Trauma
An Overview of Trauma And Treatment Options in Los Angeles
Traumatic events happen every day around the world, dramatically altering the lives of those involved. Witnessing or being a victim of a violent attack, domestic violence, bullying, and more are all examples of trauma that can stay with a person for years after the initial event.
The thing about traumatic events is that no matter if the event spanned just one hour or several months, even years, any trauma can be debilitating to your physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. This is why seeking trauma-informed care in Los Angeles is important.
Rather than pushing aside your trauma, hoping it will just go away on its own, finding treatment is essential to living a happier, healthier life. At Harmony Place, we are a leading addiction and co-occurring trauma treatment center in Los Angeles that understands just how painful and life-altering traumatic events can be. We offer premier, individualized treatment in a safe and comfortable environment.
Contact us today to learn how our treatment center can help you take back your life.
Detoxification
Residential Inpatient
Outpatient
Transitional Living
What Are the Signs of Trauma?
There are a wide variety of events, causes, and situations that can be traumatic. Whether it be a one-time event, such as a mass shooting or violent attack, to ongoing trauma, such as being bullied as a child, these events can stick with you long past the event itself.
While you can try to ignore or dismiss your trauma, this will only make your symptoms worse. If you are unsure if you are experiencing signs of trauma, here are some common signs to look out for.
- Nightmares
- Mood swings
- Intrusive, unexpected thoughts about the event
- Confusion
- Insomnia
- Always being on edge/getting startled easily
- Sexual dysfunction
- Always being alert for potential danger
- Losing interest in hobbies/activities you once found enjoyable
- Social withdrawal
- Avoiding certain places, people, or activities that may be triggering
- Debilitating fear
- Detachment from your emotions and relationships with others
- Depression
- Shame
- Anger
- Anxiety
- Panic attacks
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What Are the Long-Term Effects of Trauma?
Long-term trauma, if left untreated, can be debilitating and significantly impact your quality of life. While the long-term effects of trauma may look different depending on your unique experience, common effects of long-term trauma include:
- Substance abuse
- Sexual problems
- Inability to trust others and form healthy, close relationships with friends and family members
- Social withdrawal
- Self-destructive behaviors
- Depression
- Feeling damaged, hopeless, ashamed
While your specific traumatic event will influence the long-term effects experienced by your trauma, there’s no denying that trauma, left untreated, can negatively impact your physical, mental, social, and emotional well-being.
How Does Trauma Impact Mental Health?
Trauma can significantly impact your mental health for the worse and increase your likelihood of developing a mental illness.
This is because when your body experiences a traumatic event, it creates a stress response that triggers your natural fight or flight response. If your trauma involves a singular traumatic event, such as a mass shooting or car accident, this can inevitably trigger your fight or flight response. This response can increase physiological factors like your heart rate as your body’s sign telling you that you’re in danger.
Meanwhile, if you experience ongoing trauma, such as growing up in an unsafe home or neighborhood where violence may have been present, this can trigger your fight or flight response constantly growing up. Thus, your body will become used to always feeling anxious and on edge.
Therefore, trauma can negatively impact your mental health in more ways than one. And, especially if you experienced trauma as a child, you may not realize your unsafe upbringing or traumatic event as a child could be the catalyst for why you feel depressed or anxious as an adult.
Can Trauma Cause Addiction?
Research has found that trauma, especially traumatic experiences as a child, can increase your risk of addiction in adulthood leading many to a dual diagnosis, or co-occuring disorders. Because the body endures an overwhelming sense of stress and anxiety from the traumatic event(s), naturally, your body will look for anything to cope with these intense feelings of distress.
This explains why many people who experience trauma may start abusing drugs and alcohol as a way to cope with their trauma symptoms. However, substance abuse only masks or hides the symptoms, and does nothing to treat the source of the trauma, even though your body may feel good at the moment when abusing drugs.
Your body will begin to crave the dopamine hit of the substances you are abusing as it will give your body a false sense of relief from your trauma symptoms. This is where trauma and addiction can easily go hand-in-hand because individuals will become dependent on using a certain substance to calm their mind and body from the constant stress and anxiety they feel living with their untreated trauma symptoms.
What is Trauma-Informed Care?
Trauma-informed care focuses not on “what may be wrong with you” but on “what happened to you.” While it may be extremely difficult telling and reliving your trauma to your support staff, it’s essential for your support team to understand what you went through to devise a comprehensive care plan to better treat your trauma.
The trauma-informed care approach draws on six main principles:
Safety
Trustworthiness and transparency
Peer Support
Collaboration and mutuality
Empowerment, voice, and choice
Cultural, historical, and gender issues
A primary symptom of trauma is that individuals cannot form trusting, healthy, open relationships with anyone. This can make it difficult for treatment staff to provide the best possible care to the individual without the ability to open up about what happened and what they may be going through.
Creating a safe, caring, inclusive environment for each patient is essential to taking a trauma-informed care approach. This way, the patient can open up to the provider about what happened so the provider can work with the individual to create a treatment plan for their trauma symptoms.
Harmony Place offers trauma treatment in Los Angeles, so every patient always feels safe and comfortable at our center, while getting the care they need to take back their life.
We Offer Dual Diagnosis Trauma Treatment in Los Angeles
Trauma can drastically alter your life for the worst. That’s why seeking trauma treatment that can help you break free of addiction rather than using drugs and alcohol as a means to mask your symptoms.
While facing your trauma may sound extremely overwhelming, Harmony Place offers trauma-informed care in Los Angeles, so you feel comfortable every step of the way throughout your treatment. We understand that opening up about your trauma can be uncomfortable. That’s why our treatment center provides a safe and comfortable environment with a team of caring staff to patiently walk alongside you to treat your trauma and addiction.
If you or someone you know is looking for trauma and addiction treatment in Los Angeles, contact us today.