There are many well-known therapeutic modalities used to help those of us struggling with addiction and mental health challenges, including cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). A term we might be less familiar with when it comes to therapy is trauma-informed therapy. What is trauma-informed therapy, and how can it support us in our recovery?
A traumatic experience is any adverse life event that has negatively impacted our sense of safety and well-being. Trauma-informed therapy is a therapeutic approach that “addresses the aftermath of trauma by… understanding the root causes of distress and creating a safe, supportive environment that fosters healing and resilience.”
Trauma-Informed Therapy: Finding Underlying Causes of Illness
With trauma-informed therapy, we are examining the underlying causes of our mental health issues. Rather than simply trying to tackle the symptoms, for example, our anxiety or our urge to use drugs, we are looking at the traumas that might have played a part in creating those symptoms in the first place.
Research has shown that “the more negative events a child experienced the higher the likelihood s/he had as an adult of suffering an array of health and behavior problems.” These health problems can include depression, anxiety, alcoholism, and drug use. Therefore, gaining a deeper understanding of those negative events is critical to our recovery. Understanding that there is a link between traumatic events and our mental health issues empowers us to learn more about those difficult events. As we learn from those events, we can seek out ways to heal from them.
Trauma-Informed Therapy: Moving Beyond Denial
One reason this kind of therapy is so helpful is that many of us have spent years of our lives in denial about the traumas we’ve experienced. We may have tried to forget about the things that happened to us and pretended like they never happened. Our denial does not erase those traumas, though. It can actually have the opposite effect of compounding our pain and worsening it over time. For many of us, that denial manifests as a refusal to get help for our addictions, even when they are endangering our lives.
At Athens Area Commencement Center, trauma-informed therapy is one of the cornerstones of our treatment programs. We understand just how deeply trauma can impact mental health. It can be incredibly difficult to come to terms with our trauma and to shed our denial around both our traumas and our addictions.
With trauma-informed therapy, we begin to recognize the role that trauma has played in our lives. We’re no longer pretending that those traumas never happened, with the hope that ignoring them will make them go away. Equipped with a deeper understanding, we learn that in order to recover, we must address and heal those traumas.
Trauma-Informed Therapy: Creating Safety
Participating in therapy sessions using modalities such as CBT and DBT can help us examine our traumas in a safe space with a therapist we trust. Our therapist can help us to find healthy ways to process those traumas. One method of processing trauma is to recreate the memories we’ve been replaying in our minds, only now with our current, empowered self-comforting and supporting our younger selves.
Part of recovery is finding healthy ways to move forward from our traumas, such as journaling or writing a letter to the person who harmed us. We may also find it cathartic to attend trauma support groups with others who have experienced similar traumas. Meeting other people who have lived through similar things can help us to feel stronger and more empowered. We see that we, too, can survive even the most difficult life events. Being surrounded by other survivors mirrors to us how strong we are in our survival.
An important component of trauma-informed therapy, which we prioritize at Athens Area Commencement Center, is the idea of creating a sense of safety for ourselves as we’re doing the work to recover. How can we create safety and security for ourselves after we’ve experienced trauma?
Trauma-Informed Therapy: Mindfulness Practices
One way we can create emotional safety is through mindfulness practices. When we practice mindfulness, we bring ourselves back to the present moment rather than staying stuck in the past. We can move beyond constantly reliving our traumas. Cultivating more mindfulness can be as simple as doing breathing exercises, practicing meditation, and creating a gratitude practice.
With mindfulness, we remember that we are safe here and now in this present moment. We are no longer in the same danger we were in at the time the trauma was happening. Creating emotional safety for ourselves, along with physical safety, is a critical part of our recovery. We’re not only healing from trauma, we’re building entirely new lives for ourselves, prioritizing safety and well-being.
Trauma-Informed Therapy: Emotional Resilience
One focus of trauma-informed therapy is developing emotional resilience. Having experienced trauma in the past, we can become convinced that trauma will be a permanent part of our lives. We might have created a narrative for ourselves that we will never be free of trauma.
Trauma, just like addiction, can feel like an inescapable cycle of constantly recurring patterns. With emotional resilience, we learn that we can rise above our trauma and move beyond our unhealthy patterns. We don’t have to continue to feel victimized by our past experiences. Trauma-informed therapy helps us to discover that we are stronger than both our pasts and our current difficult circumstances. That voice inside us telling us we are nothing more than our trauma is in and of itself a byproduct or symptom of trauma. We can replace that voice with a new, empowered voice that reminds us how powerful and resilient we truly are.
Recovering from addiction invites us to take a closer look at the traumatic experiences we’ve lived through and find ways to heal from them. Where once we tried to bury our traumas and pretend as though they don’t exist, we’re now being encouraged to examine those experiences so that we can learn from them. Our traumas don’t have to bring us down. We can, in fact, be strengthened and empowered by them. Learning more about how our traumas have influenced our lives and our addictions can help us to undo the negative patterns those traumas have created. Call us at Athens Area Commencement Center today at (706) 546-7355 to learn more about our trauma-informed therapeutic programs.