Trauma, Complex Grief, PTSD, and C-PTSD

Experiencing a disturbing or dangerous life event, or series of events, can be an incredibly unsettling experience. Trauma leaves its mark – on your mind, your body, your spirit, and your sense of safety in this world. Time becomes distorted and it often feels like the past is intruding into your present moment and dictating your future. You may feel stuck in the past and unable to move forward, like your emotions and memories are controlling you, or disconnected from the life and relationships you once cherished. You may even feel disconnected from yourself.

At Clearview, clients can choose from three popular evidence-based treatments to quickly and thoroughly address their symptoms: Prolonged Exposure (PE), Written Exposure Therapy (WET) and Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT). These approaches are designed to reduce symptoms of trauma, grief, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by addressing avoidant behaviors, cleaning up cognitive distortions, and retraining the brain’s response to distressing memories and triggers. After a traumatic event, one’s nervous system often remains in a heightened state and the brain struggles to distinguish between real and perceived danger. As a result, previously non-distressing people, places, and things can become triggering or overwhelming.

While avoidance of these triggers may offer temporary relief, it ultimately reinforces the cycle of distress and leads to lasting symptoms. Many common approaches to trauma recovery – talk therapy, Brainspotting, and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique/”Tapping”) are not empirically-supported. At Clearview, we pride ourselves in only offering evidence-based, empirically-supported interventions. We only use what works.

Unlike other trauma therapies, PE, CPT, and WET protocols aim to break the cycle of distress trauma and complex grief cause through imaginal exposure to the distressing memories, sensations, and thoughts in a controlled, safe, and dignified way. The use of imaginal exposure techniques allows clients to actively and purposefully revisit their traumatic memories, “snapshots” of memories, or “bodily memories” by talking about them in detail, writing them down, or repeatedly reading and listening to them.

In addition to exposure, these treatment protocols also work on examining beliefs about the trauma or loss and the stories we tell ourselves. One thing we work on is accepting that the past happened and we cannot change it – and then making decisions about how we want our present day and our future to look. These protocols help to retrain the brain to distinguish between the past and the present. By revisiting traumatic memories repeatedly, individuals learn that memories themselves are not dangerous, even though they may feel uncomfortable – and that they can move forward in their life with intention.