Trauma: What is trauma and what types do you treat?

Trauma is considered to be any single event that can occur over a period of time in a person’s past which deeply and profoundly effected their psyche to the point of it negatively impacting their reactions and interactions with others in situations. Additionally, trauma can negatively effect the quality of your life. The trauma victim personally witnessed or directly experienced an incident that involved real or threatened violence, risk of serious injury, or death. The trauma victim experiences and then internalizes a very real sense of fear and/or helplessness during their traumatic incident. If the trauma is very intense it can later impact an individual's ability to cope with everyday life or to even interact or maintain a healthy relationship with others.

Some examples of traumatic events include rape, robbery, kidnapping, threats of violence, sexual molestation, serious vehicle accidents, industrial accidents and wartime activities. Additional examples are major natural disasters including hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, etc.

Childhood trauma often takes the most amount of treatment to successfully recover from as it is the most deeply seeded of traumas. Any unresolved trauma can be the underlying root cause of alcoholism or substance abuse disorder.

Trauma may not always be obvious or noticeable in the individual who is suffering from trauma or to others around them. The individual suffering from trauma may only show physical or emotional signs of distress when a specific trigger happens that causes the sufferer to remember and relive some aspect of their previous personal traumatic experience.

The individual suffering may have never talked about their traumatic experience with others for fear of having to relive it. In these situations a professional, experienced trauma recovery program is often the best chance for successful treatment and recovery for the trauma victim.

There are several types of physical and/or psychological trauma, most of which fall into one of three categories, and may occur at any time in an individual's life. The traumatic experience may involve a single, intense event such as: a serious automobile or industrial accident; a serious threat to one's life or the life of a loved one; abduction; rape; robbery, mugging or other acts of personal violence; natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, fire, etc; and the all too frequent acts of terrorism. In the second category, the traumatic experience may involve repetitive and ongoing events such as: sexual or physical abuse of the self; witnessing violence and/or sexual or physical abuse of others; profound physical or psychological neglect; military combat; prisoners of war, kidnapping, or other captivity; torture; prolonged illness and extensive medical procedures; etc. The third category involves the many combination of those events listed above and may occur simultaneously or separately over long periods of time.

The Trauma Recovery Program

Behavioral Health of the Palm Beaches is one of the leading treatment centers for successfully treating what is known as co-occurring disorders. Co-occurring / Dual diagnosed disorders occur when someone has both a chemical dependency and a diagnosed mood disorder, such as trauma. The Trauma Recovery program at BHOPB offers effective trauma resolution through a variety of clinical interventions and evidenced-based therapies including EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy. This state-of-the-art technique has proven a very successful tool for treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other trauma related conditions.

Light Sound Neurotherapy >

Unresolved trauma often is responsible for people engaging in self-destructive behaviors like alcohol or drug addiction or abuse. The trauma sufferer will often fall into repeating different types of self defeating behavioral patterns to escape the emotional pain they suffered during their trauma. Some of the most dangerous of these self-destructive behaviors are alcohol or drug addiction or abuse.

Please call us anytime day or night, 24/7 TOLL-FREE at (888) 432-2467 for more information on our Trauma Recovery Program here at Behavioral Health of the Palm Beaches.

Give you or your loved one the chance they need to go back in time and finally be able to move on past their debilitating emotional pain and suffering.