Understanding + Healing Trauma

Trauma refers to any experience that overwhelms our ability to cope. 

Trauma can include adverse childhood experiences such as the divorce of parents, abuse (sexual, physical, and emotional), neglect, or witnessing your parent struggle with mental illness or substance use. 

Trauma also includes horrific events like being the victim of a violent crime, surviving a natural disaster, living through the unexpected death of a loved one, or facing ongoing and systemic discrimination. 

Finally, ongoing circumstances like living in poverty or through the uncertainty in immigration or a medical diagnosis can be traumatic just as returning home from combat can be. 

Trauma can result in depression and anxiety, feeling alone and hopeless, disordered eating, substance use, self injurious behaviors like cutting, deviance, loss of interest, difficulty concentrating, feeling disconnected, insomnia, irritability, mistrust, difficulty in close relationships, nightmares, rage, and even physical health symptoms such as headaches, chronic pain, GI disturbances, and decreased immunity. 

The effects of trauma are the visible parts of a weed we see above ground. Individuals often feel frustrated when, after previous therapy, their symptoms return or remain relatively unchanged. Talk therapy for trauma is like only cutting the leaves off a weed. Talk therapy does not get to the roots. 

In the case of trauma, the roots are in the body, deep in our brains. Thus, we utilize an integrated approach, which includes: affective neuroscience, attachment theory, interpersonal neurobiology, mindfulness, and body-based (or somatic) modalities - namely EMDR and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy - in the treatment of trauma. We work with sensations, impulses, movements, and memories arising within the body to process traumatic content. Only after we work with what’s being stored in the sensory and motor systems can we then integrate emotions and cognitions. 

We also offer Ketamine-assisted Psychotherapy. Ketamine is a dissociative medication that allows the individual to tap into non-ordinary states of consciousness and their own inner healer’s wisdom. Ketamine is nearly twice as effective as traditional antidepressant and anxiolytic medications and is appropriate for enduring symptoms of depression and/or trauma. Ketamine-assisted Psychotherapy prioritizes safety, intention, and ceremony to facilitate long-term symptom reduction and, in some cases, resolution. (In the coming months, we are working to implement the use of psilocybin, as well as ketamine, following legislation passed in the state of Colorado in November 2022. Stay tuned!)

Coming to grips with your history of trauma can feel scary and even discouraging. Healing from trauma is possible, but only if we get to the roots. 

Below is a list of some of the kinds of trauma we have experience addressing:

• Abuse and assault (cultural, emotional, mental, physical, religious, sexual, and verbal)

• Accidents

• Bullying

• Community violence and terrorist attacks

• Discrimination

• Disenfranchised grief (such as job loss, pregnancy loss, retirement, and so on)

• Death of a loved one (including pets)

• Domestic violence and intimate partner violence

• First responders

• Intergenerational trauma

• Medical trauma and chronic illness

• Military trauma

• Natural disasters

• Neglect

• Parental mental illness or substance abuse

• Poverty

• Refugee and and immigration trauma

• Separations (partner and familial)

• Sex trafficking