Complex Trauma Therapy for Adults in Lafayette and Online throughout California
Increasing our awareness of our past, including our previously unknown trauma history, can be a challenging process, but it almost always leads to significant life changes over time, aided by therapy and our innate instinct to heal our historical wounds.
In this journey, it's often typical to experience guilt, particularly for those from collectivistic cultures, as if we're assigning blame to our parents for our own struggles. However, this feeling is temporary. Ultimately, the objective of this process isn't about faulting our parents or yearning for an idealized childhood that never was. Instead, it's about attaining awareness so that we can actively make informed decisions today and shape our “better” tomorrow.
Beyond Talk Therapy: Healing Complex Trauma
Conventional therapy methods, particularly talk therapy, often yield constrained and temporary outcomes, and you start questioning if therapy can help you at all.
When there's a background of trauma, regardless of how insignificant it may seem or whether you acknowledge it as trauma in adulthood, unresolved early childhood trauma significantly influences present functioning and overall behavior.
I've deeply studied how developmental trauma impacts our brains and have amassed considerable experience in working with it. While it's relatively easy to spot singular traumatic incidents like being in a war zone or experiencing a car accident (what we refer to as "big Ts"), fully grasping the extent of developmental, complex, or early childhood trauma's effects on our adult lives often requires a thorough assessment or the therapy journey itself over time.
Traumatic events or circumstances that are ingrained in our "typical" childhood upbringing, stemming from decisions, limitations, or circumstances of our primary caregivers (attachment figures), along with their complex trauma, can wield a profound and enduring impact, regardless of whether we consciously recall them. These experiences often hold greater potency and longevity compared to many other major traumatic events.
Customizing interventions and therapy to align with a client's trauma history and current state is paramount in therapy. Specific therapeutic methods, including EMDR and Neurofeedback, which I provide, can be pivotal in guiding your therapeutic journey.
Dr. Bruce Perry’s Seven Slide Series on Complex Trauma
If you're keen on delving into more scientific explanations of how early childhood trauma affects our brain and, consequently, our life trajectory, I highly recommend watching the Seven Slide Series by Dr. Bruce Perry in the following order. The combined duration of these five videos is approximately one hour. Since each video builds upon the previous sections, I recommend allocating uninterrupted time to watch them all in a single sitting.
Video 1: The Human Brain
Video 2: Sensitization and Tolerance
Video 3: Threat Response Patterns
Video 4: State-Dependent Functioning
Video 5: Six Core Strengths