This picture is of 2,977 flags. My son is the President of Young Americans for Freedom at his high school, and he led this project for 9/11 today. He gave a short speech commemorating that the lives lost were the lives of people’s mothers, fathers, sisters, friends, daughters, and sons.
Seeing all these flags memorializing the trauma of 9/11 makes me think about the private and personal traumas that many of my clients are currently working so hard to resolve in trauma therapy. Including those clients who have lost a loved one to traumatic event. They are still here on earth trying to survive PTSD. I am thinking of you today.
And so many other clients with personal traumas of being severely abused as a child and other unspoken traumas…. the kind we do not have memorials for.
I commend all my clients who make the decision to enter treatment for PTSD and to resolve their memories. I want you to Repair the most Relationship of All – the one you have with yourself – so you can trust yourself and learn to trust other people again.
My question to you is, how are you doing amid all the stress and trauma you hear about daily?
If you are considering trauma therapy because you keep avoiding dealing with past experiences that make you feel numb, scared, or unable to go forward in your life in a healthier way – please know that the work is difficult but the reward is great.
The type of trauma therapy that we do here at our practice is prolonged exposure therapy, sometimes using EMDR. It is like emotional surgery. People feel emotionally tired, tearful, and upset as they explore their memories with myself or one of my Associates.
However, after you get through the emotional surgery of digging up the memory and cleaning it out – then resetting your mind and heart to more of who you were or would have become without your trauma – well then you are finally healed.
The emotional surgery was painful… and the aftermath made you pretty darn sore… but then in the end you have less symptoms.
Less panic attacks, less OCD symptoms, the absence of phobias and rituals, less anger and emotional reactivity, less sleep disturbance. You will no longer continue to have to try to avoid thinking about your trauma. Your trauma will no longer catch you off guard in the middle of your day in the form of an intrusive thought that suddenly knocks the wind out of you.
Healing is available. PTSD is very treatable, so I hope you will Reach Out For Help to resolve your own personal traumatic events.
