One of the most common concerns that people have when they come to our office is managing trauma. Trauma, in my experience, is best defined as something that happened to you that threatened your life (or felt like it threatened your life), or your sense of safety, and you either experienced it alone or are not able to process it with others. We often consider trauma in the “big T” sense - Trauma occurs in a war-zone, or a major natural disaster. While these things are absolutely trauma, other traumas may seem small, or at least common - your parents divorce, a friend betrays you, you get bullied at school.

Either way, clients come to our office with trauma symptoms that get in the way of how they would like to function. Perhaps they have so much anxiety they can’t focus, or they have trouble with friendships due to past experiences. Trauma has a way of keeping us in the past.

This is because trauma stays in our brain stem, which regulates our central nervous system. This is what tells our heart rate, respiration, and core temperature to increase when we are in a dangerous situation, and when it is triggered we get hot, feel like we can’t breathe, and can hear our heartbeat in our ears. While this is important for our survival, and the survival of the human race, it does get in the way when we are trying to enjoy a meal out or often when we are trying to rest or sleep. Many people have nightmares, struggle to focus, and have intrusive thoughts.

This is where therapy can help. While traditional talk therapy can be supportive for people who have experienced trauma, typically this process requires many sessions to establish a trusting relationship, and will require the client to talk about (and likely relive) their trauma again and again. However, two of our therapists here at Counseling Services of Greenville also use Accelerated Resolution Therapy to treat trauma. Accelerated Resolution Therapy, or ART, uses bilateral eye movements to treat traumatic experiences. Eye movements have been studied profusely and found again and again to enhance memory, reduce reactivity, improve thinking, and render traumatic images less vivid. While using eye movements with your ART therapist, trauma can be relegated to the past so that we can focus on living in the present.

ART may sound similar to EMDR, or Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which you may have heard about as it has been around for longer. While there are similarities between them, ART was created by Laney Rosenzweig after she had been trained in EMDR and found that her clients responded more quickly and fully to her intuitive changes. Below is a chart that may help to clarify the differences.