Trauma-Informed Approach
We specialize in trauma-informed counselling, where psychological symptoms are viewed and treated as a natural response to unhealed trauma.
At INDIGROW, traumatic experiences are defined as any life event or circumstance that exceeded a person’s ability to cope with what happened. Trauma can be defined as the resulting emotional, physical, or behavioural manifestation of the traumatic experience. These experiences change neural connections in our brain and this impacts our relationship with ourselves, others, and how we create meaning in the world.
What Is Trauma?
There are a wide variety of experiences and life events that fall under the realm of trauma. Most commonly, people associate war, violence, abuse, and disasters as events that can be labeled as traumatic.
What people don’t realize is that any life event has the potential to be experienced as traumatic. From this perspective, trauma is defined as anything that you just aren’t prepared to deal with at the time that it happens. This means that each person experiences trauma differently. An event may be traumatic to one person and not to another depending on the resources they had available to cope with what happened. Some examples of this are:
Bullying
Childhood neglect
Divorce and breakups
Grief and loss
Illness and injuries
Exposure to any form of abuse or violence
Parents or family members with addictions
Having a parent or caregiver with mental health concerns
Adoption
Public shaming
Unemployment
Moving to a new location
What Happens When We Experience Something Traumatic?
Throughout the day our brain is continually bombarded with information from all of our senses. The brain’s job is to make sense of and organize all incoming information into useful memories so we can learn from it and adapt to our environment.
As the brain receives information from the environment, it works to filter through the material similar to how a digestive system absorbs nutrients from food. Our brain holds onto the useful aspects of an event and disregards the parts that aren’t relevant.
When an event elicits an intense emotional or physical response, the brain’s processing system becomes overwhelmed and the experience isn’t fully metabolized. Unlike the stomach, the brain is not able to pass something through without fully digesting it. Instead, it holds onto the information it received until it is able to make sense of it in a way that is adaptive.
Until this happens, the parts of the experience that have not been fully processed change the way we see ourselves, the world and relationships. Similar to food that irritates the system, these unprocessed experiences can manifest as mental health concerns or result in unhealthy coping mechanisms.
How Does Trauma Affect Us?
A variety of mental health concerns can be rooted in a traumatic experience or series of distressing events that haven’t been adaptively processed. We aren’t always consciously aware of how unprocessed past events can manifest themselves as current problems in our life. Unprocessed trauma can take the form of:
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Depression
Anxiety and panic attacks
Phobias
Addictions
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
Eating disorders
Chronic pain
Insomnia
Low self-esteem
Difficulty establishing intimate relationships
Performance anxiety
Recurrent nightmares
Relationship difficulties
How Do I Heal Unprocessed Trauma?
There are a variety of different approaches to healing unprocessed trauma. A trauma-informed therapist works from the perspective that unprocessed life events are contributing to what the client is experiencing now. At INDIGROW, our therapists are all trauma informed, using treatment such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) to help our clients adaptively process traumatic events.
What Is EMDR?
Trauma does not live in the talk therapy part of the brain, which means that talking about what happened will have a minimal effect on changing how you feel about it. EMDR is a well researched approach to treating trauma that initiates the information processing system in the brain, in order to adaptively process trauma that is stuck in the nervous system.
Research indicates that in the REM sleep cycle, the brain’s information processing is functioning at its peak. EMDR uses eye movements, sound, or tapping to mimic what happens in this stage, allowing for traumatic memories to be adaptively processed. Once these experiences have been moved through the nervous system, clients experience a reduction in distress and psychological symptoms. Since EMDR works with the brain, new neural networks are created which results in lasting change with minimal effort from the client.