Life can be full of jarring experiences, soul-piercing tragedies, and other earth-shattering events that destroy your sense of safety, comfort and self-confidence. You can’t run away from your past, but you can find ways to process the trauma from those events and create a path toward a better life.

Through talking sessions with your therapist, you can understand the impact trauma has on your life. When you begin to talk about your trauma, you are able to start healing. Through conversations about your past trauma, you’ll be able to understand what happened to you is not your fault and learn how to process your trauma.

Trauma always eventually manifests itself in some way in a person’s life. No matter when the event happened and no matter the magnitude of the traumatic event, the lingering trauma will show up somehow in your life. Talking with a therapist helps you identify how past trauma is linked to current behaviors, patterns and experiences that aren’t serving you in life.

Reaction to trauma can include persistent anger to trouble sleeping, pulling away from friends and family, turning to drugs and alcohol and feelings of numbness, guilt and shame. Talking with a therapist like me helps you identify why you are experiencing certain feelings and understand the impact your trauma has had on your life.

Therapists can help with trauma symptoms including:

• PTSD
• Changes in sleep and eating patterns
• Excessive alcohol and drug use
• Declining job performance
• Feeling distracted
• Feelings of isolation, numbness, shame

Trauma can be passed down through generations when it isn’t fully processed in a process known as transgenerational trauma. This shows up in later generations in traits such as a lack of trust, poor self esteem, lack of ability to cope with stress and substance abuse. Talking with a therapist about feelings of trauma can help identify traumatic events in the distant past that could be impacting more than one person in your family.

Traumatic events create emotions, thoughts and feelings that need to be processed. No matter the type of trauma, these negative and jarring life events resurface as you go through life. If you don’t process the beliefs, thoughts, emotions and fears that are created through trauma, they will manifest in ways that impact your quality of life.

Talking with a therapist about traumatic events you’ve experienced will help you discover how that trauma has impacted your life. Sessions with a therapist can free you from the chains of trauma and create a life full of freedom and positivity.

Symptoms of trauma can include:

• Insomnia
• Anti-social feelings
• Feelings of hopelessness
• Difficulty concentrating
• Phobias
• Panic attacks
• Substance abuse

Trauma can also impact your health. Studies have shown a link between unprocessed trauma and high blood pressure and heart problems. Talking with a therapist about the traumatic events that you have experienced helps you process your trauma and keep it from festering and causing more problems in your health and throughout your life.

It’s never too soon after a traumatic event to seek therapy for unresolved trauma. The sooner you start talking about what happened to you, the better you can address the trauma and create healthy ways of coping and processing the event. Unprocessed trauma can lead to feelings of guilt, shame and loneliness, an inability to move forward in life and poor decision making strategies.

Talking with a therapist about the traumatic event you experienced can help you process your trauma, no matter when the event happened. Together we can reframe memories in ways that serve you and create tools for managing your trauma as you move forward with life.

Trauma counseling can help:

• Process past trauma events
• Shift your focus from past to present
• Reconnect with yourself
• Increase daily functioning
• Learn coping skills for distorted thoughts and feeling

Learn how to be free from your trauma by talking with a therapist about traumatic events you have experienced. Talking about your trauma helps you recognize how it is impacting your life and helps you process feelings, beliefs and thought patterns that have developed. Together, you and your therapist can create a path forward toward freedom from your trauma.