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Bernadette Valentinetti

Treatment for Trauma


I have recently completed training in EMDR and am now offering Trauma Informed Care. But what does that mean?

Trauma Informed Care is a way to look at how the events that occur throughout our lifetime shape our behavior today. A lot of people think about trauma as a big event that arises in someone’s life, mostly in context of someone who has served in a war zone. Trauma is not limited to this, it can be little things too. It can even be things that don’t happen when we need them to happen. For example, trauma can come from a lack of freedom to express emotions normally or someone minimizing feelings, the list goes on and on.

In Trauma Informed Care, we look at the events that shaped the individual to explain why they are reacting to events today in the way that they are. It is an understanding that we are molded by events that have happened in the past and the behaviors we have today exhibit a purpose. When someone has unprocessed trauma, he or she reacts to events that occur today with excessive emotional response because the traumatic memories are not processed and linger in the part of the brain that is responsible for fight, flight, or freeze response (the amygdala).

EMDR works to process those traumatic events in a systematic way that can be much quicker than other therapeutic approaches. No one is positive how EMDR works (we can’t open up the skull and look at how the brain processes memories), but it is believed that it is somewhat similar to dreaming. When we dream, we are processing events that occur throughout your life. Rapid Eye Movement (REM) occurs while we dream and the process of EMDR mimics the eye movements that occur during REM stage sleep. The eye movements activate the memories and allow them to move forward into our frontal cortex where we can use them for growth.

EMDR can be used to treat many different issues including substance use, anxiety, depression, relationship issues, self-injury, borderline personality disorder, and this list continues because in Trauma Informed Care our behaviors are reactions to past trauma not being processed.

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