Trauma-Informed Care: Integrate’s Commitment to Comprehensive Healing
A closer look at how the effects of trauma-focused care in therapy can help patients heal from deep wounds with deep roots.
By: Kelsey Madas
What brings a person to make a therapy appointment?
Perhaps one day, seemingly out of the blue, they find themselves in a blind panic over something that doesn’t logically make sense. For others, it might be the creeping feeling of deepening sadness that they just can’t shake. The unexpected loss of a loved one, a bad break up, unexplained anxiety, struggling to make friends, endless stomach aches that send you to the doctor just to discover “you’re fine” (physically, at least).
Whatever it was that caused a person to seek professional help, many come to the conclusion with the help of therapist that it wasn’t just the one incident.
It started somewhere else.
WHAT IS TRAUMA?
Trauma is a bit of a buzzword online lately. Out-of-fashion outfits can be “traumatizing.” Influencers refer to “trauma dumping” when a person shares too much personal information with them. But in the professional field of therapy, counseling and social work, what do they mean when they use the word trauma?
The American Psychological Association, explains that trauma is, “. . . an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, crime, natural disaster, physical or emotional abuse, neglect, experiencing or witnessing violence, death of a loved one, war, and more.” Take note of the phrases, “a terrible event” and, most importantly, “and more,” in that definition.
There is no hard and fast rule, no category of specific events or experiences that exclusively qualify as traumatic. There is no shortage of ways in which a person could become traumatized.
Thankfully, there are ways to recover. That’s what the work of the trained therapists and counselors at Integrate Therapy & Wellness Collective strive to bring to those in need in Lancaster County.
Steven J. Berkowitz, MD, the associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Center for Youth and Family Trauma Response and Recovery, wrote in an article for the Child Mind Institute, “Many of us have experiences that are very upsetting. We may be disturbed, we may be unable to sleep, we may not be able to eat, we may be irritable, but we integrate it, over time, and recover.
So trauma is really best understood as a failure of recovery. It’s a response to an event, it’s not the event itself.”
In the same article, Berkowitz also notes that the nature of the event is not what makes it traumatic. It’s a person’s subject experience that makes it traumatic or not.
WHAT IS TRAUMA-INFORMED CARE?
Now that we understand what trauma is, we can begin to understand what trauma-informed care is and what it looks like. If trauma is an injury you’ve never recovered from, consider then, how other experiences - even seeking help - may worsen the injury. If a doctor is unaware of your condition, their attempts to fix other ailments will be unsuccessful or aggravate the initial injury.
In therapy, trauma-informed care seeks to consider how that trauma could become compounded during a recovery attempt and what factors may make it worse.
According to the University of Buffalo’s Center for Social Research, “Trauma-informed care is an organizational change process that requires all individuals, practices and protocols, and environments to engage in universal precaution for trauma. Similar to how healthcare professionals put on gloves when needing to touch patients as universal precautions for pathogens, being trauma- informed requires putting on metaphorical gloves by changing interactions, policies, and environments to prevent the possibility of re-traumatization.”
TRAUMA-INFORMED CARE AT INTEGRATE THERAPY & WELLNESS COLLECTIVE
The trained therapists at Integrate Therapy in Lancaster are well-informed on this approach to healing.
“We work to address not just the initial incident that may have brought you to us, but also seek to understand how, in the context of your life, those incidents - like panic attacks, flashbacks, compulsions - may be connected to other unresolved wounds,”
says Ambur Gregorio, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, mental health therapist, founder and owner of Integrate Therapy & Wellness Collective.
“We want you to find comprehensive healing so you can make a full recovery and lead a life that’s not inhibited by distressing thoughts or feelings at unexpected moments. We use evidenced based, bottom up treatment approaches like EMDR and parts work to help us achieve this level of healing.”
