THERAPIES

Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) is a straightforward, step-by-step therapy designed to help you heal from a traumatic experience.

The therapy focuses on changing the way you think and feel about the trauma. Here’s the basic process:

Learn skills: We start by teaching you practical skills like relaxation techniques to manage stress and calm your body when you feel anxious or upset.
Change thoughts: We work on identifying negative or unhelpful thoughts related to the trauma (like blaming yourself) and replace them with more balanced, realistic ways of thinking.
Tell your story: In a safe space, we help you create an account of what happened. This guided process allows you to face the memory in a controlled way, reducing its emotional activation and helping you feel more in control of your past.
Reconnect and plan: We work to improve communication, boundaries and develop clear safety plans for the future, so you feel safer and more resilient moving forward.

TF-CBT helps you move from being controlled by your past to feeling a greater sense of safety, hope, and resilience.

Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) - The Heart House Therapies

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is a straightforward talk therapy that helps you heal from trauma by changing how you think about what happened.

Trauma often leaves us with unhelpful beliefs, or "stuck points," like "It was my fault" or "The world is entirely dangerous." These thoughts prevent healing and keep you feeling anxious or upset.

In CPT, we work together in a structured way to:

Identify those "stuck points" that are keeping you from moving forward.
Challenge them by examining the facts and considering more balanced, realistic perspectives.
Develop skills to manage distressing thoughts and feelings yourself.

The goal is to equip you with lasting tools to regain a sense of control, reduce symptoms like anxiety or flashbacks, and improve your daily life.

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) - The Heart House Therapies

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a structured therapy that helps your brain heal from the impact of trauma and other difficult life experiences.

When something very upsetting happens, your brain can't always process it normally. Instead of being stored as a regular past event, the memory gets "stuck" in the brain's emotional centers, like the amygdala (the alarm system), which keeps you in a state of fight, flight, or freeze. This causes ongoing distress like anxiety, flashbacks, or feeling on edge because your brain thinks the danger is still present.

In EMDR, we use bilateral stimulation, usually guided side-to-side eye movements or auditory stimuli, which mimic what happens during the processing stage of REM sleep, while you briefly focus on the disturbing memory. This dual focus helps to:

Calm the amygdala (the alarm system) and reduce its overactivity.
Boost activity in the prefrontal cortex (the thinking and reasoning part), allowing it to provide context and perspective to the memory.
Improve communication between different brain regions, so the memory can be properly integrated and "filed away" as a past event.

The goal isn't to forget what happened, but to take the nervous system activation out of the memory. This process helps your brain form new, healthier neural connections (neuroplasticity), allowing you to think and feel differently about the past event and find significant relief from your symptoms.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) - The Heart House Therapies

THERAPIES

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