Trauma, PTSD and Abuse Counseling
Are you experiencing intrusive thoughts or memories of past events?
Are you fearful of the future?
Do you get startled easily?
Do you experience heightened alertness or anxiety when in public?
Do you dissociate, lose time, or go into a “trance” to escape fear?
The causes of your distress may be immediate or rooted in your history. It may be difficult to tell the difference between the source of your stress, anxiety, grief, or discomfort, and your current struggles. You may even try to correct the wrong problems. You may suppress, avoid, or even self-medicate trauma with compulsive behaviors or addiction. There is HELP and HOPE for current or past trauma, PTSD, and abuse! Call GLOW Now!
What is EMDR?
EMDR therapy was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories. EMDR is used to help individuals get in touch with and process their feelings. Using EMDR, the memory and emotional content from a traumatic incident or disturbing memory in a client’s past is relieved. With EMDR, clients can get resolution and recovery from traumatic incidents more quickly than with other methods.
As a Level II trained Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapist, I specialize in working with people burdened by a history of abuse, including childhood physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, trauma, PTSD, disturbing memories, grief and loss, addiction, and violence. EMDR is also useful in the treatment of pain, for stress reduction and grief, and in building internal resources and strengths.
What is Brainspotting?
Brainspottting is a tool in the arsenal of trauma and resource work that helps identify, process, and treat human suffering in a safe therapeutic environment. Brainspotting uses the mind’s natural capacity and ability, through its native orientation to the positioning of the eyes in the visual field, to connect with and process through emotional experiences, traumatic memory, grief and loss, and current experience of stress and anxiety.
As a Certified Brainspotting therapist, among the many issues of human suffering, I specialize in supporting individuals and couples to work through childhood traumas and developmental wounds, psychosomatic pain, resource building to increase daily functioning and to support addiction recovery, and more.
Example of EMDR for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from my Denver, Colorado, psychotherapy practice:
I saw a client recently who witnessed a murder during a gang war. She came into my office exhibiting all the signs of PTSD: sleeplessness, flashbacks, fear of a foreshortened future, startle response, stress, anxiety, and more.
The crime occurred outside of her workplace. She was reminded of the violence every day when she went to work and passed by the area. Of her many disturbing images, the most fearsome is seeing one of the wounded come toward her.
Like all PTSD victims, she feared for her safety, and was unable to function in her daily life. She was paralyzed with fear. Gang members who committed the murder all looked and dressed alike. Anyone resembling this description caused her to panic.
With EMDR, we first worked to get her to a place where passing by the scene of the crime did not trigger reoccurring memories and flashes of the violence. Slowly, she reprocessed more of the horror she had witnessed and began to feel she had choices. Her empowerment increased. She felt relief, and her emotional distress diminished.
GLOW Counseling can help on a variety of trauma related issues including sex therapy, couples counseling, and psycho-sexual education:
Addiction recovery therapy
Anxiety and panic disorders
Avoidance and isolation
Depression treatment
Disability, or chronic pain
Fear and Phobias
Grief and loss counseling
Relationship and sexuality issues
Overcoming childhood sexual or emotional abuse
PTSD
EMDR treatment
Shame and guilt
Trauma and abuse history
Worry and stress reduction
Also go to Brainspotting treatment for trauma, PTSD, and grief in my Denver mental health practice.
