Has Your Life Been Adversely Impacted By A Traumatic Experience?
• Do you work in a profession that exposes you to high-stress, critical situations?
• Have your central relationships been affected by unhealthy patterns or unresolved feelings from your past?
• Are you feeling paralyzed by an inability to make decisions or find purpose in your life?
Perhaps you are in the military and are expected to deploy on a moment’s notice or you and your family have to make big, life-altering moves every couple of years when restationed. Similarly, you may work as a medical professional or first responder who, due to recent global health emergencies, has experienced heightened and chronic distress at work.
Maybe you suffered some form of sexual or physical abuse or trauma as a child and feel emotionally burdened by your past. Alternatively, you may not characterize your upbringing or history as traumatic despite having experienced some degree of emotional neglect. It’s possible that the unresolved issues from your past have contributed to feelings of isolation and led to self-destructive patterns and behaviors.
Trauma comes in many forms and affects individuals in different ways. You may be experiencing somatic symptoms such as poor sleep, digestive issues, and headaches or migraines. Perhaps you feel stuck, unable to make progress, and frozen when it comes to making decisions. As a result, a lack of decisiveness and assertion has impacted your life at home, at work, or among your circle of friends.
Despite being surrounded by others, you may feel chronically lonely or that your needs are not getting met in your relationships. There may be ongoing conflict that you can’t seem to resolve, resulting in unhealthy interpersonal patterns, self-sabotaging behaviors, and a general sense that you cannot control your emotions.
This degree of emotional pain is burdensome, and while you may appear to the outside world as having it together, unresolved distress can cause you to feel like you are crumbling on the inside. However, you don’t have to be alone in building yourself back up. The therapists at bareWell are expertly trained and available to help you navigate and overcome your trauma through counseling.
Emotional Scars Are Usually Invisible
Because the word “trauma” itself is so emotionally charged, many people avoid acknowledging painful experiences as traumatic out of fear of being considered unstable. And while trauma is often characterized as violent and visible, there are instances of silent trauma that exist all around us, taking the form of emotional neglect, disruptions in childhood attachments, systemic racism, and vicarious traumatization as experienced by law enforcement personnel, medical professionals or even athletes who suffer life changing injuries, among many others. As such, there are very few individuals who will not undergo some degree of trauma in their lives.
Unfortunately, however, there remains a stigma attached to reaching out when it comes to mental health and therapy. The stigma often stems from shame about being seen as weak or unfit, and this standard of “keeping it together” precludes those of us who are suffering from seeking the help we need. So often, the professions we hold, our role in our families, and our cultural backgrounds create certain expectations that we should be able to perform and overcome in any circumstance, no matter how dire.
For military families, for instance, this expectation often feeds into the sense of duty and obedience that comes with a profession that faces combat, hypervigilance, and constant relocation. To use another example, the medical community is often expected to have all of the answers and approach critical situations with stoicism rather than emotion. These illustrations are hardly exhaustive of the various traumas that individuals face and don’t account for the vast population of people who have endured abuse at the hands of parents, caregivers, and/or institutions.
Too often, we feel as though our experiences don’t warrant sympathy or support because our scars aren’t visible to the eye. Moreover, we may worry that we’ll begin to unravel if we confront the “elephant in the room” that is our trauma—so instead of examining and resolving the root cause, we end up trying to numb or treat the symptoms only to land ourselves in the same cycle of isolation, conflict, and emotional dysregulation.
There is a place for you to explore and navigate trauma, however, and it exists inside of the safe counseling space at bareWell, where our team of therapists is invested in your healing.
Therapy Gives You An Opportunity To Adjust The Relationship You Have To Your Trauma
Relief from emotional distress comes when you can learn to tolerate the entire range of emotions you experience—including the especially painful ones. Therapy allows you to gain insight and explore your past so that you can develop a better understanding of your experiences and how they have impacted you. By working through your trauma, you will begin to experience emotional congruence; in other words, therapy allows for what you feel on the inside to match up with what the world sees on the outside.
Moreover, by overcoming the hurdles and resolving the blocks that have hindered your progress for so long, therapy also opens up an opportunity to be more mindful and deliberate. Such authenticity will allow you to foster meaningful connections with others and feel self-sufficient when it comes to confronting and weathering all of life’s struggles.
Throughout the process of trauma counseling, you will collaborate with your therapist in finding meaningful solutions together. By tailoring our approach to meet the needs of each unique client, we will empower and support you as you explore your history and the belief system that you developed as a result of your experiences. By viewing trauma as multidimensional, we will not only focus on the traumatic event(s) but also discuss how these painful experiences shaped the narrative of your life and branched out into other areas of your story that may, on the surface, appear otherwise unrelated.
Over time, you will gain a newfound sense of self-awareness and insight as you develop a better understanding of how past trauma has informed your reactions to the world around you. With an integrative approach, our team of therapists will help you to interpret trauma’s effect on your brain, reduce disruptive symptoms, and gain a sense of control over your emotions. At bareWell, we aim to treat the whole person so that you can begin to see that your thoughts, emotions, behaviors work in tandem and not independently from one another.
Our therapists have over forty years of combined experience counseling clients who are struggling with symptoms and emotional distress related to trauma. We have seen the value of therapy in facilitating relief from the psychological and emotional pain they are enduring. And most importantly, we have witnessed the meaningful transformation that can take place when a client’s internal sense of self matches up with their external one.
Hope is within your reach, and it is possible for you to experience pleasure, peace, and fulfillment once again. You’ve already done the hardest part—enduring your trauma. Let us help you heal and make sense of your experience so that you can move away from the pain and into a life of promise.
Maybe you have considered enlisting the help of a trauma therapist, but you have some concerns…
I don’t have the time or money to invest in trauma therapy.
We encourage you to view therapy as an investment in yourself and your future. Sure, this process takes time and money, but the emotional payoff is priceless. We, as a society, spend so much time and money keeping up our outward appearances (i.e., clothing, grooming, and presentation), yet we don’t think to invest in our internal well-being when it comes to finding a sense of happiness and stability. Therapy gives you the chance to upgrade that part of yourself so that you can be more joyful, successful, fulfilled, and productive in your life.
I’m afraid I’ll look weak, unfit, or unstable by seeking the help of a trauma therapist.
Look: everyone has baggage—nobody gets through life unscathed. However, the fact that you are considering trauma counseling reflects the inherent strength and courage of your character. No one ever said that trauma therapy is the easy way out or the choice of the weak—it’s messy, hard work that requires grit and tenacity. There is not much difference between lifting a tangible weight and an emotional weight; they both require great strength.
I am afraid I will feel worse if I confront my trauma in therapy.
First and foremost, the therapeutic process is about relief and healing. That will always be our main goal. Sure, there is a chance you’ll feel worse before you feel better, but without crawling through the rubble, you’ll never come out the other side. You don’t have to do it alone; let us help you get there.
Rewrite The Role That Trauma Plays In Your Story
If unresolved trauma is impacting your relationships, abilities, and sense of self, therapy at bareWell can help you find meaningful solutions and relief. For additional information or to schedule a free, 15-minute consultation, please fill out our contact form to learn more.
Please note that due to COVID-19, we will be conducting all of our sessions online for the time being.
