Approaches
Trauma-Focused Therapy, Parts Work/IFS & Emotion-Focused Therapy
Trauma doesn’t change who you are, but it changes how you see yourself and the world.
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Trauma changes your beliefs, how your nervous system reacts to your surroundings, and how your emotions feel.
Trauma can follow one overwhelming event or repeated exposure to danger. When painful experiences happen repeatedly within relationships that were supposed to be loving and safe, this may be understood as complex trauma. Trauma-focused therapy using parts work helps identify the patterns that have followed you for years and shows why the same problems keep repeating.
Therapy works directly with these internal responses, bringing them into awareness and working through the underlying issues. Parts work treats the effects of trauma that have persisted for years or decades and changes what once felt unchangeable. It is especially effective when the same difficulties have continued despite repeated efforts to understand or stop them.
Trauma-focused therapy makes connections that were difficult to see before clear, showing how different reactions reinforce one another and keep the problem going. The Pathway to Self approach draws on various parts-work approaches, such as IFS, Ego-State Therapy, TIST, and EFT. I draw on different methods as therapy unfolds, based on what seems most useful in the moment. Therapy focuses on helping you make changes in the areas of your life that trauma has affected for years.
When I started IFS, it changed my life. I feel more calm and whole. I still have ups and downs, but now I can regulate faster and the tools actually work for me.
Parts work is central to the Pathway to Self approach to trauma treatment. Drawing from IFS, EFT, TIST, and other parts-work approaches, it works directly with the emotions and protective responses behind what you came to therapy to change. The main approaches I draw from are:
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS is based on the idea that we all have ‘parts’ to us. There are the parts that protect you and the parts that hold onto pain. IFS works to strengthen your core self so that the inner ‘system’ can reach a greater sense of harmony. It is an experiential approach that is particularly effective and safe with trauma work.
Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT)
EFT understands some of the problems we experience as an inner conversation between parts, while also helping you gain a better understanding of emotions in all their forms. EFT treats parts of the self as different voices, identifies the relationships between them, and uses techniques like ‘chairwork’ to help the different parts, quite literally, communicate with each other.
Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST)
TIST is another parts-work approach that combines somatic awareness and stabilization. It uses mindful awareness to help you stay connected to what you are feeling, thinking, and doing in the present. It also helps you understand how those reactions developed and work directly with the parts and experiences behind them.
Other Parts-Work Approaches
Ego-State Therapy, Gestalt, and inner child work offer additional ways to work with internal states that developed in response to trauma and change the roles they continue to play in your life.
Trauma-focused therapy can change some of the most intense and painful symptoms and patterns that lock you into states that have become normal for you. It’s possible to forget what normal feels like when fear, shame, anger, and numbness have been part of your life for so long. The Pathway to Self approach to therapy helps you find a place of calm, stability, and meaning, where you can enjoy your life and enjoy simply being alive again.
When you have spent years expecting hurt, rejection, or danger from other people, feeling safe with someone can seem almost impossible. That can change too. You can let yourself be seen and be yourself with other people again. Relationships become safer, closer, and far less taxing than you have come to expect.
Therapy also brings back the kind of meaning that may have been missing from your life for a long time. Many clients describe feeling that life has become worth living again. Trauma treatment can bring a fundamental, felt change in how the trauma is experienced inside the body. Through treatment, you’ll once again find things to look forward to. You will feel alive, want to engage with life, care about what comes next, and start wanting things for yourself again.