Trauma Therapy
LGBTQ+ Therapy In person in Los Angeles and Online throughout California
Are you struggling with the impacts of trauma and craving relief?
Are you feeling numb, edgy, or disconnected without knowing why?
Have you ever lost track of time or had feelings that don’t match what is going on around you?
Has life been feeling disjointed, like you can’t always remember when events took place or who was there?
Do you react in ways that are out of proportion with the situation at hand?
Are you stuck in the same cycles of emotions and relationships, no matter how badly you want change?
These symptoms and experiences can feel frightening, isolating, and confusing. With the expert support of a trauma-informed specialist you can find your way back to feeling safe and in tune with your emotions, needs, and loved ones. Trauma counseling can help you find a way out of the fog.
Feeling Disconnected From Your Body and Emotions Can Be Disorienting
Whether you experienced a disturbing event or a long period of distressing circumstances, trauma can leave you struggling long after the cause has passed. Oftentimes, trauma is only visible through its effects, like feeling disconnected or out of control. These experiences can get in the way of feeling fully connected and fulfilled in life.
Additionally, you may blame yourself for what happened or worry that it was all your fault. This, too, is a normal reaction to trauma, since it’s common to internalize what happened as a means of coping with how difficult it is.
The effects of trauma can also be present in your body, manifesting in a racing heart, muscular pain, and headaches. Although these are normal bodily experiences, continuously struggling with them even when you’re no longer in harm’s way can negatively affect the quality of your day-to-day life.
Trauma treatment with an experienced therapist can help you find peace within your body, overcome your sense of self-blame, and understand that you are worthy of recovering from your traumatic experiences.
On Your Own, Overcoming Trauma Is Harder Than It May Seem
Many people tell themselves to push through trauma on their own or simply forget about it and move on, but this is easier said than done. After all, trauma impacts the body as much as it does the brain—hence the popular saying “the body keeps the score.”
Because of this, you can’t just rationalize your way out of trauma. You have to do the deeper work of engaging with the body and understanding how trauma shows up within it. To do so, sometimes you need the help of a trained professional.
Additionally, because of how overwhelming trauma is, most people try to deal with it through means of escapism. They resort to drugs, alcohol, and other unhealthy coping mechanisms, which only buries their pain temporarily and ultimately makes it worse. A trauma-informed therapist can help you create coping skills that provide lasting relief from trauma instead of merely offering an emotional band-aid.
If You’re Dealing With Trauma, You’re Not Alone
Most of us think of trauma as the result of natural disasters, car accidents, and other earth-shattering events, but the truth is that trauma is more all-encompassing than that. Many of us have struggled with trauma without even knowing it. We may have experienced an accumulation of emotional wounds that originated in our childhood and built up over long stretches of time.
What’s more, sometimes trauma isn’t so much about what happened as what didn’t happen. For example, maybe you didn’t get the love and acceptance you needed when you were younger. Perhaps you had parents who were often absent, struggling with mental health problems, or emotionally unavailable. All of these experiences can leave you vulnerable, disrupt your sense or safety, and create a deep need for emotional support.
LGBTQ+ Therapy In person in Los Angeles and Online throughout California for:
QPOC
Untangle The Trauma Knots And Find Your True Self With The Power Of Therapy
In trauma therapy, you will reconnect with your mind and body and develop coping tools for triggering situations, enabling you to feel safe again. Whether your trauma stems from childhood or happened recently, therapy can help you slowly and safely begin to pull on the strings that have tied you to traumatic experiences. Your therapist will work with you to understand how the experiences you have had are impacting your ability to trust yourself and others.
Additionally, we will explore how you may have developed patterns of coping that at one time worked to keep you safe but aren’t working so well anymore. These coping tools can repeat themselves across different areas in your life, such as your relationships with friends, partners, co-workers, and family.
Your trauma counselor will work with you to connect the different pieces of yourself and your history to help you feel whole, unified, and free. We will slowly nurture a new set of healthy tools that work for you. This way, you can feel grounded in your identity, foster balanced and supportive relationships, and experience your world as inviting and engaging.
Let’s put together the pieces to help you find your true Self.
Building a Bridge Back to Your True Self
Even though feeling good in your body has been difficult and you find yourself inexplicably feeling tense, therapy can help you create internal safety and work through the physical ways in which trauma has become stuck in your body. Additionally, you’ll learn to reconstruct the narrative you tell yourself about your life so that you can view your past—and your present—in a more empowering and life-affirming light.
Connecting your past to how you currently show up in life is just the tip of the iceberg in healing. What has happened to you does not have to dictate how you show up in your day-to-day life. We will work together to help you move from being in a fog of difficult-to-describe emotions to developing language and insight into your experiences. This way, you will be free from the emotional roulette of anger, fear, and sadness. You can begin living a life where you fully engage with your emotions, yourself, and the community around you.
No matter how hopeless you feel today, recovery is possible! Trauma counseling can help you forge a path to experiencing your life in a more whole and well-rounded way!
You Think You’re Ready to Begin Your Trauma Therapy Journey, but You’re Wondering…
What if talking about trauma makes things worse?
Entering trauma treatment means beginning a new chapter, trying something new, and making friends with change instead of maintaining the status quo of discomfort and disconnection. As you heal from trauma, there may be shifts that feel intense, but your therapist will be by your side throughout treatment to guide and support you. They will ensure that you never feel out of your depth.
Do I have to tell my therapist everything all at once?
One of the most important parts of healing from trauma is learning or re-learning to trust again. In therapy, this means that your trauma therapist will never push you to share before you are ready and will help you prepare to engage with therapy in a safe and grounded way.
Will my therapist judge me?
No, your therapist won’t judge you. Part of building a therapeutic relationship is building trust so that you have a secure space to heal from. Because your therapist will be intentional about this and ensure you have adequate time to settle into the therapeutic process, you get to build trust before sharing information that feels too vulnerable.
You Deserve to Heal Your Trauma.
We Can Help.
Are you ready to meet your trauma-informed therapist and begin to heal? Schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation to get a sense of which trauma therapist you feel most comfortable with and start your recovery journey at OSTC.
