What is trauma specific treatment?

Trauma focused psychotherapy (including PE and CPT) are two of the most effective types of treatment for PTSD. These treatments help you process – or work through – your traumatic experience. Evidence Based Treatment for PTSD are a specific type of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that are scientifically proven to reduce distressing symptoms and help people regain their daily functioning. These treatments often allow individual to reach their goals within 12-16 sessions and help reduce anxiety, hypervigilance, irritability, and increase one’s ability to be more integrated in the world.

People with PTSD often try to avoid anything that reminds them of the trauma. This can help you feel better in the short run, but in the long run it can create chronic issues. Avoiding these feelings and situations actually keeps you from recovering from PTSD.

What is Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PE) for PTSD?

PE works by helping you face your fears. PE teaches you to gradually approach trauma-related memories, feelings, and situations that you have been avoiding since your trauma. By talking about the details of the trauma and by confronting safe situations that you have been avoiding, you can decrease your PTSD symptoms and regain more control of your life.

What is Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) for PTSD?

Trauma can change the way you think about yourself and the world. You may believe you are to blame for what happened or that the world is a dangerous place and no one can be trusted. These kinds of thoughts keep you stuck in your PTSD and cost you engagement with the world and others. CPT teaches you a new way to handle these upsetting thoughts. In CPT, you will learn skills that can help you decide whether there are more helpful ways to think about your trauma. You will learn how to examine whether the facts support your thoughts and if they don’t, you can decide whether or not it makes sense to take on a new perspective, which can ultimately help provide a new and more hopeful way of seeing yourself, others and the world.

Trauma-Informed Guilt Reduction Therapy (TrIGR)

Oftentimes after trauma, there are guilt and shame components of moral injury. TrIGR is a 6-session therapy that helps clients consider their role in the traumatic event and find constructive ways to express important values, so that they no longer need to express values by suffering through guilt and shame.

I have extensive experience in various types of complex trauma including:

• War and Combat

• Sexual Assault (i.e. females, males, children, military sexual trauma)

• Violence (i.e intimate partner violence, community violence)

• Racial trauma or Racism Related Stress

• Disaster

• MV accidents

• Trauma-related guilt, shame, and moral Injury

Working with Diversity

I especially enjoy working with people wanting to explore issues of cultural diversity (i.e. race, racial identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation) and welcome the integration of one’s faith or questions of faith into psychotherapy.