What is Trauma-Focused Therapy?
Trauma-Focused Therapy is a specific approach to therapy that recognizes and emphasizes understanding how the traumatic experience impacts a individual’s mental, behavioral, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. This type of therapy is rooted in understanding the connection between the trauma experience and the individual’s emotional and behavioral responses. The purpose of trauma-focused therapy is to offer skills and strategies to assist you in better understanding, coping with, processing emotions and memories tied to traumatic experiences, with the end goal of enabling you to create a healthier and more adaptive meaning of the experience that took place in your life.
Benefits of Trauma-Focused Therapy
Trauma-Focused Therapy can be beneficial to youth who have experienced a traumatic event . By engaging in trauma-focused treatment, your child can learn more about what he/she is experiencing,how to address the concerns, and develop healthier ways of coping. The following are a few examples of the benefits of trauma-focused therapy:
Learn About Trauma
Trauma-focused therapy provides a space for children and their families to learn about normal responses to trauma and specifically how a traumatic event has impacted the child and family. This type of discovery and learning helps you and your child to digest why certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviors might occur, gives names and explanations to his/her experiences, and reminds your child that he/she is not alone in his/her experience.
Re-Establish Safety
A traumatic experience by definition results in a violation of your child’s sense of safety. This includes violations of physical, emotional y, psychological, and/or relational safety.. A benefit of trauma-focused therapy is to assist your child in re-developing internal (emotional, psychological, relational) and physical (touch, the environment) senses of safety, through activities and discussions that target these domains.
Identify Triggers
Participating in trauma-focused therapy can help your child learn to identify, understand, explore, and express memories and feelings related to the trauma. Often times, children may show reactions that appear to “come out of nowhere” or are out of proportion for an experience, but it may be that these are actually reactions to trauma reminders.
Develop Healthy Coping Skills
Trauma-focused therapy sessions aim to help youth discover skills and improve coping strategies to better respond to reminders and emotions associated with the traumatic event. Some of these skills include anxiety management and relaxation strategies that are taught in youth friendly ways. Developing these types of skills in response to trauma supports resiliency or assists your child in “bouncing back” from his/her traumatic experience.
Decrease in Traumatic Stress Symptoms
Engaging in trauma-focused therapy and working closely with the therapist can help your child develop and practice skills that help decrease traumatic stress symptoms and other mental health symptoms associated with the trauma. Your child may experience decreases in depression, anxiety, dissociation, trauma-related shame or guilt, and/or intrusive symptoms such as flashbacks and nightmares.
Practice Trauma Processing or Integration
One goal of a trauma-informed therapy is to help the child regain power and control over past experiences by sensitively assisting the child to re-narrate his/her story. Over time your child has the opportunity to “process” or organize these unique experiences into his/her everyday life and ,make meaning of the event(s) and how they relate to your child’s view of him/herself and the world around.
Trauma-Focused Treatment Activities
There are a large variety of different activities or strategies that used within the trauma-focused treatment process. These trauma-focused activities may look different based on age, trauma experience, setting, or location. Therapists may use creative strategies and activities to address memories, emotions, or problematic behaviors associated with traumatic experiences as part of the therapy process. These are conducted in a way that is sensitive and unique to your child’s experience and are often used in conjunction with relaxation skills.
Types of Trauma-Focused Treatments
Many different types of trauma-focused and trauma-informed treatments exist today. These may also be referred to as trauma-focused interventions. One intervention type is not “better” than another, but rather each was developed to meet the different needs of individuals and families. Trauma-focused treatments may look different based on age, trauma experience, setting, or location.
To find specific trauma-informed interventions based on your child’s needs, visit the National Child Traumatic Stress Network Empirically Supported Treatments and Promising Practices by clicking HERE.
How Do I Know if a Therapist is Trauma-Informed?
Currently there are no state or national regulations defining “trauma-informed provider” or “trauma-informed therapist.” However, some states are working toward “credentialing” or ensuring that clinicians have minimum education and training around trauma-informed practice. No matter where you live or what a professional’s background may be, there are questions you can ask a therapist to learn more about his/her training and experience working with children exposed to trauma. Some questions you may consider asking include:
- What are your specialties?
- How long have you been conducting therapy?
- What is your experience in working with youth who have experienced trauma?
- What is your approach to working with youth who have experienced trauma?
- Have you had any type of specialty training in the treatment of childhood trauma?
- Do you consider yourself a “trauma-informed therapist”? How?