Are you overreactive to situations that most people would not respond to in an intense way?  Can you feel your adrenaline pumping and are you feeling or acting aggressively?  So much so that others are telling you that you are overreacting? 

In other situations, are you so withdrawn that those who know you find you flat or totally non-reactive to things that really bother others?  Are you feeling numb or shutdown? Spaced out or just not with it?

Do you engage in survival behaviors that are typically judged as bad even though for you, those behaviors bring relief at least for a while?  Drinking, using other substances, spending, reckless driving, dangerous relationships, escaping, fighting and many other behaviors are often the result of trauma.

If you are a teen, you may be using substances, engaging in high risk sexual behaviors, running away, failing in school or using  study as a way to avoid facing the trauma, being overly aggressive or completely passive or both, and so many other things good people do when they have been traumatized.

Is this negative behavior causing you or others to see you in a bad light?   What if the behavior is not what you think and you are just telling your story, one for which you have no words or very few?  When we have been seriously hurt in a traumatizing way, we compulsively work it out in ways that can look defiant, resistant, aggressive, depressed, anxious and inconsistent.   Trauma is so deeply affecting, that it can look like learning disabilities, attention deficits, physical illnesses and brain injury and in fact, it has now been shown by researchers and neurologists, that trauma does in fact change the way the body and brain develop and respond. 

So many who have been to war or been traumatized as children or exposed to other life-changing events, blame themselves for what they tell themselves are character deficits when in fact they are survivor skills.  In trauma therapy, you will learn how to identify these behaviors for what they really are and reorganize your life around your strengths.  You will receive very direct instructions for moving forward and keeping the past in its place.  Reorganizing your skills prevents you from staying stuck in the events that do not define who you really are.

Trauma and PTSD debriefing is conducted at your own pace with the goal of gaining control of what happened and strengthening your resilience.  Debriefing helps you to take a new look at your survivor skills and how to use them more effectively.  Let’s have a good chat about this and see what you need to do next.