CLINICAL APPROACHES
Treatment Approaches
There is more than one way to heal trauma
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ONLINE TRAUMA THERAPY IN FLORIDA
Early on, I recognized that helping people heal from trauma is complicated. (I know how it sounds, so stay with me.) When I started practicing, I noticed how passionate and loyal people are to the techniques they use with their clients. I wanted to pick one and commit to it, but that’s not how I think. I believe complicated things sometimes require many tools, and trauma is no different.
I knew I didn’t want to only help someone process old hurts and overlook the things that make it difficult for them to take care of the person who survived it. Because I recognize that living through trauma segments your life, I also recognize that the very capable people I work with probably missed out on building important internal resources as they were growing up.
So I created a process focused on healing, filling in gaps, and helping my clients leave my care to go and live their fabulous lives. When I talk with clients about how I conceptualize their care, I often compare it to a good road trip - the kind where everyone likes to travel the same way you do, the conversations are lovely, and no one fusses at you about needing to stop.
My approach to trauma therapy feels similar to a road trip. You help me know where we’re going by telling me what you want out of therapy. I’m in charge of the navigation and mapping out how we might get there. I call that my Clinical Roadmap, and it has six phases.
Your Clinical Roadmap gives our work structure, but it isn’t rigid. We may spend longer in one area, continue using something we've learned earlier, or return to something that needs more attention.
Clinical Roadmap
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01
Rebuild
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02
Reconnect
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03
Reclaim
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04
Revisit
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05
Repattern
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06
Revision
01
Rebuild
ree-BILD · verb · To build something again after it has been damaged or destroyed; to develop something again so that it works effectively; to build your life again after difficulty.
Make life more manageable.
Most of my clients don’t come to therapy because they're feeling great and want to stay that way. They come in hurting and trying very hard to keep everything from falling apart.
That's why everyone who starts therapy with me starts with Rebuild. During this phase of treatment, we find ways to manage some of the emotional fires you’re surrounded by.
As you help me understand what's been happening in your life, I'll introduce you to therapeutic techniques to make things a little more manageable. Your first therapy task is to look at what I call your “Big Three” behaviors: eating, sleeping, and movement. It’s a nice way to start paying attention to your body differently, and improving those basic rhythms can positively impact your mood.
The Rebuild phase isn’t for solving everything. We're making sure you have a steady foundation for what comes next.
TREATMENT APPROACHES INTRODUCED HERE
IPSRT Somatic Therapy
02
Reconnect
ree-kuh-NEKT · verb ·To join or connect again; to improve a relationship that has become less close; to cause someone to feel or understand something they had stopped feeling or understanding.
Build a life to move toward.
Reconnect is all about alignment and growth. Specifically, it’s about intentionally moving toward the life that you want. So often, when we focus on what we don’t want, we forget to define what we actually want. Without that clarity and focus, it's not only hard to keep momentum; it’s also easy to fall back into old habits. (I see you, New Year’s Resolutions.)
As you settle into a less intense daily life, we will layer in work to help you deepen your connection with yourself and others. You’ll start to intentionally direct your life to align with your values, to discern the relationships you have, or want to have in the future, and to get clearer about your needs.
As part of that work, we look at the roles you play, the expectations you carry, and what you believe you’re responsible for. We make room for you to ask different questions and start making choices from those answers, rather than organizing your life around what you’re trying to prevent, manage, or survive.
I want you to have more than tools for surviving difficult things. I want you to have enough support, connection, self-knowledge, and access to what matters to you that difficult things aren't drawing from an already-empty reserve.
TREATMENT APPROACHES INTRODUCED HERE
ACT · CBT · DBT
03
Reclaim
rih-KLAYM · verb · To take back something that was yours; to get back something that has been taken away.
Increase what you can feel and experience without losing yourself.
Even when life is going pretty well, life keeps happening. Someone disappoints you. Plans change. Work gets stressful. Something reminds you of something you'd rather forget.
Reclaim is about creating more emotional space for ordinary life to happen without every disruption becoming overwhelming. This phase is where we are more intentional about getting to know your body. (Sometimes getting reacquainted and sometimes getting to know it for the first time.) We practice recognizing emotions and physical sensations, staying curious about them, and allowing feelings to be present without immediately pushing them away.
We deepen the somatic work here. The skills and self-knowledge you've been developing give us a foundation for increasing your window of tolerance: the range of emotional and physical experience you can stay present with while still feeling like yourself.
TREATMENT APPROACHES INTRODUCED HERE
INarrative Therapy
04
Revisit
ree-VIZ-it · verb · To return to a place; to think, talk about, examine, or consider something again, often with the intention of changing or improving it.
Intentionally move closer to what has been difficult to approach.
I sometimes think of engagement as shining a flashlight on something you’ve been trying to see clearly in the shadows. Instead of turning on every lamp and throwing open the blinds, you’ll shine a little light here, see what happens, and give your mind and body time to respond.
By now, you've practiced recognizing distress, caring for yourself, understanding your needs, noticing your body's responses, and experiencing emotion without immediately becoming overwhelmed. Revisit lets us begin bringing those capacities with us as we approach things that have hurt you deeply.
We pay attention to what happens in your body as we move closer, when we've gotten close enough, and what helps you come back. We stay within your window of tolerance while stretching it little by little. The goal is to help you approach without losing contact with yourself.
TREATMENT APPROACHES INTRODUCED HERE
TRE
05
Repattern
ree-PAT-ern · verb · To change the way something usually happens, works, or is done, especially a repeated pattern of behavior.
Work directly with what trauma left behind.
I sometimes picture trauma like one of those rubber-band balls: memories, emotions, shame, and beliefs are all wrapped around each other until the whole thing is a single solid object.
By this time in treatment, we've learned quite a bit about the tangle of your past experiences. In the Repattern phase, we begin pulling those strands apart.
We stay curious about what your body still responds to as though it is happening and all the ways you’ve tried to avoid it. We focus our attention on shifting the ways you’re still hurting and putting the pain where it belongs: in the past.
There are several ways we can do that work. We pay attention to what we’ve learned and to what seems to be keeping the trauma active now. And then we start untangling by including treatments designed specifically to help process trauma. We do this the same way we’ve been working the entire time: paying attention to what’s working for you and adjusting so the process doesn’t feel too big or too fast.
TREATMENT APPROACHES INTRODUCED HERE
CPT · WET
06
Revision
rih-VIZH-un · noun · A change that is made to something, or the process of doing this; the process of considering something again in order to make changes to it.
Make what you've built retrievable after therapy.
When I talk about Revision with clients, I usually tell the story of Hansel and Gretel. The thing I point out is that the first time they're taken into the woods, Hansel drops stones along the way so they can find their way home. I think of the Revision process in a similar way.
At this point in our work together, you understand yourself differently, have processed many painful experiences, and have learned new ways of responding. And sometimes you still find yourself doing something you thought you'd left behind.
That doesn't mean the work failed. Just means you're human.
Before you step down from weekly therapy - or leave altogether - I offer you a way to build your personal “owner’s manual” before therapy ends.
Throughout our work, you've been dropping your own stones by capturing the work you’ve done in several different ways. Revision guides you through a process of gathering those markers and integrating them into a plan you can return to.
I can’t promise you that you’ll never stumble into old patterns again. If I were a betting woman, I'd say you probably would. So the goal is to make sure that when you do, you know how to find your way back to yourself.