At Paracelsus Recovery, our holistic treatment model includes trauma-focused therapy, where appropriate. The aim of trauma-focused therapy is to help those who have experienced a traumatic event process what happened to them and deal with the resulting emotional and behavioural responses.
What is trauma-focused therapy?
Trauma-focused therapy is a specific approach to therapy that aims to help you cope with the trauma you have experienced so you can move on with your life. This involves recognising the widespread impact of trauma on a person’s behavioural, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being and providing strategies and skills to process what happened to them. It also involves taking measures to avoid retraumatisation.
Trauma-focused therapy is grounded in and guided by an understanding of how trauma affects every area of survivors’ lives. In trauma-focused therapy, the focus shifts from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” This provides a framework in which it becomes possible to understand and appropriately respond to the effects trauma has on people and provide a safe and supportive space for them to process what happened to them.
There are various therapy techniques that can help treat trauma. These include, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (TF-CBT) and Prolonged Exposure. Of course, there is no one-size-fits all type of therapy that suits every person or situation. At Paracelsus Recovery, your team will use a variety of techniques tailored to your unique needs. In particular, we have long-standing experience helping clients recover from wealth-specific traumas.
What are the benefits of trauma-focused therapy?
Trauma-focused therapy can be helpful for processing the feelings and emotions related to any experience or event that causes psychological or emotional harm. This includes both one-time traumatic events and ongoing/long-lasting traumatic experiences. As trauma can be a root cause of various mental health issues, such as substance abuse disorders, PTSD, anxiety and personality disorders, trauma-focused therapy can be truly integral to treating these issues.
A benefit of trauma-focused therapy is that it offers a space in which people who have lived through trauma can feel seen, heard and validated. This acceptance and understanding can help facilitate healing and recovery. As part of this, the therapist can help them reframe their perspective of the traumatic event, reduce the intensity of guilt and shame and challenge any problematic beliefs held about why the event happened.
Trauma-focused therapy also helps clients find healthier ways of coping with the symptoms and problems they have as a result of this trauma. For example, it can help them face fears in a safe, supportive space conducive to healing. In addition, clients can learn coping skills and build confidence and resilience to navigate the challenges of day-to-day life. Trauma-focused therapy can also help them rebuild a sense of trust, which may well have been disrupted by a traumatic event or experience.
What’s the difference between trauma-focused therapy and CBT?
Trauma-informed therapy involves considering any past trauma experiences on top of any immediate issue, such as addiction or anxiety, being treated. In the case of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), the focus is on helping people identify and change unhelpful thoughts and patterns of behaviour. To this end, the focus of CBT is the present rather than the past. This “here and now” approach is goal-oriented and strategic and involves doing tasks in between sessions, such as journaling and positive self-talk to help you replace any unhelpful thoughts with more objective, realistic thoughts. Trauma-focused therapy, on the other hand, involves understanding the traumatic experience in the past and the impact it has on the present-day experience of life.
On its own, CBT is not a trauma-focused approach. For CBT to be trauma-informed, the therapist needs to make the link between their present thoughts, feelings and behaviour and their past traumatic experiences. This can help a client explore the origins of their unhelpful thoughts and beliefs and self-destructive behaviours, enabling them to then reframe beliefs and adopt more supportive behaviours. At Paracelsus Recovery, we always take a trauma-informed approach to treating mental health conditions and substance abuse disorders.
