Many individuals experience trauma and live with the unfortunate impacts that trauma can have on one’s physical body, relationships, career, sense of self, and overall well being. At Hive Therapy Collective, we offer individually tailored therapy services to help you overcome the trauma that is clinging onto your life; we believe in resiliency and can help you develop the tools to heal and move forward.
Trauma is a response to an event that has deeply injured a person’s nervous system. If you think about humans in an evolutionary sense, we are made up of two major systems that help us take in the world around us, the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system. Our peripheral nervous system is made up of our nerves that help us experience basic senses such as our vision, our hearing, our sense of smell, and our sense of touch. Our central nervous system is made up of our brain and deep nervous tissue and makes sense of the information that our body gathers. Together, these two systems help us navigate the world around us and engage with life in a safe way. These systems tell you when something is too hot to hold with your hand or present some kind of danger to you.
When you experience something that is traumatic, your brain begins to send your body and your psyche the message that things similar to the traumatic event are also unsafe. This can understandably have deep impacts in your emotional state, which can ripple down to other areas of your life and can lead you to finding ways of emotionally numbing yourself, breakdowns in your most cherished relationships, and even a loss of a sense of purpose or meaning.
Often, people carry around their trauma for many years and even decades, before they realize its impact. However, working with a therapist to understand and process trauma can bring back a sense of control over the way that an individual is able to engage with the world around them and live their life.
Intergenerational trauma is slightly different than a traumatic event one might experience in their own life. The individual seeking therapy to process intergenerational trauma may not have been the person who directly experienced the traumatic event. Instead, they might be the child or family member of someone who’s trauma, even many generations later, is having a lasting impact. Think of the parent who pokes at their child’s weight because they remember their mother did it to them, the grandparent who scolds their grandchild for crying too often because their parent was distant or cold, or the emotionally distant parent who’s own parent worked long nights and complained about having to care for them. Working on an individual’s experience of generational trauma is something that has many ripple effects as it prevents future generations from suffering a similar fate and heals the wounds inflicted by trauma that might have happened many years before.
Here are just some of the examples of how trauma can show up, but this is by no means an all-inclusive list.
Racial trauma
Major accidents
Disruptions in childhood relationships with caregivers
Engagement with law enforcement
Bullying
Financial trauma
Medical trauma
Relational trauma
Experiencing or living through an act of violence
War
Sexual trauma
Not necessarily, but it is possible. PTSD is a condition where someone has experienced something traumatic and has a constellation of symptoms that persist at least 2 months past the traumatic event. Those symptoms can look differently for different people, but many individuals who experience PTSD have symptoms that are very intrusive and experience intense distress.
This is where a good, trauma-informed therapist can come in. Meeting with a therapist to have a discussion about your specific symptoms will allow for them to assess whether or not you’re experiencing PTSD. Ultimately, trauma care, and therapy in general, should be individualized to your needs and not everyone with trauma experiences or PTSD will need or want the same care; finding a good therapist who is willing to work with you to personalize your care is a great first step to taking back your life from your trauma!
Are you ready to work through your trauma? Schedule a session with one of our therapists to start your healing journey now! ->
Resources need to be different for different age groups, for that reason, we have broken down the resources we found helpful into categories based on how one might utilize the resource. Clinical works are best suited for adults and young adults to understand the mechanism of trauma. Certain fiction is useful to help spark dialogue and discussion between adults and the children they care for and love.
The Body Keeps the Score
It Didn't Start with You
Waking the Tiger
Parenting from the Inside Out
Far From The Tree (Pixar Short families)
Inside Out (Pixar movie for families)
Encanto (Pixar movie for families)
