Areas of Focus & Types of Treatment

Trauma is anything that prevents the nervous system from fully processing a 'scary' moment. Trauma can include events that should never have happened, like threats to survival or witnessing and experiencing physical, emotional, or sexual violence. It can also encompass situations that were supposed to occur but didn’t, such as instability in home and health, neglect, or a lack of a support system. This often leads to nervous system overload, impacting every area of a person's life, whether due to singular event trauma disorders like PTSD or chronic traumas, also known as CPTSD. 

Trauma-related dissociation is the internal disconnection of self from the self. Dissociation is a survival response as a way for the brain to protect itself from the pain of the experience (physical or emotional). This can be experienced in a few ways:

Depersonalization: the inability to feel entirely real. You might experience a lack of stable identity, or feel as though you're watching yourself through a fog or like you're far away from yourself. Your body is doing things, but you might feel like you are not in charge of the motions and actions. You don't feel real.

Derealization: the things around you don't feel real. Other people might appear like NPCs, you might notice changes in vision (tunnel vision, fogginess, colors seem too bright), or extreme disconnect from others.

Somatic Dissociation: to protect itself from pain, the brain cuts itself off from the body's experience of emotions and feelings. This disconnect often lasts beyond the trauma experience because the brain doesn't understand that it is safe enough to feel. Somatic dissociation causes us to have difficulty in connecting with others and ourselves.

Sometimes dissociation is intense enough to cause the brain to create multiple parts of ourselves. These can show up as fully formed and separate identities that can lead lives of their own (Dissociative Identity Disorder), less distinguished parts that influence how the self lives (OSDD), or through intense periods of Depersonalization and Derealization (DPDR). Regardless of how dissociation shows up, it can be an incredibly dysregulating experience.

Neurodivergence refers to a difference in how some brains process and interpret information, and there is often an overlap between neurodivergence and trauma disorders. Mind Body Soul Therapy welcomes clients with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD Level 1) and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Mind Body Soul Therapy offers holistic mental health services that include identity affirming care and a safe environment for individuals to process the queer and trans experience. 

Trauma treatment methods at Mind Body Soul Therapy include Somatic Experiencing (reconnecting with the body's experience of emotions), Parts Work (identifying, listening to, and updating the parts of ourselves that have survived the trauma), EMDR (targets specific traumas to reprocess through structured sensory input), and Coherence Therapy/Memory Reconsolidation (exploring the coherence of our blocks and allowing the brain to reprocess the need for those blocks).