Trauma Therapy for Vancouver Island, Southern Ontario, and Halifax.

What is trauma?

Sometimes, something awful happens to us. Something we can’t control. We are forced to face the worst that life has to offer, feeling broken and depleted at the end of it all. After experiencing trauma, your emotions may leave you feeling on edge and ready to react to the slightest trigger at times, while depressed and unable to get out of bed otherwise. You may have trouble sleeping, be in physical pain, no longer find everyday activities satisfying, and may struggle to keep stable relationships. At times, turning to alcohol, drugs, or impulsive decisions can feel like the only escape from the constant pain you are in. These can be the lasting effects of trauma.

If you’ve ever experienced this, you are not alone. When life gets chaotic, we often forget one critical piece of information:

We have choice.

It may feel as though life is throwing you in every possible direction, with you powerless to stop it. While it may be true that you can’t control the things that have happened to you, it is simultaneously true that, after all is said and done, you get to choose how you deal with the aftermath. Working with a therapist to regain that sense of choice can be one of the most amazing ways to break free of trauma-induced symptoms and behaviours that exhaust you.

Although it seems counter-intuitive, learning to turn towards the discomfort, rather than pushing it away, can be one of the most liberating experiences of your life time. As Mark Nepo so brilliantly writes, “love whatever gets in the way, until it ceases to be an obstacle.” At Illuminate Therapy, I am here to help you learn how to do just that.

What is trauma? | Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score

Learn more about trauma from one of the most world-renowned experts, Bessel van der Kolk.

Benefits of Trauma Therapy

  • Build closer relationships.

    Improve your communication skills, experience less emotional outbursts or periods of depression, and/or recover from addiction.

  • Know what to do.

    Understand your triggers, develop healthy coping skills for when triggers do arise, and change long term behaviours that exhaust you.

  • Feel better about you.

    Increase your self-confidence, learn how to achieve your long term goals, and heal the underlying issues that keep you stuck.

  • Find more joy everyday.

    Experience more calm, learn how to naturally find more positives day to day, get better sleep, and regain a sense of control in your life.

How Trauma Therapy Works

Trauma therapy is a specialized treatment which can help you find fulfillment in your life again. It is a common fear that trauma therapy means diving right into the most painful parts of your life. At Illuminate Therapy, we will go at your pace. A well trained trauma therapist will know that one of the goals of trauma therapy is to expand your limits, but not to push you past them. And guess what - it is not actually necessary to rehash the details of traumatic events in order to heal from them!

My preferred therapy for treating trauma is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy, or EMDR Therapy for short. EMDR Therapy is considered to be the best trauma treatment currently available. It is a highly effective form of treatment which focuses on first helping you feel stabilized in your daily life through skill development, before going into trauma reprocessing. Trauma reprocessing works to release the stuck emotions, thoughts, and physical symptoms which have been weighing you down. Through this process, clients often report feeling as though their traumatic memories have released their grip on them, leading to new, positive insights on their lives and themselves.

FAQs

  • Finding a trauma therapist can be a frustrating experience. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation floating around in the therapy world about trauma. In my experience, therapists can tend to lean too much on talk therapy, focus too hard on skill development, or believe that trauma reprocessing alone will resolve your issues. In reality, it is a blend of all three of these approaches which is most effective at treating trauma. Rather than treating trauma therapy as a “one size fits all” process, I bring a flexible, intuitive approach using evidence-based therapy modalities which is tailored to each individual client’s concerns. I am constantly improving my skills through professional consultation, continued training, and self-directed study, meaning that I will bring the most current knowledge of trauma treatment to our sessions.

  • Think of it this way - if the plumbing in your house began to break down, and your basement started to flood, who would you call? Therapy is no different than any other trade. We may try to patch things up on our own using different strategies and techniques we’ve learned from friends, family, books, or YouTube, but eventually, our patches will no longer hold up under the pressure. The plumbing will break, and we will realize that the problem is bigger than we can handle ourselves. That’s when it is time to call in the professionals - and for that, you’ve come to the right place!

  • In the first session, I will spend time getting to know you. I will ask you about your history with trauma symptoms, what it is like in present day, who the important people in your life are, and what your day-to-day life looks like. We will also set goals for therapy. You will have the opportunity to ask me questions about myself, and/or the therapy process overall. If there is something you are not quite ready to talk about in the first session, don’t worry. I know I am still a stranger to you and trust building takes time! I will never pressure you to talk about something before you are ready.

  • No. It is a common misconception that trauma therapy requires you to divulge all of the heartbreaking details of your most painful moments. This is simply not true. I let my clients know that they are welcome to talk about the details when we get to that stage of therapy, if that feels most helpful for them, but that it is absolutely not required. All I need are the “headlines” of what happened - just like a newspaper headline. A brief statement which gives me enough detail to understand what we are working on, without needing to go into detail. It feels a lot more manageable that way, right?

  • The honest answer is that I don’t know. The amount of time it takes for someone to begin feeling better depends on a number of factors, including readiness for therapy, willingness to try new ways of living, and how much “stuff” we are working through together. Therapy is also non-linear, meaning that there will be moments of progress, and moments where you feel as though you’ve been set back. However, the set backs will get smaller and fewer with time. Any place that tells you it will only take a specific number of sessions to see results is not giving you the most honest information about the therapy process.