Trauma impacts many adolescents and creates short-term and long-term issues, including negatively impacting professional opportunities. As a parent of an adolescent, you want your student to thrive in adulthood. One way that you can help your adolescent is through trauma-informed therapy.
By working with a mental health care professional, your student can work through the trauma they have experienced. In doing so, they will learn skills that help them to feel confident moving forward, manage stress, and learn healthy coping skills. These are all vital in helping your student improve professional opportunities in adulthood.
What Is Trauma-Informed Therapy?
A trauma-informed therapist is a therapist who is aware of the widespread impact of trauma, including common short-term and long-term responses. Trauma is an emotional response to individual situations or repetitive experiences that causes a person to feel distressed. Singular or reoccurring events will impact every adolescent differently. Therefore, trauma is not the specific event but instead the response to the event(s).
Therapists who are trauma-informed understand that trauma can cause issues in the following ways:
Sleep disruption
Emotional dysregulation like anxiety, depression, or shame
Numbing
Chronic health conditions
Physical ailments
High reactivity
By understanding the scope of trauma, therapists work with adolescents to learn about how trauma has affected them, how to cope with symptoms, and ways to work through and process it. The CDC states that there are six elements to trauma-informed therapy. They are:
Safety
Trustworthiness and transparency
Peer support
Collaboration and mutuality
Empowerment and choice
Cultural, historical, and gender issues
Improving Professional Opportunities With Trauma-Informed Therapy
Professional opportunities are chances to develop skills, network, or transition into a higher position at work. Many tools help individuals notice and take advantage of professional opportunities. Trauma-informed therapy can help your student to heal and build skills that will help their professional opportunities in the future, like building confidence, improving mental health, and learning to cope with stress.
Building Confidence by Healing From Trauma
When young adults are presented with a professional opportunity, it takes confidence to take advantage of them. For many young adults, this is challenging. However, for those who have unprocessed trauma, it can be even more difficult.
Trauma results in many emotional changes. Often, it makes it difficult for adolescents to control their emotions like anger, anxiety, sadness, and shame. If your student has unprocessed trauma and has experienced these emotions, it can shake their sense of self. This can leave your student feeling like they aren't able to trust themselves or others.
Trauma-informed therapy can help your student understand and process trauma. By learning about the cause of emotional changes due to trauma, your teen will begin to build confidence. This will help them seize professional opportunities that arise.
Improving Mental Health
Adolescents with a history of trauma commonly struggle with mental health issues like anxiety or depression. If left untreated, these can make it challenging for your student to pursue professional opportunities. Through trauma-informed therapy, your student will learn how to manage their mental health. Therefore, they will be more likely to take calculated risks, try new things, and be creative.
Managing Stress
Through trauma-informed therapy, your student can learn how to manage the stress of their trauma response. While this will look different for each individual, it might include breathing exercises, taking a break, or redirecting themselves in times of stress.
These skills will help your student to cope with the stress that results from trauma. However, it will also provide them with tools they can rely on to manage stress caused by other situations. Career opportunities can be stressful as they are often new, different, and exciting. While many young adults may struggle with stress, your student can learn these skills while they heal from trauma.
Building Healthy Coping Skills
Many young adults struggle to build and maintain healthy coping skills like self-care. However, by participating in trauma-informed therapy, your student can learn the value and skills that help them to cope healthily.
Therapists who are trauma-informed know that regular exercise, a healthy diet, and other healthy life skills influence how their clients feel. However, they also understand that trauma can create unhealthy coping skills. Therefore, part of the treatment is for adolescents to work on improving their coping behaviors. Often, trauma-informed therapy is also focused on teaching individuals coping methods that will last long-term. This is because trauma symptoms may reoccur in the future and knowing how to manage them is helpful.
Healthy coping skills help improve mental and physical health and, most importantly, will help your student deal with new situations better. When their future employer is considering a person to send to a course or move up the ladder, your student's healthy coping skills will help their employer know that they are prepared for the challenge.
Many adolescents have struggled with trauma, so getting help is vital. Working through trauma will help students to heal and feel more confident moving forward into their professional lives. By being informed and having processed their trauma, students are more likely to be able to manage stress and cope without forming habits that are unhealthy. At Northwest College Support, we help adolescents heal from trauma while learning skills that will help them to live as functioning adults. To learn more about our programs or how we can help your student heal from trauma, call us today at (877) 485-2776. We are ready to help your student smoothly transition into adulthood.
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