TRAUMA
Counselling
Trauma is not neatly packaged and planned for. They are random acts and mostly, chaotic and highly stressful for everyone involved.
Traumatic events can leave you feeling shocked, anxious, depressed and lost.
Unfortunately, many people experience terrible situations throughout their lives. However, some events cannot be healed or changed with time or by talking about it. It takes more than that to shift a traumatic state.
Trauma counselling and treatment is necessary for situations that have emotional, psychological, physical and mental meanings that create intense reactions and patterns of behavior. Traumatic events can change a person, purely by the experience, even if they were not directly involved.
The fact is, the traumatic event can be relived over and over again in the future when Post Traumatic Stress Disorder triggers, activate PTSD flashbacks of the trauma. This is where Trauma Counselling can help.
A Traumatic Event Is Characterised By:
- A direct threat’s been made to your life or to someone you care about
- Witnessing another person killed or seriously injured
- Witnessing or being involved in extreme physical violence
- A significant threat that was made towards your family or person you love
Trauma Symptoms Addressed in Counselling...
- Re-experiencing the event by involuntary flashbacks, disturbing recollection of feelings, images, thoughts and memories of the event.
- Emotional Reactions including panic attacks, anxiety, depression, guilt, feeling helpless or experiencing fear.
- Over-active thought processes that induce feelings of anger, rage or guilt. These include over-thinking the event and searching for all the “what-ifs” or how you could’ve dealt with the situation, how you could’ve changed it, or if you could’ve prevented it.
- Relentlessly questioning and analyzing why the event happened, why you were part of it or why you survived to the point where you feel emotional and deeply stressed.
- Insomnia and sleep issues including nightmares, sleep paralysis, or you if you wake up feeling lethargic and unrested.
- Dissociation and the inability to emotionally connect with others or inability to feel compassion or empathy.
- If you’re unable to experience positive feelings or if you seem emotionally numb.
What events would require Trauma Counselling?
- Natural Distasters including cyclones, flooding,earthquakes, fires
- Car, Boat or Plan crash
- Rape, sexual and physical abuse
- Terminal illness
- Physical disability, amputation, disfigurement
- Child birth and surgery complications
- Miltary combat
Of course, this is not a complete list of traumatic events but it’s enough to give you an idea of the types of events that require trauma counselling.
Dealing with trauma is a personal experience and as time goes on, the experience will keep unfolding. You will find yourself moving through a range of emotions, thoughts, and reactions until your mind accepts the experience and files it away. It may feel like you’re on an emotional roller-coaster or you’re feeling stuck and this is a normal reaction to trauma.
Once the event is filed away it’s not that it didn’t happen but it will be less emotionally draining and your trauma symptoms will also reduce. You do need to be aware of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms so that you can prevent or treat it.
You can’t get through a traumatic event on your own. It’s important that you seek professional help if you need it.
The truth is, family and friends can’t always cope with what you’ve experienced. They don’t cope knowing you’ve been through such a terrible event and they don’t know how to support you.
The last thing you want to hear is, “you were so lucky …….”
No-one really feels lucky. They may feel gratitude but more than likely, if they survived when others didn’t, they may feel guilt more than luck.
No-one wants to hear “it’s over now, it’s time to move on”. The situation may be over for everyone else but for someone who is experiencing trauma, the situation is not over. They’re still going through it so it’s not helpful to use these words.
Family and friends have good intentions but don’t always know what to do or say to help someone they love to get through a trauma. It’s not their fault. They just want everyone to be safe and go back to being the person they knew.
So what happens, is you have to censor your experience to protect them so they don’t feel your trauma. Trauma counselling is designed to help you and it can help your family too.
How Trauma Counselling Works
Trauma Counselling is designed to help you get through your trauma by giving you space to feel what you need to feel, say what you need to say and not have to worry about the consequences.
Trauma counselling can help you change your emotions, change your perceptions and change horrific, graphic images that may come to you as flashbacks or like a movie that can play in your mind. It won’t change what’s happened, but it can help you change how you’re experiencing it and how you react to your experience.
Trauma counselling is more than just talking about the event. It includes Clinical Hypnotherapy and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). Trauma Counselling works with your unconscious mind and makes changes to the memories you’ve recorded from the traumatic event.
Everything that’s ever happened in your life is recorded as memories and stored in your unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind’s job is to repress memories that you’re not ready to deal with to protect you. The unconscious mind’s job is also to bring up the memories so that you can deal with them and move on.
If you’re not ready to deal with these memories, you will try and push them away. Pushing away memories is achieved by distraction, getting busy and taking on more work.
It can involve drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, taking drugs, over-eating, and any other addictive behaviors. You can only push away repressed memories for so long.
The problem is, trauma can bring up unresolved issues from the past which makes today’s trauma so much more intense.
Even if you think you’re doing ok it doesn’t hurt to go to Trauma Counselling to ensure you’re not repressing feelings that will come up later in life. This can result in unexplained and uncontrolled feelings of anxiety, panic attacks, anger or depression.
What to Do Next
To get started, click the button below and choose the day and time that suits you best and complete the booking form.
