PTSD Treatment in NYC

Trauma is a rupture to the soul that needs care and attention

Whether one significant traumatic event or an accumulation of many traumatic experiences, both large and small, trauma is a rupture to the soul and a breach to the self, often with lasting consequences to a person’s well-being. Trauma is a profound and significant event or series of events that needs a particular kind of attention. Tribeca Therapy offers in-person trauma therapy in our Tribeca, Manhattan offices, as well as secure online options for New York residents.

When you experience trauma, you deserve more than merely withstanding it. We help people make sense of and make meaning out of their traumatic experiences. Even if it takes years of work, struggle, and care, if you can talk about trauma, name it, and get close to it, you can heal.

Post-traumatic stress disorder: We define trauma expansively and broadly in our New York City trauma therapy

It’s hard to make sense of trauma. Individuals who come into psychotherapy for trauma often struggle with the question of whether or not an experience or set of symptoms ought to be understood as trauma or something else. People also question whether a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis makes sense for them. Of all the weighty-sounding diagnoses, PTSD is the weightiest. In short, PTSD is an anxiety disorder resulting from acute or prolonged exposure to an intensely dramatic event or events. Following exposure to trauma, individuals suffering from PTSD can experience recurrent PTSD symptoms such as painful thoughts or dreams, flashbacks, traumatic memories, difficulty with sleep and anger, and other intense feelings and emotional distress, like anxiety and hopelessness.

Though PTSD is often associated with veterans due to its initial usage following the Vietnam War, trauma associated with war is not the only sufficient cause of the kind of suffering captured by the term. Many past experiences–rape, childhood abuse, assault, natural disasters, the COVID pandemic, the death of a loved one, and various other types of trauma, physical and otherwise–can cause serious, prolonged suffering of the magnitude that warrants a PTSD diagnosis. In fact, symptoms formerly described as indicative of personality disorders are being reclassified as a part of PTSD, otherwise known as CPTSD or complex trauma.

In our trauma therapy, we define trauma broadly and expansively. Trauma is, by definition, incredibly complex, and consequently, we follow no rigid formula in working with people who have endured traumatic experiences. While it’s hard to talk about every difficult thing that happened as trauma, it’s equally a mistake to ration the use of the word, which creates a hierarchy of pain and suffering and minimizes the accessibility of help.

We help people work through and make meaning from trauma

When ready, individuals who have suffered traumatic experiences benefit from working through these traumas. The key to trauma recovery is to acknowledge and reacknowledge what happened (even if you don’t always fully remember or understand it) and that it happened. This requires a trusted partner—a trauma therapist who has the skills and understanding of the balance between the imperative to talk about it and the need to create safe, stabilizing conditions in order to do so in talk therapy. Navigating this balance is an art. Sometimes creating these conditions for a sense of safety takes a long time. That’s okay. 

What matters is that our clinicians set a pace that finds the balance between creating the right conditions of trust and safety to move toward what happened while recognizing that confronting trauma and making sense of what happened means embracing a certain level of unsafety (within the safe context of therapy).

Trauma therapy also offers an opportunity to make profound changes

There are wonderfully creative ways that people develop coping skills to respond to trauma—things people do to make it through the world, some of which may no longer work, but served their purpose for survival. Sometimes this means burying the experience and symptoms and pushing forward, ignoring the effects of trauma. Other times, people turn to substance abuse. And yet others figure out ways to be extremely successful with their trauma, but that success represents a real compromise with their mental health.

Some of these adaptations and ways of being in the world don’t serve you anymore and harm your quality of life, which means we may need to do the difficult work of revisiting them. Ultimately, trauma is something (or some things) that happened that is significant enough to change who you are. The task in therapy is to also change. While it may sound trite, traumatic events, in addition to causing genuine suffering, are also opportunities for growth. Examining the ways you’ve lived before the trauma and after offers the possibility to make profound changes in areas you may have otherwise left unexamined and untouched.