There are many types of therapy for PTSD and psychotherapy for trauma. Talk therapy helps you understand and control your emotions. Other trauma treatments teach you ways of containing and controlling your reactions. Some PTSD therapy helps you reduce (but not eliminate) your emotional reactions.
We want you to do more than just understand, contain and control your emotions. We want to do more than just make it a little less painful for you.
If you are willing to do some hard work, we will do whatever it takes to help you heal so completely that you won’t be able to get yourself upset thinking about the memory – no matter how you think about it – no matter how hard you try.
A Simple Self-Test
Think of the most traumatic or upsetting event in your life. Now go to the worst or most vivid part of that memory and put yourself there – all five senses – as if it is happening right now. If you allowed your feelings to get as strong as they want to, how upset would you get on a 0-10 scale?
- 0-1: You most likely have fully healed from that event.
- 2-7: The event is likely to have at least a moderate effect on your life.
- 8-10: The event is most likely having a crippling effect on your life.
The Good News
With the right kind of help even your worst memories will heal so completely that you will not be able to get yourself upset about them no matter how hard you try.
The $100,000 Test
By the end of counseling, your worst memory should heal so completely that if someone gave you $100,000 and all you had to do to keep it was to get yourself upset by thinking about that memory you should have to respectfully give them their money back.
Even Your Worst Memories Can Heal
We have helped people fully heal from just about every type of trauma you can think of; car accidents, the sudden death of a loved one, being mugged, child abuse, domestic violence, rape, kidnapping, etc. One of our clients worked through the trauma of having been kidnapped and sexually assaulted as a child. Despite years of talk therapy, just thinking about the kidnapping triggered anxiety that was off the scale- on a 0-10 scale, she was way past a 10. At the end of therapy she couldn’t get herself past a 0 no matter how hard she tried. She wasn’t even able to get herself upset when she sat on the curb at the exact site in the park where the kidnapper had snatched her almost 20 years ago. If she can successfully work through her trauma, so can you.
Talk Therapy Is Not Enough
95% of therapists practice some form of talk therapy. Talk therapy works from the top down as you use your thinking mind to understand and control your emotional mind. We do the exact opposite, we work from the bottom up, helping you to identify and resolve the painful memories and toxic emotions in your emotional mind so that you can think clearly.
45-Minutes Is Not Enough
Talk therapy is built around the 45-minutes-once-a-week-for-a-year model. While this model works for many problems, it doesn’t work well at all for people who are dealing with strong emotions. It takes you most of the session to even begin to get to the emotional core and then the therapist looks at their watch and says, lets pick up where we left off next week. You are left feeling raw and vulnerable and then you have to try to pack all of those emotions back where they came from. Almost all of our clients do either 90-minute or 3-hour sessions. Longer sessions give you enough time to get to the core of your problem and to leave each session with less emotional baggage than you came in with.
Programs That Fit Your Schedule
You can also fit your program into your schedule. You may chose to complete an entire program in as little as a week or you can spread the program out in convenient monthly sessions.
But I Never Think About My Trauma
When a memory heals just enough so that you don’t think about it anymore it can cause hidden problems. Reactions that don’t make sense to you are coming from memories you have trained yourself not to think about. An argument with your spouse may subconsciously trigger an unhealed memory of witnessing your father hit your mother as a child, causing you to overreact with fear and anger. Since you have learned to keep the memory itself from coming into consciousness you will have no idea that the memory has had any effect. Instead you will probably just think that you are an overly emotional person or that you in fact must not really love your spouse. These hidden emotional reactions can lead you to make wrong decisions. For instance, women who were sexually abused as children often get a strong urge to divorce their husbands when their daughter reaches the age that they were abused. Since they have trained themselves not to think about the abuse, they never see the connection between their trauma and their divorce, they just decide that they are not going to tolerate someone who leaves the toilet seat up all of the time.