A 5-Part Trauma Series: Trauma (PTSD) Symptoms and Treatment
- Lisa Shouldice
- Oct 29
- 8 min read
Part 5: Treatment and Trauma
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Introduction
This blog continues a 5-part series on trauma symptoms and treatment.
The 5 parts will include 1) Hypervigilance/Anxiety symptoms 2) Depressive symptoms 3) Avoidance/Dissociation symptoms 4) Physical/Somatic symptoms and finally 5) Treatment.
Each piece will be released approximately every 2-3 weeks.
We have arrived at the final piece of this series in which we will cover the different types of treatment for trauma and trauma symptoms.
They are all well researched and effective, often being interwoven in an integrated way by experienced practitioners. It is about finding the right treatment, likely a set of treatments, that are right for you.
You may also find a particular treatment works to get started Ex. Group CBT, and then want to try a longer-term, one-on-one treatment once you feel some relief but still crave deeper healing and insight.
There are many effective options to choose from.
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Calming Central Nervous System & Optimal Self-care
It is so important to begin any treatment by acknowledging the changes trauma and PTSD symptoms bring to the central nervous system through increased anxiety and hypervigilance.
All mental health and related physical ailments are exacerbated by the chronic activation of the CNS. So this must be the starting point in any treatment.
A newer theory that explains the importance of the vagus nerve, CNS stimulation and trauma responses is Polyvagal Theory. Polyvagal Theory
There are many ways to calm the central nervous system, creating a toolbox you can draw from. It will take time and trying different things to determine what works for you.
Does listening to music calm and relax you?
Does a camping trip, spending time in nature ground you?
Does an intense workout at the gym feel like a necessity?
Maybe a walk through your favourite neighbourhood path is best? Do you bring your dog? The kids?
A technique I would be remiss not to mention, as it is so effective, is meditation.
Meditation that is practiced on an ongoing basis, with regularity, actually changes/heals your central nervous system so it takes more stressors to activate it. It does not have to be an hour of meditation, it can be only minutes, but practiced almost daily to get these powerful benefits.
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is used to redirect negative thoughts. It assesses what your distorted thoughts are. Practical exercises are then completed with your therapist to determine the core beliefs that developed due to your personal trauma and related experiences and relationships. Exercises are then used to reshape your thinking and address these harmful thoughts.
CBT is also often offered in a group setting. More on CBT
Once you have learned these exercises you can use them for years, fine-honing their use in your life.
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT)
Dialectical Behavioural Therapy was created to help you learn affect regulation, usually intense feelings, as opposed to numbing, low affect.
It is most often presented in either a group setting or integrated into one-on-one, longer term trauma therapy to support reducing intense affect in your life.
This is accomplished through practical exercises and self-care practices.
This has been found to be the most effective for people who have been diagnosed with
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) as affect regulation concerns are core to this experience. Research link
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Solution-focused Therapy (SFT)
Solution-focused Therapy and related techniques are used to address the relational and practical issues a trauma survivor may need help with. It is short-term goal-oriented and helps hone problem-solving skills. It is future-oriented, training you to move forward and avoid dwelling on the past as you navigate life.
An example is learning assertiveness and healthy boundaries in the family that abused you as a child.
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Mindfulness Therapy
Mindfulness begins with being facilitated by a therapist to help you become more aware of thoughts, emotions and patterns. This always you to make new choices.
This is also a way of being taught to slow down the central nervous system, enabling increased self-knowledge and biofeedback. It decreases dissociation, allowing you to be more present in life experience, including feelings. It also helps create a detachment from emotional intensity, slowing everything and making you more aware.
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Emotion-focused Therapy (EFT)
Emotion-focused Therapy is used to coach you in fully processing and experiencing your feelings. We rarely get a chance do to this in our busy lives.
This means talking about feelings and exploring them in order to help you experience, identify and regulate emotions, to better guide you in your relationships and decision-making.
These techniques help clients who struggle with affective and personality disorders as well as trauma. Emotion-focused sessions include discussing feelings in a complete way or emotion-coaching, helping you transform and make meaning in new ways.
Emotion-focused techniques are also used in trauma work to fully process shame and integrate memories, unfreezing them to fully process through the neocortex, the logical, executive functioning part of the brain, thereby reducing trauma symptoms. Ex. flashbacks.
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Attachment/Relational Psychoanalytic Therapies
Attachment therapies make sense of the way we relate to others, beginning with our family.
Trauma impacts our sense of self and ability to trust and be close to others. We can form insecure, avoidant or disorganized attachment styles Learn More that make it seemingly impossible to be close to others.
Attachment and relational therapies heal this by both exploring relationships in your life and use the therapeutic relationship/alliance to heal, learning new ways to be close to people.
Trauma happens in attachment and is healed in attachment as well.
Psychoanalytic approaches include an analysis and human understanding of the brain and development that includes several founders Ex. Jungian and their students. They access the deep unconscious mind, break down coping defenses and rebuild a new way of being.
They are varied and different, unique to each psychoanalytic practitioner. They are usually long-term and intensive. Freud is the most commonly recognized theorist and initial practitioner.
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)
Internal Family Systems can be used in many ways but in terms of trauma, it works with the various “parts” that make up our personality Ex Angry part.
All parts have feelings and roles in our lives.
All parts are identified, acknowledged. They are worked with to heal and harmonize conflicting parts to find and strengthen a core self. IFS Dick Schwartz
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Narrative Therapy
This is an approach that is used to “rewrite” your life story. We all have a life story, we are narrative beings in every area of our lives.
When we have experienced trauma, we may focus on negative pieces/memories. We may feel victimized feeling that life is always hard.
Narrative therapy supports retelling your story and becoming aware of pieces that no longer work, shaping a retelling that focuses on our strengths and the ways we survived.
It is empowering, getting to rewrite your story and choose new more flexible ways of being.
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Chemotherapy
Many people find medication helps mitigate mental health symptoms.
There are medications that mitigate anxiety, depressive and other trauma symptoms. You can try to reduce intrusive thoughts/flashbacks and get much needed sleep.
Most people do not find this manages symptoms completely. The good news is that is that it works really well as an adjunct to therapy, with research finding the most relief is reported through a combination of medication and therapy. Research Link
I like to suggest it to clients as your life can be better, you do not need to suffer. It can help even temporarily, to get relief. Ex. If we do not sleep, we are quicker to trigger and poor affect. Getting a sleeping medication can support you as you heal, mitigating other symptoms.
Talk to your GP. They will either assess and prescribe or refer to a psychologist for diagnosis or a psychiatrist as they are specialized.
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Non-Verbal Treatment
Trauma is encoded in the non-verbal parts of our brain responsible for implicit memory. Janina Fisher Therefore, in order to fully heal we need to access what is stored in our body and visual centres. This makes it imperative to fully process trauma through fully, mitigating symptoms. There are many ways to do this. Many of these can be integrated as a part of a therapeutic/healing relationship.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is a technique that accesses the brains natural healing centre and stimulates it using bilateral brain stimulation.
An EMDR therapist will assess you and identify key memories related to your trauma and held in your implicit memory centres, your amygdala. Then you allow those memories to surface while the therapist introduces bilateral stimulation, often using flashing lights or facilitated tapping.
This heals traumatic memories by tapping into our inherent, natural healing centre.
Sandtray
Sandtray a technique that uses sand play and small figures to visually depict and experience a world that you build in session, creating a world of your choosing that you are in control of. It taps into the unconscious to heal trauma in a gentle, less verbal way that is very powerful.
It can be transformational helping to process grief, past hurts or help to identify and process what is causing or maintaining depressive and other mental health symptoms, enabling recovery. It provides the possibility, to set up a world corresponding to your inner emotional state. Through free, creative play, unconscious processes are made visible in visual form.
Somatic techniques
Somatic therapy techniques can be either a main technique or integrated into therapeutic sessions to access trauma stored in the body.
This is accomplished through guided questioning, breathwork, movement and guided body scans/awareness to fully integrate the trauma through other parts of the brain, unlocking blocked/held experience.
Movement therapies
Movement therapies are facilitated by a therapist and can include physical practices such as yoga, dance, martial arts to access trauma held in the body. This aids full integration and processing of traumatic memories that are not fully healed due to the fight/flight/freeze response activated during a traumatic experience. Movement therapies foster the mind/body connection.
Art therapy
Art Therapy uses drawing, painting and others crafts to access trauma memories, bring them to the surface of awareness and heal them. It facilitates the exploration of feelings and inner conflicts. The art therapist offers reflections and an analysis, guiding healing.
Grounding techniques
Grounding techniques are used to ground you when you are emotionally triggered &/or dissociate due to either stressful stimuli or stimuli related to the trauma. They use your 5 senses to pull you out of yourself and back to the physical, corporeal world. Ex. Describe a given object to yourself in extreme detail.
Trauma (PTSD) Treatment: Maintenance
Once healing and symptom mitigation has been successful, it is important to remain committed to self-care and a healthy life and relationships to ensure long-term goals are nurtured and maintained.
Boundaries
Boundaries it is important to insist on healthy boundaries and being treated with respect in your relationships. This will ensure not falling into trauma responses such as people pleasing when we are feeling insecure and under stress.
Healthy Relationships
Healthy Relationships we cannot heal and have resilient mental health if we are in toxic relationship dynamics. It is imperative to choose partners that support our newer, healthier selves. You may also need to shape healthy interactions with family or create distance to maintain your well-earned gains.
Stress Management
Stress Management stress is always a trigger for the relapse of symptoms and unhealthy coping strategies. If you are experiencing increased stress you will need to increase self-care strategies and may want to get supportive counselling to manage healthy stress levels.
Conclusion and Next Steps
This completes the 5-Part series on Trauma Symptoms and Treatment. Thanks for tuning in! If you would like to read the entire article together, it will be posted as one complete piece in a few weeks.
Stay tuned in a few weeks for the entire series to be posted in one final large piece.
Lisa S.
