cptsd foundation
Trauma-Informed Blog
Here you’ll find content that focuses on complex trauma research, as well as survivor stories & poetry, and featured articles from clinicians and thought leaders in the world of trauma recovery.
The Role of Nurses in PTSD Recovery
Many don’t realize how vital nurses often are in PTSD recovery. When it comes to this topic, there’s a sort of standard image that comes to mind. It typically involves a mental health professional performing cognitive therapy or exposure therapy on a patient...
Traumatic Stress and Trauma Releasing Exercises
Traumatic stress causes many problems for survivors and others. We don't feel well enough to accomplish our life goals or to function in day-to-day routines. There is a new solution to traumatic stress, and it is called Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®). This...
Paying for Your Trauma Healthcare Team
Healthcare is one of the highest expenses most people will incur during their lifetimes. The high cost of healthcare has driven many to worry about how they can afford to pay for it, causing some to ignore their mental and physical health problems. This July, our...
How Do Adverse Childhood Experiences Affect You Today?
The answer will leave you speechless. Adults who experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), aka traumatic experiences as children, still pay for what happened to them years, even decades later. But what are adverse childhood experiences? And how do they...
A Trauma-Informed Mental Health Treatment Team
Healing from complex trauma takes time, and having a treatment team that is supportive and well-trained in trauma-informed care can be an enormous help. In this article, we shall discuss together more disciplines you can have on your care team and how they can help...
This is how to feel all your emotions – and not be overwhelmed – with one little word
I learned an important concept about how to feel emotions again safely – especially after trauma– over 26 years ago from my favorite graduate school professor, the late Terry Taylor Smith, LMFT: When you use the word “but” between two statements, it negates...
The 4 Steps to Emotional Regulation
We all feel a wide range of emotions; sad, happy, mad, excited, scared, lonely, frustrated, bored, anger, the list goes on. Children’s behavior (and misbehavior) is guided by their emotions and their brain states. Even for adults, these emotions can be overwhelming...
Forming Your Treatment Team
In the first part of this series on treatment planning, we focused on what constitutes a treatment plan. If you remember, "A treatment plan is a document outlining the proposed goals, plan, and therapy method to be used by you and your professional. This plan...
Safe vs. Trust
For the survivor of childhood trauma, safe is lack of attention. Safe is invisibility. And invisibility comes in many forms. It can be running away from the situation. It can be procrastination or laziness. It could be feigning ignorance. It could be excessive helping. It could be silence. It could be angry outbursts. It could be throwing and breaking things. Invisibility can sometimes be physical violence towards others or the self.
The Importance of a Treatment Plan with Your Mental Health Provider.
Upon seeing a mental health specialist, we are often unclear about what brought us there, our purpose for seeing them, and our goals for the future. One method mental health professionals use to help both you and they guide your healing journey is to form a...
What is Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
“Complex PTSD comes in response to chronic traumatization over the course of months or, more often, years. This can include emotional, physical, and/or sexual abuses, domestic violence, living in a war zone, being held captive, human trafficking, and other organized rings of abuse, and more. While there are exceptional circumstances where adults develop C-PTSD, it is most often seen in those whose trauma occurred in childhood”.