Trauma Counseling Center
of Los Angeles
When we are living in a state of increased tension, stress, anxiety, or fear our amygdala may start to play an overwhelming role in how our brain interprets information in our world. In these moments even the most neutral stimuli may be met with agitation, frustration, or anxiety.
The ability to recognize when your survival brain is throwing up warning signs from your past can be intentionally developed over time. This can allow you to decipher these warnings from your “fear brain” in the context of what is happening in the present moment. It empowers you to deepen your relationship with yourself and develop methods for finding balance between what your fear brain would have you do, and what you would choose to do. In this video series you can learn resilience tools for calming and healing the fear brain.
What You Can Expect
in Trauma Therapy
Talk therapy and trauma therapy are very similar. They both begin with talking, listening, and attunement. However, at a certain point, trauma therapy will be about targeting the material that is upsetting or in the way of our enjoyment. As therapists at the Trauma Counseling Center of Los Angeles, we look for an “in.“ What this might sound like in therapy is: would you like to work with that? Or, would you like to go a little deeper with that? Or, is this something that would be good for us to target? It is your choice. Sometimes, people say “yes, let’s work with this.” Other times they may say “no, I don’t want to, I’d rather just talk today.”
Here’s the hard part: as a client, sometimes our consciousness or our mind that helped us survive gets in the way. A part of our self may not want us to get better even though that doesn’t make rational sense. Additionally, there are parts of us that know giving up a wound or a way of thinking will cause us to change. This can be scary.
Going to therapy of any kind takes a great deal of strength, willingness, commitment, and surrender. This is not to say it can’t be enjoyable. A skilled therapist can take us towards our material and then away from it so we can breathe, and then gently brings us back to the material. In fact, sometimes our own systems do this naturally. We talk about something intense and then we switch subjects and then later come back. This is one of the ways we unwind trauma skillfully.
Therapy is a collaborative experience. Therefore, we, as therapists, can only work with you with what you bring into the room. If you don’t want to talk, then we can be still with you. If you want to try some of the additional modalities we offer that are designed for trauma or anxiety, we are excited to share what we have found has worked for many people. We want you to have the best possible therapy.
We will seek feedback from you. For example, at the Trauma Counseling Center of Los Angeles, we might ask, “how is this going for you? Is there anything I could be doing more, better, or different for you? How was our last session?” To the best of our ability, we will also make any adjustments we can. Also, if we together determine our approach is not a good fit, then we will give you names of referrals.