Trauma Therapy

Trauma is based on things that have happened to us as well as things that didn’t.

Trauma shows up in different ways for different people.

You experience an underlying feeling of shame, struggling to move past an event or events that have happened in your life. You start to feel like you are taking the step forward that you need to be and then end up making the same choices from your past.

Maybe you struggle with more vivid traumatic memories, body sensations, or even nightmares that keep you up at night.

You want so badly to have a relationship that feels full of connection but you are terrified of real connection and vulnerability

Trauma often takes away our authenticity, it puts us into a mode of reacting to everything around us instead of responding and managing the situation as it is. It creeps into parts of our life that don't make sense and we couldn't have anticipated.

Trauma shows up in so many ways – body sensations, feelings of abandonment or not being good enough, or paralyzing fear when you hear a door slam shut too hard. Trauma generalizes, it takes over.

“Leave the past in the past,” “Get over it,” “Just look forward.”

These are phrases you’ll never hear us say. At Empowerment Within we understand that trauma isn’t something you just move on from. Your brain changes from trauma. The good news? While it will take some work, you can heal and move forward.

Our Trauma Therapy Philosophy

Acknowledging the issues and engaging in trauma treatment is hard. Also, many survivors have been to therapists in the past that have done more harm than good. Our trauma therapists have specific and ongoing training in trauma and trauma treatment to support you the best way we possibly can.

When you work with our therapists, your trauma therapy will be rooted in education. With the abundance of trauma research over the last two decades we understand now more than ever that our brain is changed through traumatic experiences. These are sometimes things that happen to us but also things that didn’t happen, love, connection, emotional attunement that we didn’t get.

The goal is to give you autonomy, self-connection, and re-connection to the world around you. You will walk out of our offices with a new sense of hope, and a connection to yourself so you can take on the world. We want you to be able to live again within your light, and as our saying goes, to reignite the power within you.

The Trauma Therapy Process

Trauma therapy generally unfolds in a balance of three principles: safety, mourning, and reconnection.

Safety: Establishing ways for you to cope with ongoing stress. Understanding how your nervous system works around the trauma and utilizing different tools (mind and body based) to support ongoing regulation. This doesn’t mean you won’t feel the hard things but now you will know what to do with them

Mourning: Grieving what trauma has taken from us, the choices that weren’t choices, the relationships that didn’t have a chance. The mourning process tends to be the hardest, our truest form of allowing our body to release and let go means allowing space, and sadness around what happened or what we didn’t receive. As we move through mourning our tools from safety are essential so we have ways to support ourselves.

Re-Connection: Creating space to explore a new identity without the trauma defining your choices in the present day, really exploring who you are outside of your fight-flight-freeze responses. Getting to know yourself and other deeply and vulnerably. Reconnecting allows us to engage in the world the way we were always meant to.

While it would be nice to say that these happen in order, that rarely happens. The benefit of this is that we work on reconnection from the start – to support you in seeing what you are working towards. To support you in facing and feeling the pain that has brought you here.

Finding the right match when working through trauma is key. Please visit our Staff page to learn more about our therapists and schedule a free consultation. If you do not feel that person is a good fit, there’s no pressure, you can try someone else or we will give you outside referrals.

Types of trauma therapy: