Recovering from trauma takes time, and everyone heals at their own pace, but in order to heal from psychological, emotional and/or physical trauma, people need to resolve the negative feelings and potentially revisit the unpleasant memories that they’ve kept pent up and stored away. It is important that people affected by trauma seek help from a safe and secure environment under the care of professionals who will undergo specific therapeutic techniques that have been proven to heal each person’s specific trauma. One of the most important services we offer at our trauma treatment center in Los Angeles is crisis counseling. 

Crisis counseling allows those in recovery who are struggling with trauma to turn to our qualified professionals during their time of need. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), there are four different interventions that are strongly recommended, all of which are variations of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In addition to CBT, there is Cognitive Processing Therapy, Cognitive Therapy and Prolonged Exposure. CBT focuses on the relationships among thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and this type of therapy is used to target current problems and symptoms that a patient may be experiencing as a result of lasting trauma. This focuses on the changing patterns of thoughts and behaviors that may lead the patient to have difficulty functioning as a result of their trauma. CPT is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy that helps patients learn how to challenge unhelpful beliefs that resulted from the trauma they experienced previously. Cognitive Therapy is when therapists seek to modify the pessimistic memories of trauma with the intention of disturbing the thought patterns that have been interfering with a patient’s life on a daily basis. Finally, prolonged exposure therapy is when the patient is urged to engage with the two avoidances – the memory of the trauma and reminders of the memory. By facing what they have been avoiding, this shows the patient that the traumatic memories are not dangerous and do not need to be avoided or treated as a danger. These therapies are all geared toward healing a person’s trauma for the long term. In the short-term, there are medications that can help to subside some of the anxiety and depression symptoms that result from a patient’s trauma, but medication alone cannot cure trauma. When dealing with trauma, it is important to seek treatment, and our trauma treatment center in California has psychotherapists and counselors who are trained in treating all the varying types of trauma.