Empowered Life Therapy provides adaptive, insightful and healing therapy for those in Naperville (IL) who have experienced physical, sexual or emotional trauma.
Our trauma therapy for Naperville is highly centered on the client. As your trauma therapist gets to know you and establish trust with you, you focus together on defining the therapeutic approaches that will be most supportive to your peace and growth.
Trauma is very real and pervasive in the United States. According to the National Library of Medicine, nearly 90% of adults report exposure to at least one potentially traumatic event during their lifetime The research also reveals that the prevalence of trauma in the U.S. is equal across urban and rural regions.
About 5% to 6% of men and 10% to 12% of women suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), making it one of the most common clinically treated conditions.
An individual may experience trauma as a response to any event they find physically or emotionally harmful or threatening. Different causes of trauma might be:
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Trauma can and will affect different people of any age in different ways. It may alter a person's sense of safety, self and other people. Consequently, it can gain a foothold of one's thoughts, behaviors and relationships with an increasing negative impact.
Symptoms of trauma might include:
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If you or someone you care about has difficulty with trauma symptoms, the therapists at Empowered Life Therapy can help to heal the trauma from the inside out as you grow in peace, hope and acceptance.
In clinical terms, trauma can be identified as three types:
acute trauma from a single stressful or dangerous event
chronic trauma from repeated and prolonged exposure to highly stressful events (e.g. child abuse, bullying, domestic violence)
complex trauma from exposure to multiple traumatic events
A person can also develop secondary (vicarious) trauma in which symptoms are formed through close contact with someone who has experienced something traumatic.
Specific trauma-related mental-health conditions can be classified according to certain characteristics of them. Examples of diagnoses one may find present after a traumatic incident might be:
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While trauma in our lives is often beyond our control, there is great hope in recovery from it, as well as prevention through awareness and early intervention.
Empowered Life Therapy provides Naperville with individual, marriage and family trauma therapy that reconnects mind, body and spirit in healthy, nurturing ways toward healing, peace and growth.
With a caring, dedicated focus on you and your journey, we help you recognize and travel the path to balance and calm that is best for you according to your circumstances. We achieve it in a safe, private space where you can open up to understand, rejuvenate and follow your own personal truth forward.
Just a few approaches we might take based on what will best support you can be:
person-centered therapy
cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
cognitive processing theory (CPT)
dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT)
somatic therapy
acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)
The American Psychological Association (APA) cites CBT in particular as being highly effective in PTSD treatment and strongly recommends it.
Cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on the relationship among thoughts, feelings and behaviors and how changes in one domain can improve functioning in the other two. For example, altering negative thought patterns can lead to more-positive behaviors and greater emotion regulation.
Stressful events and situations can write their own narratives in our minds, but they don't have to be the whole story. By better understanding our internal narrative and dialogue, bodily sensations and suppressed emotions, we can learn to relax and self-regulate in ways that free our inner beauty and resilience while making us feel more alive.
When you work with your Empowered Life Therapy trauma therapist, you can explore how healing can begin with understanding what trauma does to our brain and our body.
When trauma symptoms are sustained, the resulting stress creates a mental loop that begins in the amygdala, where our brain regulates emotional processing by sending distress signals to the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus then sends us commands through the nervous system to fight, flee or freeze in a perceived stressful situation.
These commands produce reactions such as heightened adrenaline, increased heart rate, quicker breathing and hyper-alertness. While they are designed for our protection and survival, such responses also draw energy from us.
To restore that energy, our body releases the hormone cortisol. When the stressor is gone, the cortisol level drops and the body returns to its normal state.
This built-in system means to serve us in times of real or possible danger. It becomes problematic when triggers of unresolved trauma keep pushing the button of our stress-response system, which moves it into overdrive.
For someone who has undergone trauma, these triggers can continue issuing warnings even without a true imminent threat. This increases the size of the amygdala and often predisposes it to remain in a state of fight, flee or freeze. The cortisol can continue to stockpile and produce long-term effects that influence mental and physical health.
With more awareness of your physical and spiritual self through trauma therapy, you can move toward mindfulness in the moment and away from the loop of anxiety and hypervigilance that are often symptomatic of trauma.
The trauma therapists at Empowered Life Therapy are here to help you remove the barriers to the clarity and peace of mind you deserve. We truly care about helping you move forward and live your best life. To find out more about how we can support you as your "trauma therapist near me" for Naperville, call us today at (630) 842-6585 or complete our contact form.
