What to Expect from Your First Trauma Therapy Session?
Trauma can have a lasting impact on an individual’s mental and emotional well-being. If someone is struggling in their everyday life due to past trauma, it is important to provide a safe and supportive environment where they can heal from the effects of trauma and start their recovery journey. Therapy under the supervision of a qualified individual can play a crucial role in trauma treatment.
If you or a loved one has experienced a traumatic event that has left lasting emotional scars, it is important to seek the right support. You should contact a reliable trauma treatment center that offers evidence-based therapeutic solutions. While you are most likely to receive individualized treatment based on your needs, you can expect the following things from your first therapy session for trauma treatment.
What Is Trauma Therapy?
Therapy is an integral part of trauma treatment. In trauma therapy, a qualified therapist helps you deal with the emotional response caused by a traumatic event. If you are unable to cope with the trauma you experienced or it is affecting your ability to perform day-to-day activities, this form of therapy can help you. While professionals use different types of therapy to help treat trauma in individuals, the most common ones include the following:
Prolonged Exposure (PE): In this therapy, the therapist helps you face the source of fear until you are no longer afraid of it.
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT): This form of therapy involves challenging your perspective about why the traumatic event happened and the beliefs and thoughts you have developed since.
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy (TF-CBT): This form of therapy focuses on addressing inaccurate beliefs and unhealthy behavior patterns.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): In this treatment, professionals use rhythmic left-right (bilateral) stimulation to help release emotions that have been blocked by trauma.
PE and CPT are the most widely used treatments for trauma, as their effectiveness is backed by evidence.
What to Expect from Your Therapist During Your First Therapy Session?
A therapist’s job is not to solve your problems for you. In fact, they do not always tell you what to do. They also do not advise you to tell the people who have hurt you how wrong they were. They simply focus on helping you concentrate on what you can and cannot change. Based on your goal for the therapy, most therapists will spend time encouraging you to look inward.
Once you visit the therapist’s office for your first sessions, you will most likely spend the first part of your therapy session getting to know each other. Trauma therapies work best if you are able to connect with one another from the initial visit. You do not need to share your deepest, darkest feelings immediately. Instead, you talk about less intense things, such as your favorite book or show, to get a sense of how the two of you will communicate with each other.
During the first visit, the therapist will also try to learn why you are seeking therapy. They may ask what kinds of needs or issues you are trying to address in your treatment and what measures you have taken to manage your mental health in the past. They may want to talk through what worked for you and what did not to understand how best to help you.
You can expect your therapist to ask you a few relevant questions to understand your need for therapy better. Some of the questions may include:
Have you attended therapy before?
What symptoms do you experience?
Do you have any mental health conditions in your family history?
Do you get suicidal thoughts?
Do you have a history of self-harm?
What do you hope to achieve from therapy?
What are your expectations from the sessions?
You, too, can ask your therapist a few questions during the initial session. This may help you become more open and candid with your therapist.
Wrapping Up
Trauma therapies can take several sessions depending on your issues and their complexities. However, choosing the right therapist can make things much easier for you. While the first sessions may seem intimidating if you are attending therapy for the first time, therapists usually try to create a safe and supportive environment where you feel comfortable sharing your thoughts and feelings.