Mental Health Matters 🧠 - What is Trauma Therapy? Is it really different then your typical therapy?

What's up Cadre Fam Evan here, your resident mental health and addiction therapist. Back for another live stream, an episode of mental health matters, because mental health is important and we're going to be discussing matters surrounding mental health and addiction. So today we have a special topic I wanted to talk about, which is trauma therapy. So you hear more and more about trauma therapy. There's more of an emphasis, more of a greater understanding on that. And when it comes to trauma therapy, one of the most important things to note is whether something actually qualifies as trauma therapy.

But what is the difference? And I think a lot of folks don't understand and I think there's a lot of different opinions on this, but I just wanted to break down some of the differences between your typical therapy as usual, and what a trauma therapy is, something, let's say, for PTSD, for complex childhood trauma. So first, what is trauma? Let's start there. Well, basically it is an experience that negative experience, an adverse experience, something that happens to you that is a shock to your system, right?

So that could be, you know, a multitude different time types of abuse, witnessing violence, experiencing violence, war, an accident, right? Something that's like really intense and dramatic experience. Now, at some point in your life, it's likely, it's more likely than that you will experience something like that. But what makes a trauma akin to PTSD versus something bad that happened to me before? Well, typically it's in the way it affects you long term. Human beings for the most part are resilient.

I think a lot of people understand is that most people go through trauma and eventually find, let's just say like a homeostasis, a balance, a they heal from it, right? So think of it like a physical wound, like at some point we're going to get injured. It happens all the time. We get cuts and scrapes and breaks and this and that. And then a lot of times things heal on their own, but sometimes they don't or sometimes they take a while. You have like an accident, it takes a while to heal, but then eventually you're back to 80 9100 percent.

However, some injuries are so grave and it's not just the injury, but maybe how it's handled after. You know, it's like you break a leg, but are you walking on it, running it on all the time? Are you not getting the treatment that you need? What up, Luke? Happy Tuesday. So it's not just the trauma itself, but it's maybe how it's addressed afterward, just like any injury. So really the parallels between a physical injury and a psychological injury are not all that different, right? So imagine with a physi, with a mental emotional injury.

Let's say you went through combat, and a lot of times people go through that, and after, they adapt and they're okay when they come home, but sometimes that's not the case. So a lot of times, people who have experienced a lot of trauma before going into combat or having other trauma, these things compound, so they're more likely to have a PTSD reaction if they've had trauma before. Another interesting thing is a lot of times, let's say, with sexual abuse, how people respond to it afterwards really can make a difference on whether that PTSD reaction happens long term.

So, PTSD, essentially, it's really a mixture of almost any other mental health symptom, but it stems from the trauma. So, like being overly anxious, being depressed, substance abuse, self harm, having flashbacks, having, you know, changes in your belief structure, all these things that you can point to that stem from the trauma that affect you almost every single day, or that'd be the definition of PTSD. However, there's a lot in between that. There's a lot. It doesn't have to be this black or white thing, which in some cases, it often is labeled that way for insurance reasons or VA benefits or whatever, but really, it's a trauma spectrum.

So every one of us has been through adverse experiences, whether it's even just the messages we get as kids about ourselves. And a lot of those things maybe make us. They hold us back, or they make us not as happy as we could have been. And so we are all impacted by trauma in a certain way. So, really, all therapy, in a sense, is addressing those traumatic experiences that still impact us today, whether we realize it or not. And so I really believe that everyone has that as part of being human. Now, when we talk about trauma therapies or therapies for PTSD.

What's up, car jazz? Or therapies for PTSD? These are very specific and target some of those most intense symptoms that someone would experience after having one of these adverse experiences. Abuse, neglect, witnessing of violence, near death experiences. Right, those ones that really. So, for example, so you get in a car accident, and you're just like. You have so much anxiety when you're driving a car, even months, a year, two years later. Now, it'd be very normal. Hate using that word, but it'd be very typical to get in a bad car accident and then have anxiety driving.

However, usually over time, that starts to go away. With PTSD, it doesn't it's almost like the accident happened yesterday or you're still currently in that traumatized state. So what a more trauma therapy, PTSD type therapy would do is pretty much all of them, whether they like to admit it or not, probably would, but pretty much all of them use an element of exposure or exposure therapy. One of the things that makes trauma worse or just maintains it is avoidance of avoiding those triggers. And it's understandable why someone would because they're so uncomfortable.

And it may even to the point where it makes you not able to function in many ways. So you avoid it and then it compounds. So basically what it's doing is it's slowly, gradually exposing you to triggers while using different types of coping skills. Whether it's like mindfulness, relaxation, certain eye movements, like you've maybe heard of EMDR, but it's using these tools to help desensitize you to the triggers. You see similar things like, let's say with OCD, if someone's afraid of, you know, they need to wash their hands every two minutes, right?

In exposure therapy, you'd be like, all right, we're going to go two minutes and 10 seconds while we do deep breathing, while we use coping skills. And then you eventually do three minutes, five minutes, right. And you begin to, your body, your mind begins to understand that you're actually safe. So a lot of it comes down to safety that you're actually safe in these situations. So like any kind of anxiety, it's where the fear is outsized to the actual potential for harm. I'm so afraid of something that is very unlikely to happen.

However, it makes sense given my experience. I always use, I like to use the example here in Minneapolis, I think around 2006 maybe. No, I think it was 2007, something like that, where we had the 35 w bridge collapse. So about a mile and a half from where I sit right now, the 35 w bridge and interstate highway over the Mississippi river collapsed during like rush hour traffic. So the bridge had all these structural issues and so a bunch of cars were sitting on top of it. Boom, falls 50ft, I don't know, into the, into the river below.

Many people survived, many people didn't. Not sure exactly what the numbers were, but a lot of people, like, it was a very jarring incident for 1 second being in your car, the next you're falling and you're, you know, in the river and you have to bust out of your car and swim to safety. I mean, so, but a lot of. So imagine being in that situation and then after you're driving over a bridge, you know, and you're gonna have a panic attack, potentially. And so that person has this fear of driving over bridges, which the odds of that actually happening are like one in a billion, let's say.

However, they're one of those billion people that experience that, so therefore, they're gonna have more of a fear response to it. So, you know, or like, a lion escaped from a zoo and, like, attacked you and you survived that. You know, I'm walking around Minnesota and I'm, like, looking over my shoulder for a lion. Right. That's just part of our natural biology to keep us safe. And so in that incident, you know, you would help. You know, one of the ways to expose is not just necessarily saying, we're going to go to the bridge, you know, but you could do that in your mind.

So, in a trauma therapy, we try to help people go there in their minds while giving them a sense of calm, so slowly exposing them through, essentially purposefully triggering them, making them think about it. So the same process really works in regular therapy. When you talk about things, we call it processing. That's where the word process is coming from. Like packaging in a factory. I'm taking candy coming down the line and packaging it, processing it. We're doing the same thing. We're making sense of organizing those thoughts, feelings, and experiences and integrating them so they don't affect us today, so the past doesn't affect our present.

So really, it's the very similar mechanisms to regular therapy. However, it's much more targeted, and each one uses its own kind of way of helping you process them, that it. It's supposed to work more quickly, more effectively than just merely talking about it. So there's some therapies that focus in, cognitive therapies that focus on exposure, talking about it, making sense of it, changing beliefs, but then there's others that are much more focused on the body. So targeting where you feel these things in your body and trying to calm those working on the mind body connection.

So it's kind of attacking things from the mind and body down. So, yes, I mean, I guess the takeaway is maybe that's something to consider if you really, and it doesn't have to be PTSD. I mean, these trauma therapies are just really good for processing some of those adverse experiences like we talked about before. So it's definitely worth exploring. If it sounds interesting to you, most therapists who are trained in this are also kind of regular therapists, too. So it doesn't have to be only that but it could be worth checking out, especially if you've had, you know, severe trauma.

I mean, then you really want to check those out because they could be extremely beneficial. Anyways, I hope you got something out of that. And learning a little bit more about trauma therapy. I'd love to hear more about your thoughts, if you've experienced it before, what your experience with that is, or if you have any questions, you know, go ahead and put them in. Next week, I'm going to do a Q and a for all your questions. So I'd love for you to do that, put that in the community feed or even just reply to any of my videos.

I have some videos about this, too. So anyways, folks, good checking in as usual. Have a good rest of your day. Bye.