The Trauma Recovery and Crisis Stabilization Programs provide individual, group, and expressive therapies to facilitate the expression of strong emotion and other symptoms of trauma-based mental disorders. Psychoeducational modules address primary recovery skills to safely decrease crisis-generation and dysfunctional thoughts and behaviors. Finally, trauma group allows clients to share their individualized treatment gains and struggles with peer and therapist support.
Many clients experience strong, impulsive, out-of-control, or over-controlled emotions. Typically, the individual has difficulty dealing with interpersonal relationships and daily stressors, resulting in suicidal feelings, self-harm, and/or other dangerous uncontrolled behavior.
Referring therapists are encouraged to participate in treatment planning during the admissions process. The New Orleans Institute therapists then offer recommendations to mental health professionals to aid them in continued outpatient therapy with their clients post discharge.
The most common symptoms that cause the individual or family distress are uncontrollable recollections, images, or spontaneous reliving of aspects of trauma. Sometimes the impact of trauma surfaces in the form of extreme anxiety, cycles of depression, pervasive fear, self-blame, and an inability to trust. The patient may feel fragmented, separated, or different from others. Frequently, there is a feeling of unfillable emptiness inside, as if one is an impostor. Over time, individuals may find themselves participating in increasingly destructive behaviors to provide a connection and to break the numbness.
Our program focuses on enabling the client to break the trauma bond, which has controlled the client’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. They process and face fears that can eventually result in relief of trauma-related symptoms, as well as integration of dissociated aspects of the experience and of self.
The individual becomes numb, stops thinking and feeling, and feels like an object. Bonding to others is disrupted, as are object relations, self-esteem, and trust. Often, the individual experiences chronic depression, repetitive self-destructive behaviors, and even apparent hallucinations. Many individuals are erroneously diagnosed as psychotic and typically they do not respond to treatment.
The program addresses the dissociative state by utilizing the grief model called “Reliving, Revising, and Revisiting.” After forming a trusting, safe relationship with the primary therapist, the individual addresses core trauma issues. As they begin to feel the trauma, reassociating the cognition and the affect, information processing techniques are utilized to restructure their sense of self in relation to their trauma.