Trauma Counseling
Helping you heal the pain, connect with yourself and feel safe again.
In-Person in El Dorado Hills or Online throughout California.
“When trauma is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally, heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain and hears the screams healing can begin.”
- Danielle Bernock
When the dark thoughts and painful memories arise, you feel paralyzed; stuck in the overwhelming fear, hurt, sadness, and grief. Trapped in the chaos of a cluttered mind, unable to focus, oscillating between trust and distrust, fear and confidence, joy and sorrow, light and dark. On edge, feeling the constant tension between the two worlds you have become accustomed to living in. The divide between who you feel you are and who you know you could be. Disconnected from the people you love, disconnected from yourself, held back from pursuing your dreams, fearful of the pain that you believe is inevitable. This is trauma.
After a trauma or a culmination of traumatic events, the body often goes into hyperdrive to help you cope. These traumas can turn into unresolved emotions that continue to have an impact on a person’s daily life and ability to effectively connect with themselves. Any threat to your emotional or physical safety can be considered a traumatic event. Trauma is a part of the human experience, and while every experience is unique, trauma is universally stored in our physical body and mind, leaving us to hold onto our pain often unknowingly.
How You Learned to Cope
It is often in the aftermath of your worst traumas that you feel lost, confused and hopeless. You don’t know where to turn because no one showed you how to heal. No one showed you how to move through the pain, how to cope or how to overcome. No one told you that you were allowed to feel EVERYTHING you were feeling in that moment.
Instead, you were sent the message that your emotions were too much and that you needed to hide them away. You were taught to condemn your hurt and pain instead of comfort and feel it. You were taught to abandon yourself, abandon your heart and abandon your path to healing. You were taught to ignore your feelings, banish vulnerability and disconnect from all that exists in the struggle.
This also taught you to doubt your ability to move through and survive your emotions. Instead, you learned to move towards behaviors and things that numbed the pain and kept you from being present with what truly exists within. You over busied yourself, engaged in patterns to escape, avoided intimacy with yourself and others, and you overcompensated by putting others needs first. And yet, you keep moving even when you are utterly exhausted. You push yourself to keep your emotions locked away, and when all else fails, you find yourself succumbing to criticism, condemnation and blame, labeling yourself as weak or broken.
But you are not alone in your pain and struggle dear one. Trauma, loss and heartache are all an integral part of being human. We all carry with us wounds from our past and scars from our deepest hurts. There is hope for healing, there is hope for survival and there is hope for a better tomorrow.
The Path to Healing
Healing happens when we allow our stories to be seen and felt and when we allow our brain and body to tap into its natural capacity to both access and release the emotion and pain that is held within and come back to alignment.
By journeying inward, trauma therapy can help you to integrate the disparate parts of self as you simultaneously learn to release the emotions and experiences that are holding you back. This is an integral part of shifting back into alignment with your true beliefs and values so that you are able to reach authentic contentment and peace within yourself.
The therapy room is a space to become reacquainted with yourself, to become intimately familiar with the parts of Self that have been denied or suppressed, to ground in your humanness and relearn how to exist in both the light and the dark. The influence of trauma often feels prevailing, but the relief that derives from healing and restoration is undeniably powerful too.
This work will help you:
Identify the core areas in which you feel stuck, the places you feel prevented from healing
Identify messages and conditioning the you have experienced or received in order to find your true values and beliefs
Become more intimately familiar with your Self, and find a strength and confidence in who you are
Develop body awareness, learning to identify when strong emotions show up and the ways in which your body is naturally responding
Build emotional tolerance, an ability to feel the full range of emotions that make you human and ways to contain these sensations
Process and heal aspects of your trauma or pain that you cannot verbalize or do not fully remember
Gain clarity, a deep understanding of your past and its connection to your present moments
Regain a sense of safety in the world and cultivate a sense of being grounded and connected with yourself and others;
Strengthen your ability to connect to your intuition and inspiration, and move forward with your life.
Our Approach
At The Path Wellness Center, we bring a loving openness to our approach to trauma treatment, listening to your story with an empathetic and non-judgmental ear. This compassionate approach guides us as we work collaboratively with you to build a personalized treatment plan that helps you reclaim your Self and sense of safety.
Among other modalities and theoretical approaches here at The Path Wellness Center, our practitioners use Brainspotting, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Internal Family Systems (IFS) to treat trauma and tend to the parts of Self that are wounded and afraid.
Brainspotting is a modality that works by strategically accessing the deeper regions of the brain where traumas are stored. Through this method, we connect with our brain’s natural capacity, to both reach and release the emotion and pain that is held within those parts of our mind that were locked away as a means to protect us from hurt. Brainspotting breaks through the layers covering the truth of who you really are, beyond our deepest struggles and traumas. Click here to learn more.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), is a therapeutic approach that helps individuals who have experienced trauma to process and heal from these past experiences. It is an integrative treatment method that addresses the root causes of trauma. Rather than solely focusing on the traumatic event itself, EMDR acknowledges that trauma impacts an individual's thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, and beliefs about themselves and their world. Therefore, it addresses these interconnected aspects to facilitate healing on multiple levels. Learn more here.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a modality that helps connect our clients to each part of themselves in order to feel fully whole and integrated. Through finding the parts of self that have been abandoned due to messages the world has given them, clients learn to release what is no longer their true Self and reclaim the parts that are. To learn to love and support themselves when fear or sadness arrives and release the notion that we must deprive ourselves of love when we are at our most vulnerable.
All of these modalities help our clients to embrace their vulnerabilities, reintegrate their traumatized past and live a more wholly transformative present.
You deserve to overcome any limitations that deeply distressing life experiences have tried to place on you.
If you’re ready to discover who you truly are and transform your life into one of purpose and truth, we invite you to set up a free 20-minute phone consultation.