Trauma is a prevalent issue affecting around 70% of adults worldwide, with each experiencing at least one traumatic event in their lifetime. As such, there are growing concerns about managing these pervasive conditions.
Trauma can immensely affect mental patterns, human behavior, and even distort one’s personality. Worse, both young and old individuals are exposed to an alarming rate of trauma-triggering factors observable in a vast range of social and environmental settings.
With this in view, the need for therapeutic measures to help curb the impact of trauma on people and, more so, aid the reversal of existing damages from past traumatic experiences, is nothing short of crucial. Experts like Nightingale Counselling are making efforts to contribute to meaningful outcomes for trauma victims by providing helpful online and in-person support in Vancouver and curated follow-ups to ensure recovery goals are realized.
However, at the fundamental level, it’s crucial for patients to understand trauma and the importance of tailored support for effective recovery.
Understanding Trauma: What It Is and Why Support Matters
According to the American Psychological Association, trauma refers to “any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior and other aspects of functioning.”
Trauma is a strong mental picture that is hard to erase. And victims alone can’t journey into recovery. Oftentimes, victims are unaware of the degree of damage caused by this condition and may unknowingly project the effects socially, which in turn can affect others.
Click https://www.apa.org/topics/trauma to learn more about trauma.
The aftermath of such unknowing projections would be how they relate with family, friends, and workmates. Reactions from images or scenes that resemble experienced traumatic events often lead to uncomfortable situations, sometimes leading to others reneging from engagements with victims. An even more damaging effect would be the generational impact of traumatic experiences on their kids and grandchildren, which according to experts, could be psychological, but also familial, social, cultural, neurobiological, and possibly even genetic.
Trauma care involves a wide range of procedures, as each patient’s condition may vary from acute, chronic or complex. While certain severe conditions may require surgery, most procedures are non-operative, and this often requires patients to be admitted to the surgical critical care unit or postoperative care units.
Core Trauma-Focused Therapeutic Approaches
- Trauma-Informed Therapy
Trauma-informed expressive arts therapy is a therapeutic intervention created by Cathy A. Malchiodi that combines neurodevelopmental research and the sensory qualities of the arts to assist children dealing with trauma.
The focus of this intervention is to enable specialists to understand trauma response via symptom recognition, which in turn enables their patients to deal with triggers with more mind and body balance. It typically involves utilizing creative engagements like art, movement, play, music and theater, to treat PTSD, acute stress disorder and other trauma-related issues.
- Cognitive-Behavioral Techniques (CBT)
Cognitive behavioral therapy is tailored to children, adolescents, adult patients and families to help address emotional and mental needs while curbing unhealthy behavior patterns. It is suited for highly sensitive patients who have survived hard-hitting events such as abuse and grief which may have impaired the victims with mood disorders and post-traumatic stress.
This approach involves conditioning the victim’s social environment to minimize triggers and often involves non-pervasive parenting and helping the victim improve their communication skills.
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is a psychotherapeutic intervention tailored to help victims diminish negative feelings stemming from traumatic memories. When administered, the procedure involves guiding survivors to make side-to-side eye movements while recalling the traumatic event. Those visual movements are meant to help victims process their trauma to reduce its emotional impact.
Essentially EMDR sessions focus on helping the brain process trauma information differently, thus seeing them as less threatening to restore normal function while allowing for a more adaptive perspective on past and future events.
- Solution-Focused Therapy (SFT)
SFT involves enabling patients to build mindfulness and self-regulation skills. It’s based on the concept that the survivor already possesses the abilities and resources to recover from their trauma. It instead focuses on therapists supporting victims to identify and utilize their strengths. It envisions solutions based on what life would be like if the problem didn’t exist.
Click here to learn about other types of trauma therapy.
In-Person and Online Options
Trauma intervention includes many different care measures that meet unique needs. Given the different possible trauma effects victims may suffer, intervention can either be administered in person or online, each offering unique benefits.
Benefits of In-Person Therapy
Nonverbal Communication: In-person therapy allows specialists to read nonverbal cues that give more context to verbal communication. However, nonverbal information remains possible with video sessions although other remote alternatives, such as phone calls, may limit such observations.
Neutral Location: When patients are offered support in specialized spaces such as a dedicated therapy unit, it allows for easier relay of confidential information as these environments are usually conditioned to minimize distraction and foster professional guidance.
Intensive Support: Some intervention techniques require direct, consistent support to avoid extreme or psychotic behaviors such as suicide. In cases where severe mental difficulties must be addressed, specialized units with standby supervision become mandatory.
Benefits of Online Therapy
Cost: When offered online, intervention sessions can be more affordable. This may be the case especially as you can more easily review specialist options like https://www.nightingalecounselling.com/trauma-counselling/ online and choose options that suit your budget. What’s more, this doesn’t require using a facility or other equipment which may be introduced during in-person support.
Easy Access: With virtual therapy, survivors can access support via a range of media, which includes text, audio, and video sessions. This makes therapeutic support quick and convenient as it involves minimal hassle.
Reduced Stigma: Patients who join virtual sessions tend to experience less stigma associated with frequent visits to support centers. As such, survivors can benefit from increased privacy as they can schedule sessions from the comfort of their home.