Trauma Informed Individual Counselling
Are you just surviving?
- Do you experience unexplained anxiety or feelings of depression?
- Perhaps you frequently lose your temper or feel constantly irritated with people.
- You may experience intrusive thoughts or mental images that hold you back from being fully present at work or home.
- Parts of your body feel tense and tight more often than they feel relaxed.
- Maybe you notice increasing health or mobility issues, without a clear root cause
- When did you last allow yourself to sit quietly and breathe deeply, comfortable in your skin?
A trauma informed approach to counselling means understanding that anxiety and depression are not disorders to be medicated but are the nervous system’s responses to not feeling safe, seen or soothed.
The emotional states and behaviours that are sabotaging our relationships were once survival responses that made sense for the context in which they developed. But now they are holding us back from living a full life.
System Overload!
Mounting evidence is showing us that talking therapies alone, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), are not an adequate response to the impacts of trauma, and the anxiety and depression which so often result.
These responses to emotional distress live in the limbic system – our emotional centre – far from the prefrontal cortex, where conscious thoughts are processed.
Our emotional brain takes its lead from our body’s felt sense in our environment. When we have experienced overwhelming emotional distress our emotional brain is unable to process and integrate the distress and guide our nervous system back to a calm state.
When this happens, we live in a hyper (anxious) or hypo (depressed) state, unable to be fully present in our lives and bodies, just doing what we can to survive each day.
A Trauma Informed Approach
To effectively address the results of trauma or emotional distress, we need to confront the internal maps or core beliefs, which reside in those subconscious regions of our emotional brain, and in our body, where survival responses were first experienced, and still reside.
When we speak directly to these parts, it is possible to let go of the core survival beliefs, which once kept us safe, but are now holding us hostage. We are then free to choose the life we were meant to live.
At A Single Step, we draw on the following powerful modalities to support you in making fundamental changes in your life:
Parts Work is most notably associated with Internal Family Systems and Gestalt Therapies, and the theory of structural dissociation. It holds, at its core, the theory that we are not unitary beings, but rather, a collection of sub-personalities, which emerge as responses to challenging life events. By engaging with our parts, we can forge creative solutions and work towards greater integration and a sense of personal agency.
It is now widely understood that the trauma and distress of the past is held in the body, even when it is invisible to the conscious mind. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy works ‘from the bottom up’, welcoming the body as a central resource to help you chart a truly embodied healing journey.
The Richards Trauma Process (TRTP) is a powerful and intensive process, over a series of weekly sessions, which guides your nervous system from hyper (anxious) or hypo (depressed) arousal, to a place where it knows at core that the trauma or distress of the past is over and you are now safe to engage fully with life.
"The critical human capacity to overcome trauma is to be able to Imagine alternative realities".
Registered Clinical Counsellor
Chris Pye from A Single Step is a Registered Clinical Counsellor with the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA).
PACFA is a leading national peak body for the counselling and psychotherapy profession. Practising members of PACFA are listed on PACFA’s National Register. Registrants have demonstrated an approved level of training, experience and competence, complying with PACFA’s ethical standards and meeting PACFA’s Training Standards, which are the highest for the profession in Australia.
