Trauma Therapy / EMDR
A trauma is anything that occurs in our lives that results in overwhelming feelings and altered beliefs about ourselves, others, or the world. Some traumas are obvious, such as sexual or physical abuse, while others are more ambiguous, like emotional neglect or verbal abuse. In addition, when we are young, even seemingly benign events can be traumatizing because of a child's limited perspective that leads to internalization of difficult or even “normal” situations as being a product of our own deficiencies. If you are struggling with low self-esteem, are having emotional reactions that feel out of proportion to current events and/or if you find yourself repeating self-defeating patterns in your job or relationships, you may be having a "trauma reaction" to unprocessed psychological material. Trauma therapy can help to get you “unstuck” once and for all, allowing more adaptive patterns of relating to self and others to emerge.
A trauma is anything that occurs in our lives that results in overwhelming feelings and altered beliefs about ourselves, others, or the world. Some traumas are obvious, such as sexual or physical abuse, while others are more ambiguous, like emotional neglect or verbal abuse. In addition, when we are young, even seemingly benign events can be traumatizing because of a child's limited perspective that leads to internalization of difficult or even “normal” situations as being a product of our own deficiencies. If you are struggling with low self-esteem, are having emotional reactions that feel out of proportion to current events and/or if you find yourself repeating self-defeating patterns in your job or relationships, you may be having a "trauma reaction" to unprocessed psychological material. Trauma therapy can help to get you “unstuck” once and for all, allowing more adaptive patterns of relating to self and others to emerge.
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Trauma therapy involves using principles of neuroscience to help you integrate a trauma into your life narrative instead of feeling dominated by it. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a particularly effective form of trauma therapy that uses bilateral stimulation to activate and reprocess information more quickly than standard talk therapy. Bilateral stimulation is a technique in which the left and right side of the brain are stimulated in an alternating fashion to help the brain process trauma by mimicking its natural processing mechanisms - the back and forth eye movements that occur in REM sleep. This results in deep emotional change. There are many ways to do bilateral stimulation and Dr. Ferguson can work with you to select the method that feels most comfortable to you.
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Cognitive Processing Therapy / Somatic Experiencing
Other forms of trauma therapy that are used are Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) and Somatic Experiencing (SE). CPT is similar to EMDR in that it focuses on exposure to traumatic material to reduce reactivity and also examines how beliefs about self, others and the world have been affected by your experiences. The biggest differences between CPT and EMDR are that EMDR has a more structured protocol and CPT does not use bilateral stimulation during processing. Both have been found to be effective in the PTSD treatment literature. Somatic Experiecing (SE) is an approach that focuses on body sensations to help process material that is stored on a cellular level, therefore affecting behavior automatically. SE uses the information gained to help a client express action tendencies that had to be repressed at the time of the trauma, thus allowing the brain to get "unstuck" and move forward. SE is often integrated into both CPT and EMDR and is rarely used as a stand-alone approach. It is completely up to the client, however, which approach (or combination of approaches) they would like to use to help them process their trauma.