Trauma Informed Individual Counselling
Are you just surviving?
- Do you experience unexplained anxiety or feelings of depression?
- Perhaps you frequently lose your temper or feel constantly irritated with people.
- You may experience intrusive thoughts or mental images that hold you back from being fully present at work or home.
- Parts of your body feel tense and tight more often than they feel relaxed.
- Maybe you notice increasing health or mobility issues, without a clear root cause
- When did you last allow yourself to sit quietly and breathe deeply, comfortable in your skin?
A trauma informed approach to counselling means understanding that anxiety and depression are not disorders to be medicated but are the nervous system’s responses to not feeling safe, seen or soothed.
The emotional states and behaviours that are sabotaging our relationships were once survival responses that made sense for the context in which they developed. But now they are holding us back from living a full life.
System Overload!
Mounting evidence is showing us that talking therapies alone, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), are not an adequate response to the impacts of trauma, and the anxiety and depression which so often result.
These responses to emotional distress live in the limbic system – our emotional centre – far from the prefrontal cortex, where conscious thoughts are processed.
Our emotional brain takes its lead from our body’s felt sense in our environment. When we have experienced overwhelming emotional distress our emotional brain is unable to process and integrate the distress and guide our nervous system back to a calm state.
When this happens, we live in a hyper (anxious) or hypo (depressed) state, unable to be fully present in our lives and bodies, just doing what we can to survive each day.
Trauma Informed Therapy
To effectively address the results of trauma or emotional distress, we need to confront the internal maps or core beliefs, which reside in those subconscious regions of our emotional brain, and in our body, where survival responses were first experienced, and still reside.
When we connect with these parts, it is possible to gradually transform the core survival beliefs, which once kept us safe, but are now holding us hostage. We are then free to truly live in the present.
At A Single Step, we draw on the following powerful approaches to support you in making fundamental changes in your life:
An Attachment-Focused Approach
An attachment focus shows us that the way we manage relationship distress was mapped out long ago.
Infants look to their primary attachment figures (usually parents or carers) for emotional safety and soothing. When it is not received, this causes distress and level of emotional responsiveness they receive in return largely dictates the survival strategies that emerge.
An infant that receives a caring and attuned response will develop a secure relationship to emotional attachments. But if the primary attachment figure is not emotionally available and responsive, the infant may become anxious and make louder, more distressed bids for connection or, conversely, become emotionally withdrawn and avoidant.
We take these emotional templates into our relationships with our adult attachment figures and the same patterns play out at times of emotional distress.
A skilled, attachment-focused therapist can help you join the dots between your childhood experiences and the ways in which you manage your emotions now.
A ‘Parts Work’ Approach
Parts Work is most notably associated with Internal Family Systems and Gestalt Therapies, and the theory of structural dissociation. It holds, at its core, the theory that we are not unitary beings, but rather, a collection of sub-personalities, which emerge as responses to challenging life events.
By engaging with parts that have become stuck or overactive (e.g. anxious parts, angry parts, depressed parts), we can forge new relationships with them, towards a more balanced and integrated system and a greater sense of personal agency.
A Body-Oriented Approach
It is now widely understood that the trauma and distress of the past is held in the body, even when it is invisible to the conscious mind. So it makes sense to recruit the body in the healing process. This is often referred to as working ‘bottom up’, as opposed to more cognitive or behavioural (‘top down’) approaches.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a body-oriented therapy that supports clients to work with experiences of trauma and distress by identifying and transforming the automatic physical and psychological patterns that restrict a full and enjoyable life.
"The critical human capacity to overcome trauma is to be able to Imagine alternative realities".
Registered Clinical Counsellor
Chris Pye from A Single Step is a Registered Clinical Counsellor and Accredited Supervisor with the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA).
PACFA is a leading national peak body for the counselling and psychotherapy profession. Practising members of PACFA are listed on PACFA’s National Register. Registrants have demonstrated an approved level of training, experience and competence, complying with PACFA’s ethical standards and meeting PACFA’s Training Standards, which are the highest for the profession in Australia.
