Changing Negative Thoughts with EMDR Trauma Therapy
Trauma is an all-encompassing experience. Internally, it’s how the brain and body cope with distressing external events. It can manifest as anxiety, depression, shame, fear, embarrassment, and emotional pain. The residual impact of those feelings becomes our trauma, the obstacle that takes us a while to cope with and heal after bad things happen. Whether your trauma occurred many years ago or yesterday, there’s hope.
You can take an active part in the next steps to overcome the pain you’ve experienced. In trauma therapy at Haven Family Therapy, a licensed mental health professional can guide you in changing negative thoughts, updating maladaptive cognitions of self, and challenging the unhelpful coping mechanisms that trauma left. We can help you shed new light on your experiences so you can view life through a healed lens and gain a healthy sense of emotional balance.
What Makes an Event Traumatic?
Trauma occurs at the point at which we cease to cope with what’s happening within or around us. Most commonly, experiences that may warrant trauma therapy are categorized as deeply damaging or life-threatening. They pose significant harm to an individual’s psychological and physical well-being. Examples of such events include:
Childhood emotional neglect
Physical or sexual abuse
Humiliating or deeply disappointing occurrences
Sudden, accidental, violent death or suicide of a loved one
Involvement in an automobile accident
Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, or other natural disasters
Political violence, acts of terrorism, or war
There is more to trauma than those big moments though. What makes an event traumatic is not only about the scope of the event. Your emotional response after an experience may dictate how traumatic that event becomes in your life. The more frightened, helpless, or worthless you feel in an impactful moment, the more likely you are to be traumatized.
How Long Does Trauma Last?
For some people, trauma symptoms pass quickly and without further incident. Other forms of trauma may linger for months or years. Trauma symptoms and feelings may gradually fade as you process the event. Even as you heal, you may be confronted with sneaky reminders of its continued imprint on your thoughts and responses.
When you begin to think you’re feeling better, painful memories, emotions, and triggers—stressors such as an event anniversary or other reminders that lead to adverse emotional reactions—may trouble them from time to time.
How PTSD is different than trauma
Have your negative thoughts, feelings, and other psychological trauma symptoms persisted or begun to worsen over time? If your pain is lingering or compounding, you may be experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or complex PTSD (C-PTSD). The emotional trauma after a disturbing event is normal. For people with PTSD, you can’t move past these distress triggers and it exhausts your mind and body, leaving you feeling like you’re stuck in psychological shock. Professionally-led trauma therapy can help people with or without PTSD make sense of what they’ve been through. It can help you cope and change maladaptive cognitions of yourself, your reactions, and the circumstances of your triggers.
What Are the Effects of Trauma on the Brain?
Unaddressed trauma can impede your long-term cognitive functioning. People with PTSD may experience impaired problem-solving, executive function, memory, focus, attention, and more. You may also experience four different types of symptoms.
Physical. Experiencing an event threatening one’s survival can result in hypervigilance, fatigue, exhaustion, aches, pains, and disturbed sleep.
Behavioral. How traumatized a person feels after an event may determine the lengths they’ll go to to avoid reminders of the experience. This can include avoiding certain places or withdrawing from certain activities and socializing.
Emotional. The traumatic experience and the challenge of coping with it afterward can leave many people feeling fearful, numb, detached, anxious, depressed, and angry.
Cognitive. Trauma can change a person’s cognition in a way that can contribute to the physical, behavioral, and emotional symptoms a person may experience. Cognitive symptoms may include visual flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive memories, and negative thoughts. These symptoms may result in psychosomatic discomfort, avoidant behaviors, and negative emotions. The heavy impact of such disturbed cognition is why changing negative thoughts is a priority in effective trauma therapy.
Trauma Can Fuel Feelings of Unworthiness
Trauma isn’t honest about your value. If you’ve been deeply traumatized, you may leave the ordeal feeling like you are fundamentally bad or incapable of being loved by others. In these cases, pain makes you your own worst enemy. Your biggest critic lives between your ears, offering a refrain of your failure and worthlessness. It’s lying to you, but the pain it causes is very, very real.
You will work together to access your worth. No one is unworthy or inherently unlovable and there’s no such thing as deserved trauma. In trauma therapy, your therapist will help you untangle these traumatic coping mechanisms and painful tools with the truth of your identity.
Trauma experts can help you understand that these thoughts may be involuntary. You may feel angry or frustrated at these thoughts and your therapist can help you navigate the complexity of that while releasing the shame and blame of it all. You are allowed to be graceful and patient with yourself. You’re allowed to think of things you don’t agree with or know to be untrue. But you must give yourself the chance to identify and change maladaptive cognitions of self. A skilled trauma therapist can help you reframe your thoughts in a safe, compassionate, supportive way that demonstrates that you are worthy and deserving of love and respect.
Find the Right Trauma Therapy Technique for Changing Negative Thoughts
There are general and specialized treatment options and licensed professionals available to help people of all backgrounds cope with any mental health or relationship issues. However, for individuals with a history of trauma, meeting with a therapist who specializes in trauma can make a world of difference. Effective trauma therapy may involve reliving disturbing experiences. Considering this, you may want to be speaking to a trained professional who specializes in trauma and can best help you navigate your experience.
Every form of trauma therapy doesn’t require you to have re-traumatizing discussions that focus on the root of your pain. At Haven Family Therapy, when it’s clinically appropriate, we utilize eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). EMDR allows clients to access their most painful memories briefly. EMDR doesn’t prioritize changing your emotional experiences as a goal of trauma therapy. It recognizes your memories as the root of your reactions and feelings. Clients experience bilateral stimulation (e.g., eye movements) associated with reducing the vividness and emotion related to traumatic memories. With your therapist’s guidance, your brain works to make sense of your trauma without awakening feelings associated with old, yet unhealed, wounds.
Receive Trauma Therapy That Prioritizes the Brain in Healing
Receiving EMDR trauma therapy in the safe, relaxing environment provided at Haven Family Therapy may be the optimum solution for you. In EMDR sessions, you’ll identify the event in your history you wish to work through. Through stabilization and coping techniques, your clinician will prepare you to feel safe in this experience. Then, they’ll assess the target memory in ways that provide fresh insight that helps you heal. From there, they’ll help you identify any remaining negative feelings and those you’ve resolved. As EMDR progresses, clients typically feel:
Less distress
Elevated moods
Enhanced memory
Healthier thought processes
This EMDR trauma therapy gives you an awareness of how you heal and a sense of control you might’ve been missing since childhood. This allows you to be an unapologetic expert in how you reprocess trauma and change negative thoughts. Reach out to Haven Family Therapy today for support in dulling the painful impact of traumatic memories. Here, you’ll gently become aware of healthy ways to confront your past without allowing the feelings associated with it to consume your present and future.
