Trauma Therapy
Ages 3+
Let’s Start Here!
Traumatic stress is an emotional response to an upsetting, shocking, scary, or dangerous experience. It affects how a person thinks, feels, and acts. Traumatic experiences and traumatic stress can occur at any age. Most people will experience an event in their lifetime that can be considered traumatic, but not everyone will experience traumatic stress or develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
What is Traumatic Stress?
How is it Diagnosed?
Medical and mental health professionals are able to diagnose an individual with Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders after meeting with the individual, discussing their experiences, and evaluating their reactions to those experiences. There are several diagnoses associated with traumatic stress (e.g., Acute Stress Disorder, Adjustment Disorders, Other Specified Trauma and Stressor-Related Disorder). The most well-known diagnosis is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
In order for a person to be diagnosed with PTSD, their traumatic experience must involve death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence. An individual may witness these events, experience them directly, discover these events happened to a loved one, or have the events occur as part of their professional duties (e.g., first responders, medics, soldiers). There are four symptom clusters associated with PTSD: intrusions, avoidance, negative alterations in cognitions and mood, and marked alterations in arousal and reactivity. Individuals diagnosed with PTSD experience a certain amount of symptoms in each cluster for over 1 month, 30 days after the traumatic experience. The individual’s symptoms cause distress and get in the way of their day-to-day functioning.
How is Traumatic Stress Treated?
Traumatic Stress is best treated with evidence-based psychotherapy. There are many different treatment models, but the most effective models provide individuals with useful coping strategies for managing distress, help individuals decrease avoidance by having them gradually process the traumatic experience in a supportive setting, discuss the impact of the traumatic event on various aspects of the individual’s life, challenge unhelpful beliefs that came about as a result of the traumatic experience, prevent the traumatic event from re-occurring, and teach skills for maintaining progress once after the individual completes psychotherapy. Research shows that psychotherapy in combination with psychotropic medication is most effective for reducing traumatic stress symptomatology.
How Will I be Treated at your Center?
I begin treatment by gathering background information and asking about the different thoughts, feelings, and behaviors individuals typically experience following a potentially traumatic experience. DETAILS SURROUNDING POTENTIALLY TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES ARE NEVER DISCUSSED DURING THIS MEETING. Afterward, I use the information I collected to determine an appropriate diagnosis and treatment modality. The entire process typically takes 1 hour and therapy services begin the following week. Check out the evidence-based treatments I offer below!
Trauma and the Brain:
Taking complicated concepts and simplifying them using easy-to-understand language and real-world examples is an essential part of my practice. When it comes to understanding traumatic stress, I find that most people aren’t wanting a lesson in Anatomy & Physiology. They just want to understand what’s going on in their— or their child’s— brain. For me, the best way to explain this is by comparing the brain to a car.
Amygdala=Car Alarm
Hippocampus=Dash Cam
Prefrontal Cortex=Multimedia System
When we experience something upsetting, shocking, scary, or dangerous, our amygdala responds by releasing norepinephrine. Norepinephrine is a hormone and chemical messenger that plays a crucial role in the body's response to upsetting, shocking, scary, or dangerous events— also known as "fight-or-flight.” Think of the amygdala as your car’s alarm— and it is going off!
The hippocampus has a lot of jobs. One of its jobs is to help us form and process memories. Norepinephrine leads to enhanced memories of upsetting, shocking, scary, or dangerous experiences. Often this is a good thing. You wouldn’t want to have to relearn that a stove is hot every time you cooked, right? That said, too much norepinephrine can cause the hippocampus to start to fear everything and make it harder for individuals to tell the difference between actual and imagined danger. Think of the hippocampus as your car’s dash cam. When the alarm goes off, it takes pictures of everything going on around it and stores them. Some of those pictures are of things that are actually unsafe. A lot of the pictures are of things that are pretty harmless. However, we now associate those images with danger. Next time we see those images, our car’s alarm might be triggered again.
The prefrontal cortex also has a lot of jobs— namely planning, decision-making, controlling our impulses, regulating our emotions, and being our mental sketchpad when we need to work with information for a minute. Too much norepinephrine causes the prefrontal cortex to become less active and struggle to carry out its normal jobs. Usually, the prefrontal cortex can exert control over the hippocampus and amygdala when it needs to, but norepinephrine disrupts this communication. In other words, when the car alarm is going off, your multimedia system doesn’t work. It can’t access the dash cam’s settings and delete safe images. It struggles to de-activate the alarm.
I’m the mechanic who is going to teach you ways to turn off the alarm and access new settings in your multimedia system to manage dash cam files. After a while, you won’t need to come by the shop anymore. The alarm will go off less often and you’ll know exactly what to do when it does!
I offer the following evidence-based services
in-person and via telehealth:
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TF-CBT (Ages 3 to 18)
Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Services in Fargo-Moorhead at Ani Mangold Psychological Services PLLC
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AF-CBT (Ages 5 to 18)
Alternatives for Families a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is available in Fargo Moorhead at Ani Mangold Psychological Services PLLC.
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CFTSI (Ages 7 to 18)
The Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention is available in Fargo-Moorhead at Ani Mangold Psychological Services PLLC.
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CPT (Ages 14+)
Cognitive Processing Therapy is available in Fargo-Moorhead at Ani Mangold Psychological Services PLLC