Trauma Disrupts Your Life. Counseling Can Help You Move On

Welcome. I’m Adrian Connolly. In my metropolitan Washington, DC practice as a trauma counselor, I deal with a variety of people and psychological issues.  But the heart of my practice is working with the after-effects of Trauma (overwhelm), including PTSD, dissociative disorders, mood disorders, anxiety and more.  I work with individuals and couples who have survived traumatic life experiences. A traumatic life experience can leave you with complex emotional issues to deal with. Not all these carry the official label, PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). But they all hurt and can hold you back from living your life to the fullest. I can help you move on from issues such as:

  • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Dissociative Disorders, e.g. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)
  • Mood Disorders, e.g. Depression, Bipolar Disorder
  • Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
  • Anxiety & Panic
  • Grief & Loss
  • and other complex life challenges resulting from trauma

The Healing Process is a Journey We Take Together

Avoiding Painful Feelings Doesn’t Work

Trauma causes emotional pain and fear and disruption. It’s human to want to avoid difficult feelings when they arise in your daily life. Working with a trauma counselor can help. The difficult aftermath of trauma can show up as:

  • unwanted thoughts, memories, flashbacks, troubling images,
  • uncontrollable impulses,
  • identity disturbance (unstable self image or sense of self),
  • dark moods (e.g. suicidal thoughts & behaviors),
  • depersonalization, derealization,
  • and amnesia (e.g. inibility to recall the trauma as a whole).

Painful feelings can fill you with dread and you may go to great lengths to avoid them.

“No matter how much you cry, the tears will dry. No matter how many nightmares, flashbacks, visions, or terrors you endure, they will pass. To weather these in order to find your true self and the happiness you deserve, that is not a risk. To waste the time you have in this body, never showing your soul to yourself or anyone else, living in fearful misery – that is really the most dangerous thing you can do.”–Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset

But the crazy and counter-intuitive thing is: the more you try to avoid your painful and troubling feelings, the more powerful and influential they become. Just the act of avoiding them robs you of the energy and vitality you need to deal with them. Trauma counseling can help. You don’t have to go it alone.

Befriend Your Feelings and Rediscover Your Life

As a therapist who deals with psychological trauma, I will help you learn how to treat your feelings in a nonjudgmental and compassionate manner. This may be the last thing you feel like doing. But the truth is, therapy can help you learn to move toward and through your feelings and reduce the hold they have over you.

“Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.”–Jon Kabat-Zinn, Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness

Trauma counseling, as the name implies, deals with trauma and its emotional and physical aftermath (PTSD, Dissociative Disorders, Mood Disorders, Anxiety, etc.). In my practice, I use therapy approaches that can help you move along the path to recovery:

Manage Thoughts, Emotions & Impulses
Cognitive Emotional Behavor Therapy (CEBT)
Regulate Mood & Emotional States
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)
Reduce Stress & Learn Present Centeredness
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
Release Painful Memories
Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR)

Take the First Step. You don’t have to go it alone.

Counseling for emotional trauma is a process that will help you recover from the turmoil in a safe, therapeutic setting. The process frees you to attend to the very things you value: creating meaning and purpose in your life.

You can take the first step by calling me at my Dupont Circle office at (202) 669-0013.