Touched by trauma
By Laurie Meyers
February 22, 2019
Licensed professional counselor (LPC) Ryan T. Day often refers to himself as a trauma survivor turned trauma therapist. When he was 11, Day was molested several times by a family friend. He had also already endured serious bullying brought on by a temporary childhood speech impediment. Day eventually began to act out and get into trouble at school. At age 13, as punishment for this misbehavior, he was severely beaten by his father, a preacher in a Pentecostal African-American church who interpreted the saying “spare the rod, spoil the child” literally.
Once he was molested, Day says he began to feel that something was wrong — he was constantly angry and often used his fists to express that anger. Day knew he wasn’t feeling “normal,” but it didn’t occur to him that what he was feeling was tied to the molestation. He says there was simply no awareness of any kind about trauma in his community, which he describes as a rough area of Richmond, Virginia, where residents learned to ignore the sounds of gun shots and to turn away from domestic violence.
“I never knew that violence was an issue,” Day says. To him, it was just a normal part of life. Nor did Day know what sexual abuse was. Although he took a sex education class in high school, he says that sexual violence was never mentioned.
Day was also an athlete in high school, but instead of changing clothes in front of other students, he would retreat to a bathroom stall. “I felt uncomfortable around males. I didn’t trust men,” he says, adding that his feelings were not about homophobia but simply about not feeling safe. “Locker room shenanigans triggered me and made me want to fight or freak out.”
Still grappling with emotional and personal barriers as a young adult, Day earned his bachelor’s degree in information technology and then decided to become a counselor. He says his counseling program didn’t emphasize self-assessment, however, so it wasn’t until he confronted a crisis during his internship that Day finally made the trauma connection.
During this time, Day had become suicidal, in part because he realized he was married to someone he didn’t love. Day says he hadn’t learned how to establish personal connections growing up, so, as he puts it, “I married the first person to show me some affection and love.” The religious tradition in which Day was raised didn’t consider divorce an option. In addition, Day and his wife were expecting a child, so he didn’t see a way to escape the stress of his marriage.
Fortunately, one of Day’s supervisors realized that he was experiencing a crisis and referred Day to a therapist. Day was in therapy for five months before he started talking about his childhood. The therapist helped Day see how his traumatic childhood experiences had shaped him and, in some cases, held him back.
After Day earned his counselor licensure, his first few clients were adolescents who had experienced multiple traumas and were living in violent neighborhoods. Their experiences paralleled Day’s own, and he realized that his personal history with trauma gave him extra insight. And that was it — Day decided to become a trauma specialist, and he’s never looked back, including presenting an education session on complex trauma at the ACA 2018 Conference & Expo in Atlanta.
Like Day, many clients don’t initially present to counseling for trauma but rather for help handling other issues. “You have an individual coming in for treatment, coming in for depression, etc., but the further you get into [the person’s] history, there’s so much more story,” Day says, adding that it’s like unpeeling the layers of a client’s life.
Day doesn’t screen for trauma during a client’s first session — he prefers to reserve that for beginning to build the therapeutic relationship. But he does complete a screening within the first few visits, often using the Life Events Checklist from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).
Day says he also probes for trauma as he listens to clients’ stories, asking questions such as “Have you had trouble sleeping?”; “Are you having any relationship issues?”; “Have you ever been in a serious romantic relationship?”
Why the questions about relationships? Day explains that difficulty forming and maintaining personal relationships is a hallmark symptom of complex trauma, which is different from — and not as familiar to most people as — posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Complex trauma vs. PTSD
PTSD is typically considered to be the result of a single traumatic event that occurs at any point over the life span, whereas complex trauma is the result of repetitive trauma that begins early in life and endures for a prolonged period of time, explains Cynthia Miller, an LPC in Charlottesville, Virginia, whose practice specializes in trauma. Complex trauma might result from numerous occurrences of the same kind of trauma — such as ongoing physical or sexual abuse — but it can also develop from the accumulation of different kinds of trauma.
“It’s the difference between taking a single blow versus absorbing multiple blows over the course of years,” says Miller, an American Counseling Association member. “The accumulation of those blows causes a different kind of damage than what is caused by a single blow. The damage doesn’t impact just one system but multiple systems. With a single blow, I may have swelling and bruising and scarring, but that will be confined to one area. With multiple blows over time, I will have bruising and swelling in multiple places at different times and scar tissue all over.”
People with complex trauma or PTSD may experience some of the same symptoms, such as hyperarousal, disturbances in cognition, intrusive memories and avoidance of triggers, but there are critical differences between the two types of trauma. For instance, people with complex trauma have much more trouble with interpersonal relationships and their overall self-concept, Miller says. “In addition to all the usual PTSD symptoms, they will struggle with their sense of identity, with building stable relationships and with making meaning of the world and their lives,” she explains.
Miller says it is vital that counselors understand and recognize the differences between PTSD and complex trauma because misdiagnoses are common. Complex trauma is often mistaken for borderline or other personality disorders or, in some cases, diagnosed as PTSD with co-occurring mental health issues such as depression, anxiety and somatic disorders.
“People can end up with a bunch of different diagnoses which don’t really encapsulate and accurately formulate the total problem. The trauma gets lost in the various diagnoses,” Miller says.
In addition, the treatment approach for complex trauma is not the same as that for PTSD. “Treatment differs mostly in the sequence of interventions one might use, along with the length of treatment,” Miller explains. “Gold-standard interventions for PTSD typically involve the exposure and reprocessing therapies like EMDR [eye movement desensitization and reprocessing], prolonged exposure therapy, etc. Those treatments can be effective, but they can also destabilize clients, at least in the short term, and clinicians need to be really careful to ensure that clients have strong and varied coping skills in place before doing exposures.”
Although prolonged exposure therapy and EMDR are popular therapeutic methods that can be very effective, Miller believes clinicians should be more flexible in their approaches to treating trauma. “It’s great to be trained in EMDR or prolonged exposure therapy, but those approaches don’t work for every client,” she stresses. “Some clients are just dubious of them, others don’t want to do the exposure, and others just aren’t comfortable with it. [Also,] people don’t necessarily need to process the trauma in order to get better. I’ve had clients come into my practice who have stopped seeing other therapists because the therapist was too wedded to a particular approach and, when the client expressed discomfort with it, the therapist either couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt. You have to be able to tailor treatment to the client, not tailor the client to the treatment.”
Miller routinely uses cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and psychoeducation to help clients understand what is going on with them, how trauma has impacted their life and what can be done about it. “This, in and of itself, is really helpful for clients,” she says. “They often believe that they are deficient in some way and have caused all their problems. Once I explain what [complex trauma] is and how it affects people, they really start to understand themselves better and feel less shame.”
Miller recommends workbooks such as Life After Trauma: A Workbook for Healing by Dena Rosenbloom, Mary Beth Williams and Barbara E. Watkins and Seeking Safety: A Treatment Manual for PTSD and Substance Abuse by Lisa M. Najavits. The workbooks “have great psychoeducational handouts and readings for clients that provide education on how trauma affects the body and the brain,” she says. “I typically use the first few sessions of therapy to go over the handouts and help clients notice ways in which what is described applies to them and does not apply to them.”
Regardless of the methods clinicians choose, the initial stage of any therapeutic intervention for complex trauma should focus solely on client safety, helping them remain in the present and build their coping skills, Miller says. She adds that this is usually the longest phase of treatment.
To help clients learn how to stop symptoms such as flashbacks and dissociation, Miller teaches grounding skills. “Groundings skills involve different ways of trying to get the brain’s attention, helping it focus on what is literally happening in the moment instead of focusing on a memory from the past or checking out entirely,” she explains. “Grounding skills can involve techniques that use the five senses or techniques that attempt to engage the cognitive portion of the brain.”
Exercises that involve the senses include tasks such as asking clients to feel their feet on the ground, inhaling a relaxing scent such as lavender or running cold water over their hands. “We [also] might teach them how to describe everything they are seeing around them in detail, as if they were trying to paint the picture of a room with their words,” Miller continues. “One of my favorite grounding skills for using in emergencies is holding an ice cube in the palm of your hand or against your cheek. The sensation of cold, and then nonharmful pain, tends to get the brain’s attention fairly quickly and help someone reorient.
“Cognitive grounding skills can include things like reciting the ABCs backward, or naming every state in alphabetical order or [naming] every make of a car that one can remember. These skills try to engage the frontal cortex, which tends to go offline when someone is having flashbacks or dissociating.”
Miller also helps clients reframe their cognitions, making them aware that their past is not continually playing itself out in their present. “We help them notice how today is just today,” she says. “For example, clients often have difficulty with the anniversaries of traumas that have happened to them. They get anticipatory anxiety and, as the date approaches, they will fall apart. We work in therapy to help them notice ways in which the upcoming date is different from the date of their trauma. The year is different, their age is different, the people around them are different, their life circumstance is different, etc. It’s helping them be fully in their present and in the reality of that instead of in their past.”
Counselors also need to be mindful of the accumulative physical toll of long-term trauma, Miller adds. Research has shown that experiencing trauma — especially when it is prolonged and repetitive — rewires the nervous system in ways that cause hyperarousal and persistent anxiety. This continuous stress causes the body to release cortisol, which can cause chronic inflammation. Over time, the inflammation leads to negative health effects. To help counteract this cascade of neurological and physical damage, practitioners can teach clients skills for calming their nervous systems, Miller says. Again, counselors should tailor the treatment to the individual client. Some clients may find yoga or meditation helpful, whereas others might benefit more from neurofeedback.
Triggers and trauma responses
Debbie Sturm, an LPC in Virginia and South Carolina, has extensive experience working with trauma survivors. Currently an associate professor and director of counseling programs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, at one point Sturm counseled clients through the state of South Carolina’s crime victims support service, which allows people who have experienced a crime to receive 20 state-funded counseling sessions.
Sturm’s clients had experienced a range of terrifying incidents. Among others, she worked with a bouncer who had been shot at work, a woman who had been stabbed and left for dead by someone trying to steal the cash from her paycheck, people who had witnessed a homicide and a client who had been held captive by an abusive family member. Some of her clients also lived in violent neighborhoods or had histories of adverse childhood experiences. “[All] of my clients, however, were just regular people going about their daily lives [who had] experienced something awful,” says Sturm, a member of ACA.
Most of the people Sturm counseled didn’t necessarily meet all the criteria for PTSD, but they all presented with numerous trauma symptoms. The core issue for these clients was that the distress of what had happened, combined with how unfamiliar, uncomfortable and often frightening these new symptoms were for them, caused them significant difficulties. Typical symptoms included anxiety, fear, hypervigilance, sleep and eating disturbances, a compromised sense of safety and, sometimes, anger, resentment, blame or self-blame, shame and helplessness.
“For those who experienced violence, the shock of the violence and the damage to [their] personal sense of safety, control or power could be profound,” Sturm says. However, the intensity of the trauma response did not necessarily line up in the expected way, Sturm continues.
Many people assume that the most “serious” or violent events are more traumatic than a less dramatic experience, but that is often not the case, she says. A person’s trauma response is always unique to the individual and the circumstances surrounding his or her traumatic experience. “It’s really important for the clinician to hold that belief and really honor whatever response each individual is having,” Sturm emphasizes.
The treatment path that Sturm followed with each client revolved around how that person was experiencing his or her symptoms. Sturm says that identifying clients’ triggers played an important role in their recovery. She did that in part by asking: “When do you feel like things are at their worst? What is happening around you? What do you do for comfort or reassurance? As you feel that sense of fear or hypervigilance welling up, how can you start to recognize it sooner and listen to what it’s telling you?”
“Helping people really recognize when their [sense of] fear and lack of safety is starting to elevate can also help them get out of a situation or connect to something or someone safe sooner,” she explains.
Interestingly, the triggers were not always tied directly to the client’s trauma. For example, one client who had been sexually assaulted at work would “lose time” whenever she saw a white truck. The vehicles had no connection to her assault, but for whatever reason, they triggered her, Sturm recounts. But for other clients, the triggers were connected to their previous traumas.
The search for what triggered trauma symptoms provided some therapeutic benefit in and of itself, Sturm says. The clients’ “discoveries” also allowed Sturm to suggest strategies for responding to their fears. For example, the client who feared white trucks connected a sense of safety to her mother, so Sturm suggested that when she was driving and spotted a white truck, that she pull over and call her mom.
Employing such strategies helped Sturm’s clients increase their sense of efficacy, power and control because they were no longer passive captives to their symptoms. Instead, they were armed with strategies that brought comfort and helped dispel their fear.
A person’s traumatic response is typically adaptive and can even be protective, Sturm says. “For example, consider hypervigilance. If something horrible has happened and your sense of safety is shattered, the most adaptive and protective thing you could do psychologically is to be on alert. After all, the world is now proven to be quite unsafe. So, be alert!”
At the same time, the state of alertness involved in hypervigilance is very uncomfortable, can be frightening and takes a toll on trauma survivors psychologically, neurologically and biologically, Sturm says.
Traumatic environments
In some cases, a certain place is the trigger for the person’s trauma response because it isn’t safe and will never become safe, Sturm says. Part of trauma therapy might involve talking with clients about the possibility of removing themselves from that environment. Unfortunately, leaving isn’t always an option.
ACA member Leah Polk, a licensed master social worker with Change Incorporated in St. Louis, asserts that trauma can never be treated separately from the environment in which it occurred. While some survivors of traumatic events go on to reestablish safety in their lives, others must continue living in places that are directly linked to their traumas or in environments that are violent or dangerous, such as unsafe neighborhoods, war zones or violent homes. Ultimately, practitioners must accept that they cannot prevent clients from experiencing or reexperiencing traumatic events, stresses Polk, whose specialties include helping clients recover from trauma.
However, to help clients cope, counselors can support the survival skills that these clients have while distinguishing the times and places in which those skills are useful or necessary, Polk explains. “For example, perhaps it’s crucial to be vigilant while walking home alone at night from the bus stop, but that same vigilance is not required at one’s place of work or a doctor’s office,” she explains.
Practitioners can also provide clients a safe place to express the emotions tied to the burden of living in an unsafe environment, Polk says. Clients can express the sadness and frustration of not having their needs met, the pain and anger caused by social and economic oppression, and the fear that comes from living in an unpredictable and chaotic environment.
Polk says counselors can become a safety resource for clients wrestling with trauma by modeling a consistent and predictable relationship within a contained environment. “Often … clients’ trauma is founded by a violation of trust, confidence or safety from what should have been a trusted figure in their lives,” she explains. “Without establishing an explicit alliance within the [therapeutic] relationship, much of this work is nearly impossible.”
Polk also works with clients to identify other sources of support in their lives, such as caring relationships or enjoyable hobbies and interests. To help regulate emotional arousal, she teaches clients relaxation techniques such as brief meditation, deep breathing, body scanning (to identify where in their bodies they might be holding tension) and progressive muscle relaxation.
Miller has also worked with clients who could not escape traumatic environments. “I would have loved to send my clients in prison to entirely different communities and home environments when they finished their sentences,” acknowledges Miller, who has previously worked with female inmates at correctional facilities. “It would have helped a lot, but it’s just not possible. So, what do you do when [clients] have to go back to the same environment?
“It’s not a great solution, but I think part of what you can do is help clients learn how to take control of what they can in an environment that feels uncontrollable. You can help them learn to set better boundaries around how they will allow themselves to be treated. You can teach them skills for asking for help when they need it. You can link them with supportive resources. You can also help them focus on their strengths and resiliencies and learn how to calm their system when there’s chaos all around them. Any little bit of control someone can feel is better than feeling no control at all.”
For many clients who have been through complex trauma, especially those who have been physically or sexually abused, the idea that they can have any say over how people treat them is a new concept, Miller says. “They are very used to being controlled by others and being told who they can and can’t talk to, what they can say and what they can’t, where they can go and where they can’t, even down to what they can eat or wear. They are also told that they must do whatever people want them to do. So, helping them set boundaries begins with helping them see themselves as people who have rights and who don’t have to tolerate any and everything.”
When counseling these clients, Miller says, “we work on building self-esteem and teaching assertiveness skills. Just helping them learn how to say ‘no’ can take time. We practice it in session through role-plays. We also focus on helping them learn ways to keep themselves safe when saying no to someone who might not take kindly to it. This can include having them take a personal safety class or a self-defense class that is geared specifically toward [assault] survivors. It can also include talking through how to determine how much risk is involved in a given situation.”
Body guards
When it comes to cases involving sexual trauma, the person’s own body can feel like the “unsafe environment.” Therefore, feeling safe in one’s own body constitutes the core of work with these survivors, says Laura Morse, an LPC and a sex and relationship therapist in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who specializes in helping clients recover from trauma.
Morse starts by providing psychoeducation about the fight-or-flight response to trauma. This step helps normalize the symptoms that her clients are experiencing. Morse also teaches clients how to self-soothe and ground themselves. She pairs mindfulness and deep-breathing techniques with tapping, using either EMDR or self-tapping. During the tapping work, Morse has clients practice deep breathing accompanied by a calming scent, which gives them a method to ground themselves and self-soothe wherever they are.
Polk notes that clients with a history of complex trauma may never have possessed a sense of confidence or autonomy about their bodies. She uses mindfulness-based stress reduction exercises to help clients integrate the mind and body. This might include a guided meditation in which the client’s anchor of awareness is an upward scanning of the body, from toes to head. During the exercise, the client may notice that certain areas within the body elicit specific emotions or sensations.
“Once the client is discovering feeling in these areas, the client may offer compassionate thoughts or phrases to the impacted areas,” Polk says. “The client may also be encouraged to continue compassionate exercises such as offering gratitude for the ways in which their body has helped them survive trauma.”
Clients can also explore nonsexual touch, such as different temperatures (a cold compress versus a warm bath) or textures (a soft brush versus a silk ribbon) and journal about their experiences, says Polk, who is also seeking certification as a sex therapist.
“If the client wants to move toward reclaiming their sexuality, it may be important to discuss their sexual self-perception and relationship with themselves,” she says. “Are they able to achieve pleasure through masturbation? If not, what seems to get in the way? If certain touches are uncomfortable or triggering, the client’s sense of choice must be paramount — they can choose to try something different or set a limit around specific experiences.
“For example, while caressing and external stimulation may be pleasurable, penetration leaves the client feeling overwhelmed and tearful. Therefore, the counselor would encourage the client to observe their thoughts and feelings about their self-exploratory experience and determine what feels right for them in that moment. The sense of agency that comes with integrating the mind and body, along with rediscovering self-pleasure, can be a life-changing concept for survivors of chronic sexual trauma. Therefore, the counselor must give plenty of patience and space for these experiences.”
Sexual assault survivors also frequently experience problems with sexual intimacy. Says Morse, “I use the dual-control model for sexual intimacy to empower survivors to understand the ‘brakes’ that are keeping them safe [but] may be preventing them from enjoying experiences that they used to in the past. And then we begin to learn ‘accelerators’ of what is helpful.”
Brakes are sexual-inhibition factors such as a history of trauma, body image issues, relationship conflict, unwanted pregnancy, depression, anxiety or, as Morse puts it, “everything you see, hear, touch, taste, smell or imagine that could be a threat.”
Accelerators are sexual-excitation factors such as a partner’s smell or appearance, a sense of novelty, new love or “everything you see, hear, touch [or] smell that is a turn-on,” Morse says.
Morse also helps clients who are in relationships to create sexual scripts with their partners. “When creating a sexual script with a couple, I will do the exercise both with the couple [and] individually,” she says. “I ask the couple, with their permission, if we can create a line-by-line script of the actions that lead to intimacy. This may start with affection at breakfast or date night, well before intimacy in the bedroom begins.”
Creating the script encourages couples to reflect on their usual sexual patterns and, in individual sessions, allows each partner to express any barriers they may be experiencing or areas where novelty or changes could be incorporated.
Polk believes that when clients who have experienced sexual trauma say they are ready to reengage in partnered sex or physical intimacy, it is important for the counselor to assess how they came to that conclusion. “While being supportive of their desires, the counselor may want to ask if this interest arose from their partner, from their own interests or collaboratively. The client’s sexual self-efficacy, or ability to reliably communicate and have sexual needs met, is of paramount interest when approaching this topic.”
Sexual assault survivors who are already in a sexual relationship may also find that trauma symptoms create barriers to intimacy. Clients may experience psychological symptoms such as depression, PTSD, traumatic reenactment and anxiety. Decreased libido or arousal and painful sex are also common, as are sexual avoidance and conflict in the relationship.
To combat these negative impacts, Polk helps clients create a sexual consent model. “The sexual consent model is used to negotiate sexual boundaries and mutual agreements between partners,” she explains. “This is more than a ‘yes’ or ‘no’; [it] is explicit and entails ongoing dialogue between partners. Research currently tells us that men are more likely to see consent as a one-time event, so gender scripts must be considered when approaching this model.”
Polk provides examples of possible script dialogue:
“I know I said oral sex was OK last week, but right now, I am uncomfortable.”
“If we try this position, it doesn’t mean that you have to always do this.”
“After sex, can you make time to cuddle so that I am not left alone?”
“While having sex, I noticed that you got unusually quiet. Is everything OK?”
Morse recommends sensate therapy to her clients. She describes sensate therapy as a series of sex therapy exercises that allow for sensual touch to be achieved without anxiety. “Typically,
this will start with just having a couple carve out time twice a week where intimacy is not centered around the genitals and penetrative sex,” she says. “Masters and Johnson initially developed a series of exercises which are now commonly adapted based on a couple’s specific needs.”
Morse recommends the book Sensate Focus in Sex Therapy by Linda Weiner and Constance Avery-Clark for counselors who want to learn more.
Trauma education
Day believes there are still too many people walking around with trauma who have no idea that they can be helped. He says counselors need to be proactive in educating the public about trauma because many of the people who could benefit will never show up in their offices. Day also stresses the need for trauma education in schools but says that because school counselors have so much on their plates, clinical counselors need to step in and be willing to give their time.
“Counselors don’t always have to sit behind the desk,” he states. “Go to places where people are uncomfortable about having these conversations, such as schools, community centers, churches.”
One of the things that Day loves most about being a trauma counselor is getting the word out. He gives presentations, participates on panels and has even talked about trauma on the radio.
“Individuals have to have that conversation,” he says.