Most of the people that seek counseling have experienced trauma in the past. This trauma could be a result of something that the individual experienced during their childhood such as sex and physical abuse, bullying at school or divorces. Even adults experience trauma as a result of sexual and physical assault, a road accident or when one becomes diagnosed with a chronic disease such as cancer.
Trauma should no longer b a jail sentence to the victims. There are different techniques for treating trauma. One of them is orienting. It has been proved to be one of the best trauma treatment techniques. It is also a very easy technique. But you should not have the mentality that it is the most valuable trauma treatment technique due to its simplicity. But you should know that it is. It is a natural behavior that victims of trauma engage in without even becoming aware of their behavior.
The traumas are mostly obvious and the victim may seek counseling as a result of experiencing one or more of these traumas. Besides these common pressing issues, the victims may suffer from anxiety, depression and experience hardship in their relationship and these are other traumas that have not yet been identified. The victims may experience this as a result of some difficult experiences at school when they were bullied or due to poor parenting that some experience which may be regarded as abnormal. These painful experiences may cause some trauma and have negative effects on their lives.
The first thing that should be done when counseling a traumatized victim is by identifying what may have caused the trauma and the kind of trauma. The process of counseling will require the counselors to explore the presenting issues to identify the behavior pattern which could be contributing to the problem. This will lead to an exploration of where the behavior may have originated from and lead to some sort of trauma. We can take an example where one may be having difficulties with a certain colleague at their workplace. The exploration may lead to considering the colleague as a bully. In this condition, the victim may have been bullied at school. Such a person may be helped to identify possible responding to the situation based on some past trauma and they can identify ways of dealing with the current situation with better ways.
However, this approach may not be that effective because the effects of the past trauma may be widespread or devastating. Under such condition, a different approach need to be used such as eye movement desensitization and debilitating commonly referred to as EMDR. This is a very powerful technique that employs observing eye movement and other forms of bilateral stimulation that facilitate the body’s natural processing capacity. This technique is very effective in helping the victim fight the emotional connections between the trauma and any existing triggers that could be facilitating the trauma. The victim will be set free from and will get new ways of dealing with the causes so that they can live a stress-free life.