Mental Health Treatment
Overcome the past with trauma recovery.
Trauma is a response to experiencing or witnessing an event that feels life-threatening, causes severe injury, or involves threat to physical integrity or safety. Combat exposure, violent assault, serious accidents, natural disasters, childhood abuse, and sudden loss are common sources of trauma.
Understanding the Impact
What Is Trauma?
Trauma is not the event itself, but your psychological response to an overwhelming event. The same event affects different people differently based on their history, resilience, support system, and other factors. Trauma involves a breakdown of your sense of safety, control, and predictability. Your brain registers the event as a threat to survival, activating intense stress responses that remain activated even after the danger has passed.
Trauma can be a single catastrophic event, a serious accident, violent assault, sudden death of a loved one, or natural disaster. It can also develop from prolonged abuse or neglect, repeated exposure to secondhand trauma (like combat medics), or cumulative adverse experiences. Childhood trauma is particularly impactful because the developing brain is vulnerable and the child has limited ability to understand or process what’s happening.
Types of Trauma
Single-incident trauma involves one overwhelming event, a car accident, assault, or sudden loss. The traumatic memory is usually very clear and vivid. Complex trauma or complex PTSD results from prolonged exposure to traumatic events, often of an interpersonal nature like childhood abuse, domestic violence, or captivity. Complex trauma typically involves deeper impacts on self-identity, self-worth, and ability to trust.
Vicarious trauma affects people repeatedly exposed to others’ trauma, therapists, first responders, combat soldiers. Collective trauma involves entire communities experiencing shared trauma, like after a disaster or mass shooting. Intergenerational trauma passes effects from one generation to the next, as parents who experienced trauma may struggle with parenting and pass anxiety or avoidance patterns to their children.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
PTSD develops when the brain becomes stuck in trauma response mode even though the danger has passed. PTSD involves four clusters of symptoms. Intrusive symptoms include unwanted, distressing memories; nightmares; or flashbacks where you feel like you’re re-experiencing the trauma. External reminders, sights, sounds, smells, can trigger intense reactions.
Avoidance involves actively avoiding reminders of the trauma, people, places, activities, conversations. Avoidance can become all-consuming as more and more situations become connected with the trauma in the person’s mind. Negative mood and thinking changes include persistent negative beliefs about yourself or the world, persistent blame of self or others, pervasive negative emotions, diminished interest in activities, feelings of detachment from others, and inability to recall important aspects of the trauma.
Hyperarousal or negative alterations in arousal include irritability or aggression, reckless or destructive behavior, hypervigilance, exaggerated startle response, and difficulty concentrating. Sleep problems are nearly universal.
The Connection Between Trauma and Addiction
Trauma and addiction are deeply connected. Many people with substance abuse disorders have histories of trauma. Conversely, many people who experience trauma turn to substances as a way to manage overwhelming emotions and intrusive memories. Alcohol and drugs provide temporary relief from trauma symptoms: they numb emotional pain, help with sleep, and reduce hypervigilance and anxiety.
But substance abuse prevents trauma healing. Substances interfere with therapy effectiveness, maintain avoidance patterns, and over time worsen trauma symptoms through brain chemistry changes and additional life consequences. When trauma and addiction co-occur, both must be addressed simultaneously. Treating only the addiction without addressing trauma leaves a person vulnerable to relapse because trauma symptoms persist. Treating trauma without addressing substance abuse is difficult because substances interfere with the vulnerable emotional processing that trauma treatment requires.
At Destination Hope, we’re experts in helping people address both their trauma and their substance abuse in an integrated way, recognizing how they feed each other and requiring simultaneous, coordinated treatment in our dual diagnosis program.
Group and Family Work
Group therapy with other trauma survivors is powerful. You discover you’re not alone, reduce shame, and learn from others’ healing. Group members provide mutual support and understanding that people without trauma histories often cannot.
Family therapy addresses how trauma has affected your relationships and helps rebuild damaged trust and connection. It educates family members about trauma and PTSD so they can recognize your symptoms as trauma responses. Family sessions help develop healthy communication and support patterns.
Trauma-Informed Therapy at Destination Hope
Our trauma-informed therapy approach provides thorough care for people seeking healing from trauma or PTSD. Destination Hope is a trauma-informed facility, and all our therapists are trained to recognize and address trauma with clinical expertise. Our clinical team includes EMDR-trained staff to support deep therapeutic processing. (Our trauma-trained clinical professionals include Lystra Lewis LMFT CCTP and Gabriel King CTP.)
Our trauma-informed care integrates one-on-one individual sessions with trauma-trained therapists, group therapy with other trauma survivors, family work to address family impacts and rebuild relationships, meditation and yoga for nervous system regulation, psychiatric care when medication is helpful, and access to all our other programs and services.
We provide trauma-informed care throughout your treatment. This means our entire staff, therapists, nurses, support staff, housing supervisors, are trained to recognize trauma responses and respond with sensitivity. We maintain physical and emotional safety, respect your autonomy and choices, and work collaboratively rather than authoritatively. We recognize how trauma affects everything and approach each interaction with awareness of trauma’s effects.
Evidence-Based Trauma Treatment
Trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy helps your brain process traumatic memories so they lose their emotional charge and become integrated into your life story rather than remaining stuck as present-day threats. The therapy involves gradually approaching trauma memories while using coping skills to manage the distress that arises. By approaching rather than avoiding traumatic memories, and by staying with the uncomfortable feelings until they naturally diminish, your brain learns that the trauma is no longer a current threat and can be stored as past history rather than present danger.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a specific trauma treatment where you access traumatic memories while tracking a therapist’s finger or light moving side to side. The bilateral stimulation (alternating left-right) appears to help the brain process the trauma differently, reducing its emotional intensity and allowing it to be integrated. EMDR can be particularly helpful for single-incident trauma. Many people are surprised by how effective EMDR can be, as the mechanism isn’t completely understood, but research demonstrates its effectiveness.
Cognitive processing therapy focuses on how trauma has changed your beliefs about yourself, others, and the world. Trauma often creates false beliefs, “I’m damaged,” “People can’t be trusted,” “The world is completely unsafe.” CPT helps you examine these beliefs, understand how trauma shaped them, and develop more balanced perspectives that acknowledge reality while not being defined by trauma.
Somatic experiencing addresses how trauma becomes stored in the body through tension, dissociation, and nervous system dysregulation. Trauma literally changes how the nervous system functions. This approach helps your body complete the defensive responses that were interrupted during trauma, the fight, flight, or freeze responses that were necessary for survival but got stuck. By allowing your body to complete these responses in a safe context, the nervous system can return to baseline regulation. Somatic therapists may use bodywork, movement, and attention to physical sensations to facilitate this process.
Yoga, Meditation, and Nervous System Work
Trauma dysregulates the nervous system, keeping it in a state of high alert even when there’s no danger. The amygdala, the brain’s alarm center, becomes hyperactive, triggering fight-or-flight responses to harmless reminders of the trauma. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex, involved in rational thinking and self-regulation, becomes underactive. This neurological imbalance explains why trauma survivors struggle with emotional regulation and are easily triggered by reminders of trauma.
Yoga and meditation help calm the nervous system by activating the parasympathetic nervous system, the body’s natural relaxation response. These practices improve sleep, reduce hypervigilance and anxiety, and increase capacity for emotional regulation. They also increase awareness of body sensations, which can be healing for trauma survivors who have learned to dissociate or numb their bodies as a survival strategy. By gradually reconnecting with physical sensations in a safe context, trauma survivors can learn that their body is not inherently dangerous and can develop better interoceptive awareness (awareness of internal body signals).
Breathing exercises like diaphragmatic breathing or the “4-7-8” technique (breathing in for 4 counts, holding for 7, exhaling for 8) activate the parasympathetic nervous system, shifting from fight-or-flight to rest-and-digest. Progressive muscle relaxation teaches your body to recognize tension and consciously release it. These simple techniques, practiced regularly, retrain the nervous system toward a baseline of calm rather than constant alertness.
Holistic Healing
Canine Assisted Therapy
Healing trauma requires a deep sense of safety and connection, which isn’t always easy to achieve through talk therapy alone. We offer Canine Assisted Therapy twice a month for our Residential and PHP levels of care.
The presence of a therapy dog provides profound emotional support, helps regulate the nervous system, and offers a calming, non-judgmental presence that allows clients to process difficult emotions more comfortably.
Creating Safety and Healing
For trauma survivors, safety is paramount. Before healing can happen, you need to feel genuinely safe, physically, emotionally, and interpersonally. Our trauma-informed community creates this safety through consistent, respectful staff; clear boundaries; respect for your autonomy; and recognition that trauma recovery is unique to each person and cannot be rushed.
Healing from trauma is possible. With proper treatment, peer support, family involvement, and time, people recover from even severe trauma. They process traumatic memories so they no longer dominate their present. They rebuild trust and connection. They develop resilience and a sense of agency. They move forward with their lives.
Of adults in the U.S. experience at least one traumatic event in their lifetime.
Source: Kilpatrick et al., 2013Getting Started
Help is available. You can truly heal.
If you’re struggling with trauma, PTSD, or substance abuse related to traumatic experiences, help is available. Call Destination Hope to speak with an admissions counselor who can assess your situation and explain your treatment options. We understand that discussing trauma can feel frightening. Our admissions team is trained to listen with compassion and without judgment. You’ve survived what happened to you. With treatment, you can begin to truly heal.
Crisis Support: If you are experiencing a trauma crisis or having thoughts of harming yourself, please call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988, available 24/7. For life-threatening emergencies, please call 911.