People cope with trauma in many different ways. If you've experienced a traumatic event, you may have coped in some of the following ways: being super-alert, spacing out, eating difficulties, substance abuse, workaholism, isolation, suicide attempts, self-mutilation, and avoiding intimacy.

If you experienced trauma as a child, coping is what you did to survive the trauma, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. Children survive with whatever resources they have and do the best they can. Once they reach adulthood, trauma survivors have the power to change if they choose to do so. Help and support are available.

Not all coping skills are harmful. Some of the ways we use to survive may have developed into strengths to celebrate, such as:

• Being self-sufficient
• Sense of humor
• Good in a crisis
• Resiliency
• Successful at work
• Nurturing spirit
• Compassionate

• Become aware of the behavior you want to change
• Look a why that behavior developed in the first place
• Have compassion for what you've done in the past
• Find new ways to meet your needs
• Make several tries
• Be persistent
• Get support

I begin with an intake session to assess what treatments are best suited for you. In addition to traditional psychotherapy, treatment options can include the following modalities.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is a treatment based on the theory that traumatic incidents can upset the biochemical balance of the brain's information processing system. Consequently, the negative information is literally frozen in its original anxiety-producing form with all the emotions, beliefs, and meanings prompted by the event, remaining locked in the nervous system. EMDR is a type of accelerated information processing that stimulates the hemispheres of the brain to re-establish the balance between excitation on one hand and inhibition on the other, permitting the frozen information to be processed and integrated.

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)
The idea behind NLP is to re-program your brain so that you think in another way. Instead of concentrating on the problem, NLP attempts to alter the thought processes that lead your body to behave in a certain way. Once your brain has been retrained to think differently, your actions should change automatically. NLP looks at how people organize their experience. We all have various habits and patterns and once we've learned to do something, we tend to always do it in that particular order or set of circumstances without thinking about it again. NLP helps you become aware of how and what you're doing so you can approach it another way that may produce better results.