New Beginnings offers long-term therapy services that utilize techniques geared towards the reduction of trauma symptoms. Therapists at New Beginnings specialize in treating sexual victimization issues such as relationship difficulties, anxiety, phobias, depression, and post-traumatic stress. Each client will be offered individualized treatment and will be given referrals if issues outside the scope of sexual victimization emerge. Treatment length varies, depending on treatment needs. Also note that services at New Beginnings are on a voluntary basis, and clients may discontinue services at any time.
Our therapists use prescriptive client-focused approaches tailored to the basis of each client’s needs. This may include some combination of any of the following practices:
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
As per the EMDR Institute: “EMDR is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference. It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. EMDR therapy shows that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound. If a foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. EMDR therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental processes. The brain’s information processing system naturally moves toward mental health. If the system is blocked or imbalanced by the impact of a disturbing event, the emotional wound festers and can cause intense suffering. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. Using the detailed protocols and procedures learned in EMDR therapy training sessions, clinicians help clients activate their natural healing processes.”
NeuroAffecticve Relational Model (NARM)
As per the NARM Training Institute: “NARM is a cutting-edge model for addressing attachment, relational and developmental trauma, by working with the attachment patterns that cause life-long psychobiological symptoms and interpersonal difficulties. These early, unconscious patterns of disconnection deeply affect our identity, emotions, physiology, behavior and relationships. Learning how to work simultaneously with these diverse elements is a radical shift that has profound clinical implications for healing complex trauma. As such, NARM is positioned to become an invaluable treatment option for the Trauma-Informed Care movement as we gain greater understanding of the nature of adverse childhood experience (ACEs).”
Polyvagal-Informed Therapy
According to Deb Dana: “From a polyvagal perspective, a key goal of therapy is to help the client find ways to move out of a dysregulated state—either a numbed-out “dorsal vagal” state or a hyperaroused “sympathetic” one—and return to “ventral vagal,” the biological seat of safety and connectedness. And because we can change our dominant life story only from a place of ventral vagal, it’s crucial for both therapist and client to be able to accurately identify the state of their own nervous systems at any point in time—both in the therapy session and out in the wider world. Only when individuals are able to recognize their location on the polyvagal map can they begin the journey back to calm and connection.”
Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP)
As per Unyte-iLs: “SSP is a five-hour intervention designed to reduce stress and auditory sensitivity while enhancing social engagement and resilience. By calming the physiological and emotional state, the door is opened for improved communication and more successful therapy.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT)
As per the Institute for Solution-Focused Therapy: “SFBT is a short-term goal-focused evidence-based therapeutic approach, which incorporates positive psychology principles and practices, and which helps clients change by constructing solutions rather than focusing on problems. In the most basic sense, SFBT is a hope-friendly, positive emotion eliciting, future-oriented vehicle for formulating, motivating, achieving, and sustaining desired behavioral change.”
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT)
As per the National Child Traumatic Stress Network: “TF-CBT is an evidence-based treatment for children and adolescents impacted by trauma and their parents or caregivers. It is a components-based treatment model that incorporates trauma-sensitive interventions with cognitive, behavioral, family, and humanistic principles and techniques. TF-CBT has proved successful with children and adolescents (ages 3 to 18) who have significant emotional problems (e.g., symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, fear, anxiety, or depression) related to traumatic life events. It can be used with children and adolescents who have experienced a single trauma or multiple traumas in their lives.”