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Trauma

Work Through What Keeps You Stuck

CAUTION: Unlike other challenges in this program, trauma needs to be approached with care. Before exploring trauma it’s critical to know that doing so may bring back memories that have been buried for a long time, and with that powerful emotions. If you believe this might happen, we suggest not doing this work alone but with someone you trust that can be available for support (or use the phone support that comes with this program).

No one escapes life without some trauma. It shows up in sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, neglect, medical trauma, natural disasters, domestic violence, terrorism, school shootings, and traumatic loss. What traumas have in common is overwhelming fear due to a threat to survival for yourself or others. Trauma is not defined by the event itself, but by your response to the event. That is why people can be exposed to the same trauma and have different responses. For some an event is frightening, but not overwhelming and becomes just another memory of the past. Yet for others, it alters the brain and nervous system in ways that continue to shape future experiences in powerful and predictive ways.

If you have struggled with abuse of substances or addictive behaviors and never connected the dots to trauma, it will offer you a powerful new lens to understand the origins, development, and consequences of addiction. Even more, it will offer you hope that by addressing trauma you can overcome addiction in your life.

Brief Tools to Assess Trauma
  • Types of Trauma

    To get started assessing trauma, use the following form (PDF) that lists different types of traumas and consider whether each type has happened to you and its impact on your life.

     
  • Adverse Childhood Experiences

    Another way to explore the degree to which trauma impacts your life is by assessing adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. To learn more about ACEs and take a brief assessment that provides you an ACE score, check out:

     
  • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

    In this program we are not focused on “diagnoses” of mental or emotional challenges, which are done by healthcare professionals. That said, when trauma symptoms are significant, they can result in a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that can benefit from expert treatment. The tool below is a brief screen for PTSD, and if positive, may or may not mean you have PTSD. If you have questions or concerns about the results please contact one of our trained clinicians at NMCAL.

     
Getting Unstuck
  • Healing ACEs and Trauma
  • 4 Tools to Self-Treat Trauma
  • Parts Work
  • Mental Health One-Stop Shopping
  • Developmental Catch-up
  • Grief Work
  • Addressing Trauma and Addiction (Community)
  • Embracing Your Internal Family
  • Growing Up Emotionally: Living from Your Head & Heart
  • Attachment
  • ACE Study
  • Trauma 101
  • Fight, Flight, Freeze
  • Your Brain on Trauma
  • What You Can’t Remember
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