trauma competent clinicians

Look up the provider director at the Foundation for Excellence in mental health care:  http://www.mentalhealthexcellence.org/

EXCELLENCE Provider Directory Principles for Practice

We believe that...

• People experiencing distress remain people first and foremost and should be viewed and treated with respect (as opposed to being viewed and treated as diagnoses or cases).
• Recovery involves collaboration between the person in distress and their social and therapeutic network.
• The wellness model of care should be the norm. The current illness model should be challenged.
• The paradigm of recovery and well-being is the underpinning of all our initiatives.
• Individual informed choice and self-determination are critical ingredients for recovery.
• Children, young Adults and Seniors are particularly vulnerable to emotional distress.
• People are resilient.
• Honest evaluation of medication risks and benefits should be shared openly.
• The role that alcohol, prescription medication abuse and illegal drugs play in damaging the lives of those with mental health challenges and their families must be addressed.
• Social and emotional distress is an essential, if difficult, dimension of human experience.
• While medications may provide some symptom relief in the short-term, the assumption that their long term use is effective is not supported by independent research. In fact, new research has found that long term medication use may impede sustained mental health recovery and optimal health.
• People can and do recover from mental health conditions, at times facilitated by, but at other times in spite of, current mental health services. Long-term disability is not inevitable and should be neither an expected nor an accepted result of mental health conditions.
• Recovery is primarily the work of the person in distress. We value individual choice and foster hope by appreciating the active and substantial involvement of the person in distress in all facets and phases of their own care and recovery, whether or not they choose to use medications.

Also, look up Cranial Sacral Practictioners at Upledger.org, and look up vision therapists at covd.org (much mental health stuff is vision related.). here's another directory: https://www.alternativementalh...egories/practitioner

Linda Curran has a handpicked preferred competent therapist listing, http://trauma101-rtic.com/

Some of these people I know personally as really good. Linda also has a great Trauma website.

The most hopeful and effective treatments for trauma use different pathways to reach the right brain, where childhood trauma is stored.  Sadly TF-CBT is the most available kind of therapy, but it is generally not that useful for healing childhood trauma.  In the case of my CASA youth, she felt "unhelpable" after several years of CBT did not help.

When your brain is programmed in Fight/Flight/Freeze patterns that arise from particular stimuli (triggers), it's hard to "think" your way into this pattern and break it by force of will.  For a shock trauma that happens at an older age TF CBT may be effective, but for developmental (early) trauma, it is not.

The best results come from:

1.  Neurofeedback:   There are a variety of NF systems that require a diagnosis and a specific plan of use-- these systems are dependent on who the practitioner is and how experienced and skillful they are, which can be hard to assess.  However, there is one system (Neuroptimal) that is "one size fits all" and focuses on Central Nervous System arousal and coherence.  It trains the person for a calm CNS by giving them interruptions in the music they are listening to when their CNS is over- or under-active, or out of synch.   This is one-size-fits-all training, so diagnosis is not a concern.  This is the one my CASA youth did, and it was incredibly helpful to her.  (Miracle-level helpful!)   20 sessions = 10 hours of clinical time, and her anxiety and depression essentially remitted.  (If you use directed NF, make sure the therapist is VERY trained (~PhD) and experienced in the use of the machinery and in diagnosis.)  The biggest advantage was that 1. it was FAST, 2. The client's OWN BRAIN solves it's own firing problems, when it is finally given feedback about what it is doing that's awry.  This is extremely empowering, especially for a person who feels broken or flawed.  Non verbal, so there is no re-traumatization.

2.  Body-Based systems of "talk" therapy:  NARM (Laurence Heller), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Pat Ogden), Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine).   These therapies basically bring the client back to the sensations of, and awareness of, their bodies.  The focus stays on the body and what sensations it is experiencing.  These systems help the client learn to feel, tolerate, and name emotions and notice them as physical feelings that move, morph, change and resolve if the client is able to let that physical process take place.  These therapies hook up R and L brain through experiencing & re-hooking-up-to the sensations of the body (where trauma is stored).

3.  EMDR.  Also well validated for helping the right brain reprocess information that is 'stuck' due to trauma by mimicking REM sleep.

Be warned that there are a lot of posers in trauma therapy.  There are alot of people who took one seminar and bill themselves as experts, or who use their own spin on a therapy that may render it very different or ineffective.  You need to make sure you are dealing with an experienced, skilled practitioner who has the requisite accreditation. 

NICABM = Natitional Institutue for the Clinincal Application of Behavioral Medicine.... they have a ton of info on line about the therapies that are the most promising for trauma healing.