Trauma Therapy
Rebuilding safety, connection, and joy
Anxiety, Depression, Addictions, and Trauma
How could trauma therapy be helpful? You may be flooded with anxiety, panic, or flashbacks in certain situations. Depression may be so overwhelming it feels impossible to make any of the changes you want in your life. Behaviors or addictions that you don’t want may have become a way you cope with it all.
These issues could be affecting your relationships, friendships, or work. Or perhaps you avoid relationships altogether and feel disconnected from others.
As humans, we endure and survive many traumas. You may have survived traumatic events, such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, rape, accidents, combat, etc. You are not alone.
Other types of traumas are less apparent but can have similar effects, such as the expectation to be perfect, shaming by a parent, shaming by a religion, being bullied in school, transphobia, racism, homophobia, or ongoing body-shaming messages from media and society.
A Trauma-Informed Approach
Trauma therapy offers hope for healing. Whether you’re coming in for anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress, relationship problems, self-harm, problematic addictions, or something else, these patterns likely emerged from a need to cope or survive. Life’s traumas are often at the root of what brings us into therapy.
Trauma therapy at Healing Umbrella involves building safety and connection in our therapeutic relationship, finding and building on your current strengths and resources, learning and practicing effective skills you may need, and working together to address the root of the issues.
EMDR Therapy
Healing Umbrella offers EMDR, which stands for Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. EMDR is a comprehensive and evidence-based approach to safely address the effects of trauma.
Traumatic memories are stored in the brain as images, body sensations, and other sensory experiences that get activated or “triggered” when something in our present experience consciously or unconsciously reminds us. Often, especially with the types of traumas that are not specific events, the body remembers even though our language brain may not have a “story.”
EMDR moves the memories from the limbic or emotional part of your brain to the prefrontal cortex so you can integrate the memory and leave it in the past where it belongs.
IFS, DBT, and Other Somatic Trauma Therapies
Trauma is stored in the body, even when our brain can’t remember stories or find language for them. It is also passed through generations, especially in marginalized communities such as with BIPOC, Queer, immigrants, and other minorities.
Healing Umbrella therapists blend and use various evidence-based therapeutic approaches to help our clients reconnect with their bodies and present experience, such as IFS, Somatic Experiencing, DBT, and others. While healing looks different for everyone and there is no “right” way, reconnecting with our body is a key ingredient. And having understanding of Neurodiversity helps our therapists find the most compassionate and effective roads within each person that lead toward healing.
IFS, or Internal Family Systems, is a therapeutic approach that helps us meet, explore, and work with our “Parts.” Usually, our parts (such as depression, addictive behaviors, anxiety, panic, etc) bring us into therapy. IFS is a powerful, compassionate, evidence-based transformative process that blends well with EMDR to unburden our parts from the trauma they hold so our true Self can emerge.
Healing Umbrella offers DBT-informed therapy. DBT, or Dialectical Behavior Therapy, helps us work with overwhelming emotions and behaviors that are not serving us well. It emphasizes skills we all need to tolerate distress, shift our current emotional experience, live in the present moment, and effectively manage our relationships. DBT is proven to be effective in dealing with suicidal urges, self-harming urges, substance use disorders, and behavioral addictions. DBT is an evidence-based approach that can not only increase your sense of peace currently, but also give you the skills you need to heal from the legacy of trauma.
Sand Tray, Art, and Other Expressive Therapies
Creativity and playfulness are at the heart of healing. While we think about things a lot and can even understand them intellectually, that alone does not always help us make the changes we need to make.
With adults, teens, and kids, Healing Umbrella therapists often integrate art, sand tray, play, and other creative and effective therapeutic approaches to help meet our clients’ unique tools of expression and connection.
Since words do not always connect to how trauma is stored in the body, we would be honored to work with you and your brain’s own unique gifts to find paths toward healing.