Biggest Myths About Trauma Therapy in St. Louis

When your child or teen has experienced a traumatic event, you feel lost as a parent.

You may blame yourself for what happened, have difficulty sleeping, feeling anger or shame or sadness. These are all normal feelings. And you know your child is suffering, as well.

All of our therapists at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis are trained in trauma-focused therapies, and recognize that anger can mask an underlying trauma or traumatic stressor.

Often times during our initial consultation calls, we share that we can provide trauma-focused CBT (TF-CBT), which can be great for many reasons. A TF-CBT background allows us to assess for underlying trauma that can be leading to the big outbursts, anxiety, panic, and so on. It allows us to really bring in specialized intervention as needed.

However, this can catch many parents off-guard, as their child might only be struggling with anxiety or emotional overwhelm, and they don’t feel as if trauma therapy is quite necessary.

Sometimes people believe that trauma therapy is only for a PTSD diagnosis, but in reality a PTSD diagnosis is not required to receive trauma therapy in St. Louis.

Someone with trauma may never actually be diagnosed with PTSD. Trauma can co occur with other mental health concerns like depression and anxiety, which is what makes trauma therapy useful for many reasons. Not only can trauma therapy in St. Louis help with other co occuring concerns, but it can also help parents understand their child or teen’s difficult experience.

The great thing about trauma therapy in St. Louis is it can really be universal, and a traumatic experience is not always needed to benefit from trauma therapy—contrary to popular belief.

(Read more here: FAQs about Trauma Therapy in St. Louis)

Image Credit: Anthony Tran @anthonytran on Unsplash

One of the biggest myths about trauma therapy in St. Louis is that a traumatic experience is required to need trauma therapy.

While trauma therapy does address trauma, it can be used for other concerns like anxiety or depression, or even emotional outbursts or perfectionism. Components of trauma-focused therapy can help get to the root cause of whatever is going on with your child or teen. It can be a great therapy method to use when needing the space to process unwanted thoughts and feelings that stem from a number of reasons. Because the model focuses on relieving and/or minimizing stress through the development of healthy coping skills, it can help decrease or manage cognitive or behavior problems that come with trauma, anxiety, anger, and depression.

Read more: TF-CBT and Trauma Therapy for Teens in St. Louis

Another myth about trauma therapy is that it is overwhelmingly scary.

Experiencing trauma or a traumatic even can be very scary, so therapy for such trauma often is believed to be a very scary process.

While it can be tough to reprocess the trauma, trauma therapists incorporate different practices to ensure your child or teen is ready and supported before diving into the trauma.

At Compassionate Counseling St. Louis, rather than jumping right in to reprocessing your child’s trauma, our therapists build our way up to it.

We start with building our therapeutic relationship, building relaxation skills, learning about emotions, and practicing cognitive restructuring. Our therapists make sure your child or teen is really ready before we dig in to the trauma and that we’ve built our strong foundation of PRAC skills. This process is dually guided by the client and therapist to ensure their therapy experience is never re-traumatizing for them.

A common misconception is that trauma therapy won’t work because trauma symptoms last forever.

Trauma therapy will never take away the trauma, but it can change the trauma from being something that defines who you are to something that has happened. Think of trauma therapy as something that helps change reactions and feelings about the trauma instead of something that completely removes the trauma. The goal is more to help your child or teen understand the trauma and cope so that healthy functioning can be restored.

Molly Shaffer, MA, LPC, certified TF-CBT therapist

Do you still feel like you have more questions about trauma therapy? Or, are you ready to start trauma therapy?

You can schedule a call here with our intake coordinator who can help answer any questions or schedule you with one of our trauma therapists!

Curious to hear more about trauma therapy in St. Louis? Compassionate Counseling St. Louis provides specialized anxiety and anger management therapy for kids, teens, and college students. We work in Clayton, MO and serve kids, teens, and college students throughout St. Louis City, St. Louis County, Ladue, University City, Town and Country, Webster Groves, Creve Coeur, Kirkwood, Richmond Heights, and Brentwood. You can set up your free phone screening to see if we’re a good fit for your needs right on our website.