Group Therapy

Trauma comes in various forms. Emotional trauma can show up after physical/verbal abuse, bullying, or other major incidents like an unexpected death of a family member or loss of a child. Regardless of the onset, these major events in life can leave us with emotional wounds, also known as trauma. For the person who experienced the tragic event of 9/11 first hand, we might think this as a BIG “T” trauma. Whereas, the child who witnesses their mother being verbally abused over time may have small “t” trauma. However, the intensity of the experience, the degree to which the child felt they or their parent was threatened, and the length at which they were exposed to this type of experience can turn into what we call C-PTSD, or complex trauma.

Often complex trauma can be just as (or even more) debilitating to a person as someone who experienced a BIG “T” trauma. Thus, it’s important not to compare our trauma to someone else’s, or minimize our experience which is unique and individualized to our collective human experience. Emotional abuse, parental neglect, relationship/spousal abuse, an unexpected death, a car accident, all of things can bring about long-term negative effects for a person. Our capacity for processing different aspects of trauma also varies greatly depending on the resources we have available to us at any given time, including:

• Having the information I needed to process my trauma
• Having family and friends who supported me through the traumatic experience
• Whether I took advantage of therapy or other means for processing my trauma
• The severity of my trauma
• Whether I had chronic/repeated exposure to my trauma?
• Whether I had previous trauma that was not properly dealt with