Trauma Therapy in Minneapolis & Brooklyn Park
Trauma does not always look like the thing that caused it. It shows up years later as a short fuse, a body that will not settle, a relationship that keeps breaking in the same place, a night that never quite turns into sleep
Authentic Roots Therapy is a collective of licensed, independent therapists in Brooklyn Park, serving Minneapolis and the northwest metro. Several of our clinicians hold specific training in Somatic Psychology, and work with what the body is holding alongside what the mind already understands.
Trauma Therapy at Authentic Roots Therapy
Trauma therapy is structured work with a therapist trained to help the nervous system process an experience it was never able to finish processing at the time. That is the core of it. A traumatic event overwhelms the capacity to cope in the moment, and the memory gets stored differently from ordinary memory. It stays loud. It gets triggered by sounds, smells, tones of voice and situations that resemble the original event even slightly.
Ordinary talk therapy can help you understand this. Trauma therapy goes further and works on changing it, so the memory loses its charge and stops hijacking the present.
Signs that trauma therapy might help
People often wait years because they assume what happened to them was not bad enough to count. There is no threshold. If the effects are interfering with your life, that is reason enough.
Some of the patterns we see most often in people who come to us for trauma work:
Feeling constantly on alert, scanning rooms, sitting with your back to the wall, startling easily. Difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, or dreams that leave you exhausted. Avoiding places, people or conversations that bring something back. Reacting far more strongly than a situation seems to warrant.
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The kinds of trauma we work with
Trauma is not one thing, and the therapy changes depending on what kind it is. Broadly, our therapists work with:
Complex and developmental trauma: Harm that was repeated and happened in relationships, usually over a long period and often in childhood.
Grief and traumatic loss:A death that was sudden, violent or witnessed sits differently from an expected loss. Grief and trauma get tangled together and often need to be worked with at the same time.
Single incident trauma: A car accident, an assault, a medical emergency, a sudden loss, a natural disaster. One event, clearly defined, with a before and an after.
Intergenerational and racial trauma: Patterns of harm, survival and silence that pass down through families, and the accumulated weight of discrimination and displacement.
Trauma therapy and somatic therapy together
Trauma lives in the body as much as in memory, which is why many of the people we see for trauma also do somatic work. Where trauma therapy addresses the experience, somatic therapy addresses what the experience left behind in the body, the held breath, the clenched jaw, the shoulders that never come down.
Learn more about somatic therapy.
Schedule an Appointment with Authentic Roots Therapy
The first step is a conversation, not a commitment. You can book online or call us at (612) 217-4101 and we will talk through what you are dealing with and which of our therapists is the right fit.
We also offer trauma therapy by telehealth and we regularly see clients from Brooklyn Park, Minneapolis, New Hope, Coon Rapids, Fridley, Maple Grove and Plymouth.
