Tag: trauma-informed psychotherapy

Psychotherapy could, and really ought to, promote itself as the best investigative tool around for understanding emotional health and problems in living. That would change its footing, putting it on much more solid ground. I’m calling this redefined version of psychotherapy multi-lens therapy, to put the emphasis on where it ought to have been put all along: investigating.

The Psychological Injury model will triumph, not just because literally thousands of studies show how trauma and stressful life events result in mental health problems, but because at our core, we know it is true. People hurt people, and people heal people. This cracks the intellectual foundation of psychopharmacology.

Becoming "trauma-informed" is often just a way to advance one's career and feel good about oneself while pretty much doing nothing different. Here's a glimpse into the ways in which mainstream services and trauma specialists are perpetuating harm while patting themselves on the back for being progressive and aware.

An interview with Jeffrey Michael Friedman, clinical social worker and activist in the psychiatric survivors movement who provides trauma-informed therapy to victims of abuse and violence, including those who have survived abuses within the mental health system.

Parents should be very cautious about entrusting their children to any institution — private boarding schools, ballet schools, training facilities away from home. We are all best off raising our adolescents subject to our oversight, rather than entrusting them to others. Those who should protect us from trauma are harming our children.

Scrooge’s character was forged from his own emotional pain. Indeed, we can change the course of our lives through facing and mourning that pain. Want, deprivation and cruelty create the evils of the world. Mourning and trust, in the context of love, are its antidotes. 

Although I saw a number of counselors and therapists for my dependency issues, they were unable to help me. Therapists saw my unhappy childhood experiences as part of me, part of who I was, but I did not see it that way. I imagined the experiences circling around outside of ‘the real me’ like moons around a planet, standing between me and the outside world.

Historically, psychiatric diagnoses were never intended to signify literal brain diseases. They used to be a shorthand and a guide to point to the psychological issues that presented. This is how it still should be today. The way diagnosis is now used is a travesty. 

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Writing Therapy both reduce PTSD symptoms in children who experienced a single traumatic event.