EMDR Therapists for Trauma in San Francisco, CA
EMDR Therapy for Trauma
What Is Trauma? Types, Symptoms, And EMDR Treatment in San Francisco
Bad things happen to everyone. Pain is a stranger to no one—it’s a part of life. Normally, when a person lives an unpleasant or painful experience, they feel a range of emotions in response. After processing what happened, they eventually move through it and, although it remains an unpleasant memory, it doesn’t continue to cause distress. However, an ordinary painful experience is different from a traumatic event, which produces mental trauma.
What is trauma?
The American Psychological Association defines trauma as an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster. However, trauma does not only occur following an acute, one-time incident. Trauma can also result from prolonged exposure to a stressful situation that makes a person feel emotionally or physically threatened. Poverty, racism, childhood neglect, and living with a family member with a medical or mental health condition are a few experiences that can cause trauma.
Traumatic events cause a psychological injury that produces psychological pain until the injury heals, which can take weeks, months, or years. While emotional distress is a normal and healthy response to a traumatic event or experience, prolonged symptoms can be a sign that the brain has not fully healed.
Types of trauma
Trauma can result from many different situations in life. These are a few types of trauma a person can have:
Acute trauma: Results from a single overwhelming event such as a car accident, natural disaster, or sexual assault.
Chronic or repetitive trauma: Results from a recurring traumatic event such as getting treatment for a chronic illness.
Complex trauma: Results from multiple varied traumatic events such as childhood neglect and domestic violence or abuse.
Vicarious trauma: Results from empathetic engagement with a trauma survivor or person living a traumatic experience. Think healthcare workers caring for COVID-19 patients during the pandemic.
The degree of trauma that a person has depends on many factors including the intensity and frequency of the traumatic event(s), whether the person had good coping skills at the time of trauma, and whether there was a safe, supportive environment to process the traumatic event after it occurred.
Symptoms of Trauma
Trauma is stored in the brain and body. In the same way that a brain injury can impact the brain and body’s ability to do different functions, trauma can impair optimal brain function, especially when triggered.
When a brain hasn’t healed from trauma, emotional and physical distress can happen when something triggers memories of the traumatic event. A person can feel triggered after being exposed to even small parts of the original memory, such as sounds, images, smells, faces, and specific interactions.
A common example is a war veteran who is triggered by noises similar to the ones they heard at war. Even when they are in a different year, thousands of miles away, and this time it’s just a motorcycle backfiring, the brain and body may respond the same way they did when the person was actually in danger. This happens because trauma can be triggered even if there is no present threat. Years after a traumatic event, a person can feel as though they are reliving it.
Trauma activates the fight, flight, or freeze response of the brain. A person who is triggered may respond in a wide range of ways, from having a panic attack (fight) to shutting down and immediately withdrawing from a situation (freeze or flight). Trauma can manifest in emotional outbursts, anger, fear, anxiety, sadness, irritability, and depression.
Trauma can also manifest in many different physical symptoms. Digestive issues, fatigue, headaches, appetite changes, sleep issues, aches, and pain can all be symptoms of trauma. The emotional and physical symptoms of trauma can be acute, chronic, or both.
Trauma is very common. Research suggests that 60-75% of North Americans experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives, but the percentage is believed to be higher. Some believe that a trauma survivor is a severely dysfunctional person that’s unable to do some normal daily tasks. Although this is true in some cases, many people who have untreated trauma are able to go on with their lives and have a family, a job, friends, and hobbies, yet symptoms of their trauma can be triggered at any time and affect their lives long-term. Living a relatively normal life on the outside does not mean there is an absence of trauma.
Healing trauma with EMDR.
Unfortunately, trauma is not something you can just get over. Doctors wouldn’t tell a patient with a brain injury that if they ignore their symptoms their injury will heal. In the same way that a broken bone or punctured lung needs treatment, trauma is healed through evidence-based treatment.
There are multiple treatment options for trauma. While traditional talk therapy is effective, EMDR is considered the gold standard treatment for trauma. Some scientific studies suggest that around 90% of victims of single trauma don't have PTSD after going for only three 90-min EMDR sessions. Another research suggests that all trauma victims did not have a PTSD diagnosis after only six sessions of EMDR.
EMDR therapy suggests that the mind is able to heal from mental trauma just like the body recovers from physical-force trauma. The process consists of eight phases, which you can learn more about here.
EMDR allows the brain to reprocess a traumatic event, like letting a wound close and scar over. In the same way that a closed and healed wound is no longer irritated when touched, after successful EMDR therapy, the brain is no longer launched into emotional distress when the painful memories resurface. A person can experience disturbing thoughts and memories differently, becoming free from their past.
If you believe you may have experienced trauma at one point in your life, you are not alone. There is hope and there is help. If you’d like to learn more about what the healing process can be for you, reach out to one of our EMDR-trained therapists by clicking below.
