Follow Your Pathway to Healing

When you've experienced trauma, it can be excruciating. You may feel at a loss as to how to process what you've been through or how you can even start to heal. You just want to experience a sense of safety again. But the impact of trauma can cut deep. Even if you feel lost, there's hope.

Psychological trauma can affect your life for many years after the event or situation that caused it. It isn't a problem that's easily resolved, especially if you try to do it on your own. However, talk therapy has proven valuable in helping people overcome the distress, pain, and dysfunction that come from having lived through the most overwhelmingly threatening experiences.   

Domestic violence can be defined as abuse in a pattern of coercion, intimidation, as well as violence used for purposes of power and control in a household setting. Domestic violence can take place in marriages, intimate partnerships, parent-child relationships, or in other family relationships. Individuals affected by domestic violence can include elders, children, and adults. Violence can be in the form of physical, verbal, emotional, economic, and sexual abuse in a domestic violent relationship. Thus, domestic violence therapy is a useful tool.

Domestic violence can affect people of any age, class, culture, religion, occupation, sexual preference, or also race. Research has shown that when one remains in a violent domestic relationship, they are prone to developing psychological and chronic mental health conditions. When an individual is experiencing domestic violence, patterns of abuse will often increase in severity and frequency over time without help.

 It can be difficult to know how to help someone you love and care for when they have gone through a distressing or frightening event.
It’s natural to want to make someone you love and care for feel better again, but it’s important to accept what has happened. There is nothing you can say or do to make the person’s pain disappear. That will happen with time, rest, and appropriate support. Explain to them that you are sorry about what they have had to experience and that you are there to help them in any way they need.   

Get the help you need to support your loved ones.

Sexual assault is a unique form of trauma. It is highly stigmatized, and when people go to seek help for it, unlike in a car accident — well, the police are not going to ask you if you've really been in a car accident. 

It's important for survivors to know that they can regain a sense of power over triggers, and that the most natural response is to push away the triggers. Self-care isn't about turning off those bad feelings, but feeling those feelings so that they can subside naturally. 

Depression is a serious mood disorder, with an estimated 17 million American adults having at least one major depressive episode in the past year.1 It can affect how you think, feel, interact with people, and handle daily life. It can cause feelings of sadness and a loss of interest or pleasure in things you once enjoyed. Anyone can be affected by depression, and it can happen at any age, but it often begins in adulthood.

The good news is, depression is highly treatable, with reports of 80% to 90% of people eventually responding well to treatment.2 One of the reasons depression responds so well to treatment is that improvements can be found in medications, psychotherapy, or the combination of both. Finding the right psychotherapist who can help you understand and work through the underlying causes of depression as well as develop coping strategies to deal with the symptoms is often the first step to feeling better.

 Therapy can help you uncover the underlying causes of your worries and fears; learn how to relax; look at situations in new, less frightening ways; and develop better coping and problem-solving skills. Therapy gives you the tools to overcome anxiety and teaches you how to use them.