How We Define Trauma
Trauma cannot be reduced solely to your neurobiology, maladaptive learned behaviours, or environmental conditioning. Trauma affects our fundamental motivations at the level of identity, relationships, personal meaning, and purpose. Trauma treatment with us focuses less on symptom reduction exclusively (which is considered less effective) and instead combines symptom reduction with helping clients pursue personally meaningful lives.
Our PTSD Treatment Program Aim and Highlights and Therapies
Our goal of the trauma program is to help first responders, military personnel, and veterans integrate their traumatic experiences into how they make sense of themselves and the world. To achieve positive results, this new way of making sense of things must be responsive to reality and to the client’s personal values. Our current trauma therapies include:
- Dedicated group therapy for trauma and PTSD
- Psychiatric assessment and treatment
- 1-1 talk therapy
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)
- Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS)
PTSD Treatment and Addiction Programs Work Together
Most treatment centres do not treat addiction issues and PTSD at the same time. Treating one issue while ignoring the other can cause real panic for clients, often leading to them leaving early from the program. Our clinical and medical teams have worked hard to make sure our addiction treatment program and the trauma program integrate seamlessly. This prevents clients needing to make sense of conflicting information. For example, standard addiction programming that uses language like “defects of character” often causes overwhelming shame for a professional who used drugs and alcohol as a way to deal with the PTSD they developed on the job. We take care to ensure the language we use is not causing confusion of pain.