implies that we are always growing, rather than assuming we have arrived. As trauma-wise therapists, we have a deep respect for our clients and their stories, and put immense care into being client-centered. 

Sources:

http://files.constantcontact.com/621c30b3101/138239cb-cad8-4167-9198-e89e8db7c32f.pdf

https://rockymountainbrainspottinginstitute.com///wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Effective-treatments-for-generalized-anxiety-disorder.pdf

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20008198.2021.1929023

The Cycle of Anxiety

Anxiety manifests throughout the body in many ways: you may experience tightness in your shoulders or jaw, shallowing breathing, a feeling of dread and restlessness, the inability to stop circulating thought patterns, and so on. Many of us have not been taught how to cope with the intense feelings of anxiety, so we pull out our best stop: avoidance. Although avoidance works wonders at alleviating anxiety in the immediate, short-term, it ends up causing further damage down the road. Thus, the road to anxiety alleviation is not avoidance, but rather facing our fears.

To illustrate this cycle, I’ll use the example of a fictional case: we will look at Sarah, who deals with social anxiety. Although Sarah longs for connection and close friendships, she finds herself feeling dread, self-doubt, and a negative internal dialogue whenever she tries to meet up with new people. One week, she works up the courage to text a friend to hang out. However, in the days and hours leading up to the hangout, she feels immense anxiety. Eventually, she decides to text her friend that she is feeling under the weather and cancels. Sarah is instantly relieved to have avoided this anxiety-provoking situation. However, she is still left without the level of friendships she desires, as well as an increased anxiety about social interactions in general. 

This experience highlights something called the Cycle of Anxiety. In this cycle, you first feel anxiety, which then leads to avoidance– a temporary alleviation of that anxiety. However, this avoidance strategy communicates to your brain that the original stimuli was indeed to be feared. In the long-term, your brain reinforces the anxiety, causing anxiety to grow rather than decrease. 

Avoidance in essence is a maladaptive coping strategy resulting in the cycle: anxiety, avoidance, relief from avoidance, and then increased anxiety. One way to disrupt this cycle is to intentionally expose yourself to your anxiety. Using the previous scenario, if your anxiety is around social settings, you could expose yourself to your fear through avenues such as inviting a friend to coffee, talking to a barista, and working your way up to more stress-inducing situations.

By choosing to face your fears, you will feel an increase in anxiety at first, but overtime, you will learn to implement new coping skills and to trust that you truly are capable of dealing with your fears. The goal in this exercise is to face rather than avoid your fear, thereby helping your brain to stop reinforcing the anxiety response.  The goal in this exercise is to face rather than avoid your fear, thereby helping your brain to stop reinforcing the anxiety response. This technique is often used in anxiety-related disorders such as OCD, phobias, and social anxiety disorder, but can be expanded to many other anxiety-producing situations.

Growing Self-Compassion

For many people, the old adage, “You are your own worst enemy” rings unfortunately true. You may find your thoughts circulating back to a self-defeating pattern in which you blame yourself and see all of your shortcomings. This pattern of self-criticism may lead to various mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, emotional shut-down, avoidance, and low self-esteem. It is difficult and frustrating to stay in this loop, but thankfully there are strategies to cope with this dilemma. Here are a few techniques to try to work through your mindset:

ONE: PRACTICE SELF-COMPASSION

A helpful first step to healing is paying close attention to your thoughts. Say that you make a small blunder at work and your boss corrects you: what is your initial reaction? What kinds of thoughts do you have about yourself after this situation? Times of stress, confusion, or emotional intensity may reveal your default thought patterns, which may either be self-compassionate or self-critical. It can be helpful even to write down the types of thoughts you tell yourself. Building awareness around these automatic thoughts can help you then change your internal dialogue, allowing you to grow in self-compassion.

---

TWO: EXPLORE THE ORIGIN OF YOUR SELF-CRITIC

Either in therapy or in your own processing, practicing curiosity is key. If you have a lot of insecurity around your looks, for example, explore where this may have come from. What sorts of messages did you receive from parents, peers, and the media growing up around body image? We are shaped by our early experiences, so it makes sense that you may carry around disapproving voices from early on. 

---

THREE: CONNECT WITH YOUR INNER CHILD

For many of us, shame and self-criticism developed from an early age and we have years of experiencing a self-shaming narrative. To change this narrative, practice connecting with your childhood self. Think of a time in your childhood that was particularly important, impactful, or challenging. It might be helpful to select a picture of yourself from this time period and print it out or make it your phone screensaver. Whenever you notice yourself speaking harshly to yourself, look at the picture of you as a child. What are your feelings towards this child? Can you feel compassion for this child? This exercise can help you grow compassion for yourself both in the past as well as the present, as you carry your child self in the present.

---

FOUR: CHALLENGE YOUR THINKING

The last route for coping with negative self-talk is to take a Cognitive-Behavioral route in which you can challenge your own thinking. You might notice negative self-talk such as “I am such an idiot; I can never do anything right”. Take a moment to stop and put the negative thought on trial: what are all the pieces of evidence that support your thought? What are all the pieces of evidence that go against your thought? Once you list the evidence for and against your negative thought, you can then decide if you’d like to replace it with a new one. For example, you may realize that you actually do a lot of things well in your life and yet are very hard on yourself for making small mistakes. The alternative to “I’m such an idiot for messing things up” would then become something like, “Everyone makes mistakes, and this small mistake does not say anything about my worth or identity”. 

---

Choose one of these avenues to practice self-compassion this week and pay attention to how your self-talk starts to change!

Ride the Wave

“Stop crying over spilled milk!”

“It’s bad to feel anger, you should work on that”

“Get over it, it’s not that big of a deal”

“Why are you being so emotional?”

Some of us have grown up hearing phrases like these from our caregivers, friends, teachers, and leaders, and we now internalize these messages for ourselves. In moments of anxiety, depression, or anger you may experience a strong desire to escape your negative emotions as quickly as possible, just as you were taught. It may feel scary or even wrong to feel certain emotions. However, I want to invite you into a new challenge: sitting with and accepting emotions as they come. This exercise draws from mindfulness techniques and allows you to grow distress tolerance as well as self-acceptance.

To start, do a quick body scan: are you holding pain anywhere throughout your body? Notice your bodily sensations from head to toe and take note where your anxiety or depression is the strongest. Next, notice the emotions that are currently surfacing. If you can, name the specific emotions arising. Try not to judge these emotions, but rather observe them with curiosity and openness.

Try to sit in this state of observation for a couple of minutes. The goal in this exercise is not necessarily to change your emotion or make it end sooner, but to simply be with your emotion. It may be helpful to think of your emotions as friends whom you can befriend: what would it be like to grow comfortable with your friend, Sadness, who comes to sit with you every so often?

It may be helpful to think of this exercise as riding a wave – pushing against an ocean’s wave is exhausting and largely ineffective, but in choosing the rise and fall with the wave, you can allow it to pass. In the same way, rather than pushing against your emotions, you can choose to ride them out, accepting them as they come and go.