Caption: Left to right: SooMi Lee-Samuel, MD, Medical Director, and Rachel Sherron, MA, LPC, RYT, Coordinator of Trauma Awareness and Clinical Yoga Specialist, Timberline Knolls, collaborate as part of an integrated multi-disciplinary treatment team to treat the whole person—body and mind, physically and emotionally.
Researchers at Yale discovered that the culprit is inflammatory stress hormones; these hormones pour into the body and brain at an early age due to adverse experiences. In turn, the genes that govern an individual’s stress reactivity are altered. The stress response is set on “high” for life. This increases the risk of inflammation, which can manifest later in a variety of diseases, including cancer, heart disease, autoimmune diseases and more.
In fact, it was reported that women who had experienced three types of childhood trauma had a sixty percent greater risk of being hospitalized with an autoimmune disease later in life. People who’d experienced four such categories of childhood adversity were twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer and depression as adults.
“The behavioral health field has long recognized the important connection between early trauma and future disease,” said Rachel Sherron, MA, LPC, RYT, Coordinator of Trauma Awareness and Clinical Yoga Specialist at Timberline Knolls. “That is precisely why our campus is not only trauma-aware, but addressing trauma is such a key facet of all of our therapeutic strategies.”
Trauma Philosophy at Timberline Knolls
The trauma program at Timberline Knolls is infused into all areas of treatment. It engages residents in experiential body-oriented practices, psychoeducation, and verbal dialogue to facilitate regulation of the nervous system, emotion management, and cognitive integration.
From campus to outreach, all staff at Timberline Knolls approach their shared purpose with awareness of the vulnerabilities and resilience of trauma survivors. Our awareness is reflective of our commitment to continual learning.
Our residents are met with a residential support staff that is specifically trained in trauma safety, support, and empowerment creating a trauma informed milieu. Our individual therapy teams and group therapists integrate sensory awareness, mindfulness, attachment, and stress response tracking and reworking to lower trauma symptomology.
Early Intervention
Early intervention is critical with all addictions and disorders. This is especially the case with trauma. Our adolescent program, in particular, focuses on treating incidents of childhood trauma, knowing that such therapy could prevent not only a lifetime of emotional issues, but physical illnesses.
In either population, adult or adolescent, it is essential to validate a person’s individual traumatic experience or event. A study of 125,000 patients revealed that when doctors honored and discussed patients’ childhood trauma openly, patients enjoyed a thirty-five percent reduction in doctor visits.
“The medical field could improve their assessment for early childhood trauma in a few ways,” Rachel said. “They could offer more training to physicians on trauma symptomology and learn to ask just a few simple questions to acknowledge and validate patients’ experiences. Also, doctors should have appropriate referral sources on hand to encourage their patients to reach out to a therapist.”
|
