San Francisco Hypnotherapy
Mandala Institute for Holistic Mental Health
What is Trauma?
Trauma is any overwhelming negative experience that is too much to mentally and emotionally process at the time it occurs.
Dissociation can occur in the midst of a trauma, often followed by shock and denial immediately after the experience.
Traumatic memories are stored in the subconscious mind, which expresses the residual experience through the mind and body in various ways.
Symptoms of trauma can look like:
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Confusion, difficulty concentrating.
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Anger, irritability, mood swings.
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Anxiety, fear, and panic attacks.
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Depression, withdrawal, feelings of hopelessness.
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Guilt, shame, self-blame.
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Feeling disconnected or numb.
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Nightmares
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Chronic headaches, digestive issues, and other medical manifestations.
What is PTSD?
When the number of trauma symptoms being experienced exceed a certain threshold, a psychologist may conduct an formalized assessment resulting in an diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
Part of the PTSD experience can look like reliving a trauma through nightmares and flashbacks. Some people may experience feelings of isolation, irritability and guilt. They may also have problems sleeping, such as insomnia, and find concentrating difficult, among other symptoms.
PTSD symptoms are often severe and persistent enough to have a significant impact on the person's day-to-day life.
How is Trauma Normally Treated?
Mainstream psychology typically relies on medication, talk therapy, sometimes cognitive processing therapy (CPT), cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, and exposure therapy to try to reduce symptoms the symptoms of trauma.
Many mainstream approaches require you to recall your traumas, to talk about them in great detail, and to relive them. These approaches can be retraumatizing and leave clients feeling worse after a session than when they arrived.
How is our approach different from other trauma therapies?
We use trauma healing techniques that are more gentle, work faster and are more effective than those typically used by mainstream psychologists and psychotherapists.
Trauma healing within the frameworks of, and using the tools of hypnotherapy and neurolinguistic programming (NLP) starts by creating positive mental states, followed by using the imagination in positive ways to rewrite how a traumatic memory has been stored in the mind. This approach to trauma healing keeps you in an empowered and positive mental and emotional state throughout the entire process, and always leaves you feeling better than when we started.
What's more, our trauma healing approaches often activate and engage the use of self-love, whereby you become both the provider and the recipient of the safety, acceptance, understanding and support that was missing at the time of the trauma, and that becomes the medicine that your psyche needs to heal.
In this way, our approach to healing trauma is to guide you to heal yourself, and in the process, you develop a deeper, more moving relationship with yourself.