Trauma is a pervasive problem in the U.S., and it can have a lasting impact on your mental, emotional, and physical health. To properly address and treat your trauma symptoms, it helps to first understand the complex nature of trauma. That knowledge will be essential for finding the right form of trauma therapy in Dallas, TX for your needs.
To break down the facts surrounding trauma conditions, we asked our mental health professionals to provide their industry expertise.
What is Trauma?
The American Psychological Association defines trauma as an emotional response to a terrible event or series of events, such as an accident, a physical attack, or a natural disaster. The emotional response is often so intense that it overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope, resulting in feelings of helplessness and a diminished sense of self.
Trauma symptoms tend to have lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and physical, social, and emotional well-being. Trauma can occur from all kinds of situations, and people can even have trauma from an event that occurred to someone else.
Individual cases can often be categorized into one of three different types of trauma, which include:
- Acute trauma – This usually results from a single incident like a car accident.
- Chronic trauma – This is caused by repeated exposure to a dangerous or stressful event (e.g., domestic violence, bullying, etc.).
- Complex trauma – These cases are caused by repeated exposure to events that are severely distressing or traumatic (e.g., sexual abuse, war, chronic abandonment, etc.).
Trauma can occur at any point in your lifetime, however, research has shown that children are particularly vulnerable to trauma because of their rapidly developing brains.
Is Trauma the Same as PTSD?
While post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can develop from a traumatic event or series of events, it is its own mental health disorder. The difference between trauma and PTSD is defined by how the traumatic event affects the individual and how long the traumatic response continues.
When trauma goes unprocessed or untreated, it can become embedded in the nervous system and progress into PTSD. For trauma to be diagnosed as PTSD, symptoms need to last longer than a month and must be severe enough to interfere with daily functioning.
How to Recover from Trauma
Healing from a traumatic event or change is never an easy process. The road to recovery will be long and challenging, and it isn’t always a linear process or a pretty one. Everyone navigates through trauma recovery differently and your overall arc will be unique as well. It’s important to remember that:
- Recovery happens in stages
- Healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum
- Your trauma doesn’t define who you are
- And you have options for community support
What to Know About Trauma Therapy in Dallas, TX
To successfully overcome your trauma, it is important to have a personalized treatment plan in place that integrates a variety of therapeutic interventions and techniques.
Talk therapy is often a top treatment option for most people because of its accessibility and long track record of success with mental health issues. Counselors and talk therapists can guide you through your trauma processing through a variety of techniques. However, this isn’t your only option for trauma therapy in Dallas, TX.
There are other unique treatment models that can be highly effective at alleviating trauma and symptoms of PTSD in the short and long term. It’s worth considering holistic treatments like neurofeedback.
Neurofeedback is an innovative and non-invasive brain training therapy that blends seamlessly into any existing talk therapy plans. This treatment utilizes EEG “Thought Technology” to measure your brainwave activity in real time as you work through a series of mental exercises. When your brain activity is within optimal ranges, you will receive a reward to reinforce that behavior. When your activity drops out of those ranges, the reward is taken away.
Over time, neurofeedback can help re-balance your cognitive activities and improve your brain function in overactive or underactive areas. The treatment can be customized to your specific trauma disorder or issue, and your neurofeedback clinician will structure your training to ease symptoms and reduce the severity of trauma triggers.
Get Started with Braincode Centers Today
If you are interested in exploring holistic options for trauma therapy in Dallas, TX, look no further than Braincode Centers. We are a top local practitioner of neurofeedback therapy, and we will build a customized treatment plan for you to address your trauma. We can even help you reduce or eliminate the need for prescription medications, thus giving you back the control to maintain a calm state on your own.
Contact our trauma team at Braincode Centers today to learn how we can help you work through your trauma.
