Trauma Therapy
While a traumatic experience can leave a lasting impact, it doesn’t have to define your future.
We are a trauma-centered therapy practice. The majority of our therapists have specialized training and experience helping individuals heal from trauma. This includes single incidents such as car accidents, serious injury, or witnessing a crime, as well as histories of physical and sexual abuse, neglect, and poor attachment.
We customize therapy to the unique needs of each client and their history. For children who have experienced long-term trauma, we often incorporate play therapy, family interventions, and attachment-based therapy approaches to help them find the sense of safety and trust, learn to regulate their emotions, and connect with others in healthy ways.
We also offer two evidence-based trauma therapies, which are considered the gold standard in trauma treatment: Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) and Eye-Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR). More about these two therapies can be found below.
TRAUMA-FOCUSED COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY
TF-CBT is especially designed to help children ages 3 to 18 heal from sexual abuse and other traumatic experiences. In TF-CBT, children learn skills for expressing and managing their thoughts and feelings, and have the opportunity to process what happened in a healthy, productive way. Parents and caregivers learn how to support their child’s healing and overcome their own feelings about the abuse or trauma. TF-CBT is a very skills-based, directive approach to trauma therapy.
Carlisle TF-CBT Therapists:
- Brianna Lightner, LPC
- Kayla Kennen Schmidt, MS
- Carri Morris, LPC
- Stephen Russell, LSW
- Shannon Snyder, LPC
- Liz Campbell, Ph.D.
Chambersburg TF-CBT Therapists:
EMDR
EMDR is a wonderful tool for helping individuals process trauma with deep emotional roots or that is stored in the body. Many clients appreciate that EMDR helps them to clear out the strong emotions tied to a traumatic incident, without having to talk about it in detail. EMDR is often integrated with other therapy approaches and can be used with all ages.
In EMDR, clients move between 3 stages. First, there is an emphasis on learning tools for handling emotions and creating stability. We start to look at how the past is affecting the present and identify “targets” (upsetting experiences) that we might want to process in the future. Next, the therapist guides the client in processing their target, to resolve strong feelings and unhelpful beliefs that may be tied to the event. Processing may take one session or many sessions, depending on the number of targets. Some form of side-to-side (“bilateral”) eye-movement or tapping is used during processing. Finally, we evaluate how things are going and identify any areas that still need attention.
Carlisle EMDR-trained therapists:
We do not currently have EMDR-trained therapists in Chambersburg.