Trauma leaves an imprint on both the mind and body. A traumatic event can change how you see yourself, how you relate to others, and how safe you feel in the world.

You may find yourself constantly on edge, avoiding certain situations, or feeling disconnected from your own life. These responses made sense at the time—they helped you survive. But now they’re getting in the way.

Trauma therapy helps you process what happened so your nervous system can finally recognize that the danger has passed. At Therapy Group of DC, our trauma-informed therapists work with clients who have experienced trauma ranging from single incidents to complex, ongoing experiences. Whether you meet criteria for post traumatic stress disorder or simply recognize that past events are affecting your present life, we can help you heal.

Washington DC’s high-pressure environment can intensify the impact of trauma, affecting both your personal well-being and professional life. Our therapists understand the unique stressors of working in government, advocacy, policy, and other demanding DC careers—and how these environments can both cause and complicate trauma.

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Is Trauma Therapy Right for You?

You might benefit from trauma therapy if you:

• Feel stuck in patterns connected to past experiences
• Experience flashbacks, nightmares, or intrusive memories
• Find yourself avoiding certain places, people, or situations
• Feel constantly on edge, easily startled, or unable to relax
• Struggle with trust, relationships, or emotional numbness
• Notice physical symptoms without clear medical cause

What to know:

• You don’t need a PTSD diagnosis to benefit from trauma therapy
• Trauma therapy moves at your pace—you stay in control
• Many people see significant improvement within months
• We offer evidence-based approaches including EMDR, somatic therapies, and trauma-informed CBT

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Understanding Trauma

Trauma occurs when an experience overwhelms your capacity to cope, leaving lasting effects on your mental health and physical well-being. This can include exposure to death, severe injury, sexual violence, or other events that cause emotional or psychological harm.

Trauma can happen directly—experiencing the traumatic event yourself. Or it can happen indirectly—witnessing trauma or learning about traumatic events affecting someone close to you.

Not every difficult experience qualifies as trauma, and what feels traumatic varies from person to person. What matters is not whether your experience meets some external standard, but how it has affected you.

Trauma can result from:

Single-incident trauma — A car accident, assault, natural disaster, or other discrete traumatic event that overwhelms your ability to cope.

Complex trauma — Ongoing difficult experiences such as chronic trauma in childhood, domestic violence, sexual abuse, or repeated exposure to distressing situations.

Vicarious trauma — Indirect exposure through witnessing others’ trauma or working with trauma survivors, common among healthcare providers, first responders, and advocates.

Trauma can also result from sexual assault, which affects how safe you feel in your own body and in relationships with others. Survivors often experience intense shame despite the assault being entirely outside their control.

Whatever the source, trauma symptoms share common threads: your nervous system learned to protect you, and those protective responses haven’t yet received the message that the immediate danger has passed. Trauma reminders—a smell, a sound, a situation that echoes the original experience—can activate your body’s alarm system even when you’re objectively safe.

Many people who have experienced trauma don’t realize the connection between their past and their current struggles. You might notice you’re easily triggered, have difficulty in relationships, or struggle with anxiety or depression without understanding why.

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Common Trauma and PTSD Symptoms

Trauma affects people differently, but certain patterns are common among trauma survivors.

Intrusive symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, or unwanted memories of the traumatic event can feel like you’re reliving the experience—complete with the original fear and physical sensations.

Avoidance is another hallmark of trauma. You may find yourself steering clear of places, people, or situations that remind you of what happened. You might avoid talking or even thinking about the traumatic event, or feel emotionally numb as a way of protecting yourself.

Hypervigilance keeps your nervous system in a state of constant alert. You might feel on edge all the time, startle easily, have difficulty sleeping, or struggle with irritability. Concentration becomes difficult when part of your brain is always scanning for danger.

Negative self-beliefs about yourself and the world often develop after trauma. You might struggle with thoughts like “I’m broken,” “It was my fault,” or “No one can be trusted.” Shame, guilt, and self-blame are common—even when the traumatic event was completely outside your control.

Physical symptoms are more common than many people realize. Chronic tension, unexplained pain, digestive issues, and other bodily sensations often have roots in unprocessed trauma. Your body holds what your mind cannot fully process.

Relationship difficulties frequently accompany trauma. Trauma can disrupt your sense of safety and make it hard to trust others, leading to patterns of withdrawal, conflict, or difficulty with intimacy.

You don’t need a formal PTSD diagnosis to benefit from trauma therapy. Many people experience significant trauma-related symptoms without meeting full diagnostic criteria—and treatment can still help.

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Specialized Trauma Therapy Services

Some experiences benefit from specialized approaches. Explore our dedicated trauma services:

HIGH-FUNCTIONING PTSD THERAPY →

For people managing PTSD symptoms while excelling professionally. We help you process trauma without disrupting the career and daily life you’ve worked hard to maintain.

EMDR THERAPY →

A powerful, evidence-based approach that uses bilateral stimulation to help your brain reprocess traumatic memories and finally move forward.

COMPLEX PTSD TREATMENT →

Specialized therapy for trauma that happened over time—not just once. Our phase-based approach helps you build safety and skills before processing childhood abuse, domestic violence, or other chronic trauma.

CHILDHOOD TRAUMA THERAPY →

For adults realizing their “normal” wasn’t. We help you understand how early experiences shaped you—and build the life you want now.

VICARIOUS TRAUMA THERAPY →

For helpers carrying the weight of others’ pain. We help mental health professionals, health care providers, attorneys, and advocates process what they’ve absorbed and continue meaningful work without losing themselves.

SELF ESTEEM THERAPY →

Trauma — especially early or repeated trauma — shapes how you learn to see yourself. Self esteem therapy helps you rebuild a sense of worth that your experiences tried to take from you.

LIFE TRANSITIONS THERAPY →

Major life changes—especially unexpected ones like job loss, breakups, or sudden illness—can be traumatic. We help clients navigate significant transitions, particularly when current changes activate past trauma patterns.

PSYCHODYNAMIC THERAPY →

When trauma has shaped patterns in how you relate to yourself and others. We help you process not just the events but how they’ve influenced your relationships, self-image, and unconscious responses—particularly effective for complex trauma rooted in early experiences.

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Our Approach to Treating Trauma

Effective trauma treatment isn’t one-size-fits-all. Our therapists draw on multiple trauma focused therapy approaches, tailoring treatment to your specific experiences, symptoms, and goals.

We practice trauma informed care, which means creating safety, building trust, and ensuring you maintain choice and control throughout the healing process. The therapy process always moves at your pace.

Trauma-Informed Relational Therapy

At its core, healing from trauma happens in relationship. Our therapists create a space where you can experience safety, attunement, and connection—often the very things trauma disrupted.

This relational foundation shapes everything we do. Your therapist pays close attention to your nervous system, noticing when you’re feeling overwhelmed or disconnected and helping you return to a window of tolerance where processing can happen. We don’t push you to “get through” material before you’re ready. Instead, we help you build the internal resources and felt sense of safety that make deeper work possible.

For many clients, this attuned, paced approach is the primary mode of treatment. Traumatic experiences—especially relational trauma from childhood—often heal best through consistent, trustworthy connection over time. Your therapist becomes a secure base from which you can explore difficult material and eventually integrate it.

Some clients also benefit from specific evidence-based modalities designed to target trauma directly. We offer several of these approaches, and your therapist can help you determine whether adding a structured protocol makes sense for your situation.

EMDR Therapy

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is one of the most researched treatments for post traumatic stress disorder.

EMDR therapy involves recalling traumatic memories while engaging in bilateral stimulation, typically eye movement guided by your therapist. This process helps your brain reprocess the trauma memory so it loses its emotional charge. EMDR therapy consists of eight phases that help you process traumatic memories and develop more adaptive beliefs about yourself.

EMDR is particularly effective for people who:

• Have specific traumatic memories that continue to intrude
• Feel stuck despite understanding their trauma intellectually
• Haven’t found relief through talk therapy alone

Trauma-Informed CBT

Cognitive behavioral therapy for trauma helps you understand the connection between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors related to traumatic experiences.

This approach helps you identify and challenge negative beliefs that developed after the traumatic event—beliefs about yourself, others, and the world that may have been adaptive at the time but now cause suffering. You’ll develop coping skills to manage PTSD symptoms and gradually reduce avoidance behaviors that keep you stuck.

Some therapists refer to this as trauma focused CBT, emphasizing the specific adaptations that make cognitive behavioral therapy effective for posttraumatic stress disorder. These adaptations include in vivo exposure—gradually approaching avoided situations in real life—and cognitive restructuring to address the distorted beliefs that often follow traumatic experiences.

Somatic Therapies

Trauma lives in the body as well as the mind. Somatic therapies address the physical impacts of trauma by helping you develop body awareness and release tension held in your nervous system.

These approaches recognize that traumatic memories are stored not just as thoughts but as bodily sensations—and that healing requires attending to both. Somatic therapies help you reconnect with your body in a safe way and regulate your nervous system’s stress response.

Additional Approaches

Psychodynamic therapy explores how traumatic experiences from your past influence your current patterns of thinking, feeling, and relating. This approach helps you understand the deeper roots of your responses.

Narrative therapy helps you construct a coherent story of your life that includes traumatic experiences without being defined by them. Many trauma survivors feel fragmented—narrative therapy helps you integrate these experiences and recognize your own resilience.

Dialectical behavior therapy skills can be invaluable for trauma survivors who struggle with intense emotions, self harm, or emotional regulation. DBT teaches distress tolerance, emotional regulation, mindfulness exercises, and interpersonal effectiveness.

What’s the most effective therapy for trauma? Several approaches effectively treat PTSD and other trauma-related conditions, including EMDR, prolonged exposure therapy, and cognitive processing therapy. Our therapists primarily use EMDR, trauma-informed CBT, somatic therapies, and psychodynamic approaches—we’ll help you determine which makes sense for your situation.

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What Happens in Trauma Therapy?

The therapy process for trauma typically moves through several phases, though the pace and approach are always tailored to your needs.

Phase 1: Safety and Stabilization

Before processing traumatic memories directly, we ensure you have the coping skills and stability needed to do this work safely.

This might include developing grounding techniques, building emotional regulation skills, and establishing safety in your current life. For some people, this phase is brief. For those with complex trauma or chronic trauma, stabilization may be a significant focus of early treatment.

Phase 2: Processing Traumatic Memories

The core of trauma focused treatment involves processing traumatic experiences so they become integrated into your past rather than intruding into your present.

Different approaches do this differently—EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, somatic therapies work with the body’s stress responses, psychodynamic therapy explores underlying patterns. What they share is helping you face what happened in a safe, supported way so your brain can finally process the traumatic event.

Phase 3: Integration and Growth

As traumatic memories lose their charge, space opens for rebuilding. This phase focuses on reconnecting with yourself and others, developing new patterns, and creating a meaningful life beyond trauma.

Many trauma survivors find that the healing journey leads not just to symptom relief but to genuine growth—a deeper understanding of themselves and stronger connections with what matters most.

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Trauma in Washington DC

Washington DC presents unique challenges for those dealing with trauma and mental health conditions.

Vicarious trauma affects many DC professionals. Constant engagement with difficult policy issues—immigration, violence, public health crises, human rights—takes a cumulative toll. Healthcare providers, first responders, journalists, attorneys, and advocates regularly encounter others’ traumatic experiences as part of their work.

Career uncertainty with changing administrations creates ongoing stress. Disillusionment from policy setbacks or institutional failures can feel like a betrayal, particularly for those who entered public service hoping to make a difference.

Professional culture in DC often minimizes emotional impacts. The expectation to stay composed, perform under pressure, and compartmentalize makes it harder to acknowledge when you’re struggling—and can delay seeking help.

Our therapists understand these DC-specific stressors. We help you navigate the demands of your professional life while prioritizing your mental health and healing process.

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When to Seek Trauma Therapy

Consider reaching out if you notice that past experiences are affecting your current life:

• Feeling stuck in patterns you can’t seem to change
• Difficulty in relationships or with trust
• Unexpected emotional reactions that seem disproportionate
• Physical symptoms without clear medical cause
• Avoiding certain situations, places, or memories
• Feeling disconnected from yourself or others
• Recognizing that DC’s high-pressure environment is triggering past experiences

You don’t need to be in crisis to seek help. Many people who have experienced trauma function well in many areas of their lives while still carrying the weight of unprocessed experiences. Early intervention often leads to faster healing.

Begin Your Healing Journey

Trauma therapy at Therapy Group of DC provides a safe, supportive space to process what happened and build a life no longer controlled by the past. Our trauma-informed therapists help you understand your experiences, develop coping skills, and move toward recovery.

Seeking help for trauma is an act of courage. You’ve been carrying this long enough.

[Schedule an Appointment →]

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is done in trauma therapy?

Trauma therapy helps you process traumatic experiences so they no longer control your present life. This typically involves building coping skills, processing traumatic memories through various techniques, challenging negative beliefs that developed after the traumatic event, and integrating your experiences into a coherent life narrative.

What is the most effective therapy for trauma?

Several approaches have strong research support for treating trauma and PTSD, including EMDR, prolonged exposure therapy, and cognitive processing therapy. At Therapy Group of DC, our therapists primarily use EMDR, trauma-informed CBT, somatic therapies, and psychodynamic approaches. We’ll help you determine which approach—or combination of approaches—makes sense for your specific situation and healing journey.

How do you release trauma from the body?

Trauma is stored not just in the mind but in the body and nervous system. Somatic therapies address this by helping you develop body awareness, notice where you hold tension, and release trapped energy through movement, breathwork, and mindful attention to bodily sensations. EMDR also addresses the body’s role in trauma through bilateral stimulation.

What is EMDR therapy used for?

EMDR therapy was originally developed to treat post traumatic stress disorder and remains one of the most effective treatments for PTSD. It’s also used for anxiety, depression, grief, and other mental health conditions where distressing memories play a role. EMDR helps process traumatic memories so they lose their emotional charge.

How long does trauma therapy take?

The timeline varies significantly. Single-incident trauma may resolve in a matter of months. Complex trauma or chronic trauma from ongoing experiences typically requires longer treatment. Your therapist will give you a realistic sense of what to expect after your initial sessions.

Do I need a formal diagnosis to get trauma therapy?

No. While some people meet criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other trauma-related diagnoses, many others experience significant trauma symptoms without a formal diagnosis. What matters is whether past experiences are affecting your current life—not whether you check every box on a diagnostic checklist. During your first sessions, we’ll discuss your medical history and current symptoms to determine the best approach to treat PTSD symptoms or other trauma-related difficulties.

What’s the difference between PTSD and complex PTSD?

PTSD—sometimes written as posttraumatic stress disorder—typically develops after a single traumatic event or discrete series of events. Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) results from prolonged, repeated trauma, often occurring in childhood or in situations where escape wasn’t possible. C-PTSD includes the core PTSD symptoms plus difficulties with emotional regulation, negative self-concept, and relationships. Both respond to treatment, though complex trauma often requires a longer, more phased approach. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) recognizes trauma-informed approaches as essential for effectively treating both conditions.