Trauma Counselling Perth

Trauma Counselling

Suffering from Trauma or PTSD related disorders can significantly affect the quality of your life. It can impact every aspect of your daily life, including your personal interaction with family, friends and colleagues in a variety of situations. It is important to know, even though these conditions can be debilitating, our body-centric approach can alleviate and heal your past traumas, so you can move forward in your life.

Trauma Counselling Perth

At the Energetics Institute, we are mental health professionals and offer comprehensive PTSD / Trauma Counselling in Perth. Our experienced counsellors are trained in Sensorimotor Trauma Resolution and Body Psychotherapy, which are very effective therapy tools to help free yourself from the symptoms of PTSD. Our mental health providers will work to assist and resource you to be conscious of your trauma triggers, disarm them, and be able to stay consciously present to the normal and stressful events in your life.

What Causes Trauma/PTSD?

Trauma is caused when you undergo traumatic experiences or you live in an unsafe or life-threatening environment, which rewires your brain to be in a state of ever-constant fear. What originally happened in the single or multiple traumatic event scenarios was typically a fight-or-flight response to the threat, but it failed and you became overwhelmed. At this point, your brain was prepared that you might die, but took sensory snapshots of everything happening. You survived but it left an important two-fold defensive legacy in place. This means that your fight or flight receptors are stuck in the “ON” position. As a result, you have become over-reactive to every stimulus in your everyday life.

If you are have gone through traumatic events and are currently experiencing symptoms, our PTSD counselling in Perth will help you find peace, find a sense of balance and reset the fight or flight response back to its normal state.

People with PTSD normally exhibit the following mental and physical symptoms:

• Feeling unsafe or anxious
• Recurrences or flashbacks of the original trauma
• Tendency to easily dissociate (distorts reality and hallucinates)
• Black and white rigid thinking
• Feeling emotionally or physically stuck or collapsed
• Being in a state of constant fatigue and experiences difficulty sleeping
• Starts but does not finish projects and tasks
• Fears socialising or being in crowds or around noise or stimulation
• Numb to physical bodily sensations and feelings
• Lacks resilience or healthy coping strategies
• Inability to have positive emotional responses to situations and people that you previously loved

How Can Trauma Therapy Help You

Our PTSD Counselling in Perth can assist in calming your nervous system and belief systems so we can then firstly reduce the severity of, then minimise and cease the typical behaviours and symptoms of trauma. The course of PTSD Counselling is related to the complexity of both your trauma and the dynamics of your life. Our treatment schedule suits everyone going through and experiencing PTSD symptoms. We assess each client on a case by cases basis to determine the most effective PTSD therapy plan for you.

Our post traumatic stress disorder treatment works well in conjunction with Sensorimotor Trauma Psychotherapy. We will explain the trauma to you, show you how trauma is an abnormal reaction to an abnormal event, how your trauma switch is now on, how trauma triggers work, and teach you how to use your adult mind to create a new belief in safety, of being a normal person, and how to contain trauma and remain a witness and be present to it, rather than succumb and be overwhelmed by it.

True cessation of trauma triggers is not achievable via Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or other front brain therapies, as they rely on the stable adult front brain-mind to be operating for you to apply their techniques. This part of the brain doesn’t react well to these types of therapies, only a body-centric, body sensory approach can stop the trauma process from triggering again.

How do I know if I’m displaying a PTSD risk factor? A risk factor can be characterised as something that increases your likelihood of being susceptible to obtaining or developing a condition. The major risk factors are as follows – childhood sexual abuse, painful experiences, exposure to natural disasters, sexual assault, motor vehicle accidents, genetics, lack of support in your life, existing mental health conditions, neurological conditions, history of substance abuse, lack of social support and previous exposure to traumatic experiences.

How do you know if you need PTSD treatment? When you think of trauma, you often think of major events such as wars or near-death experiences which cripple your functioning and create a legacy of PTSD. However, we now know that PTSD can come about from far less severe traumatic experiences or ongoing exposure to unsafe or adverse environments of dynamics with other people.

Treatment For Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

In our Perth based practice, our mental health professional use a PTSD therapy approach to “turn off the switch” that is jammed and keeps you no longer feeling safe in the world. The treatment for PTSD must take you back to a place of the original state of feeling safe again. As our therapists have a very good understanding of how PTSD manifests in your body and mind, we can help resolve your simple and complex trauma using both counselling and psychotherapy.

Talk therapy including cognitive processing therapy is effective as an educational tool but is limited in dealing with PTSD, but it can help improve your overall mental health.

At Energetics Institute in Perth, some of our body-mind therapists are specifically trained in Sensorimotor Trauma Psychotherapy which treats trauma using neuroplasticity which repairs the parts of the brain (Autonomic Nervous System, ANS) that are affected by PTSD symptoms. This approach utilises the body as a key means of developing the trauma sufferer’s awareness of their internal and physical action patterns, which is very effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Trauma therapy creates a safe environment for healing to occur. Our treatment may involve attachment theory, breathwork, bodywork, neuroscience and working with the sensorimotor processes of the trauma sufferer. Work may be needed on abandonment, traumatic experiences, boundary violations, loss of self-regulation, trust issues and formation of victim belief systems. If you or your loved ones are suffering from this condition please feel free to reach out to us at the Energetics Institute. If you are dealing with PTSD or any other mental health condition such as anxiety, depression or stress, remember you are not alone.