Compassionate, Evidence-Based Counseling & Therapy in N. Chesterfield, Richmond, Central VA, and online 
Virginia Counseling Associates

Empower Your Journey with Trauma Informed Care

Trauma can influence the way a person experiences relationships, safety, trust, emotions, and even their own body. Difficult experiences may continue affecting someone long after the immediate event has ended.

Trauma-informed counseling begins with an important principle: understanding what a person has experienced is often more useful than simply asking what is “wrong” with them.

At Virginia Counseling Associates, trauma-informed care emphasizes emotional and physical safety, collaboration, choice, respect, and an understanding of how past experiences may influence present reactions. Clients are not expected to immediately discuss every detail of a traumatic experience simply because they have entered therapy.

Treatment may first focus on building trust, understanding trauma responses, developing emotional regulation skills, recognizing triggers, establishing healthy boundaries, and increasing a sense of stability and control.

When appropriate, therapy can also help clients process difficult experiences and examine beliefs or patterns that developed as a way of surviving or adapting to those experiences.

Trauma-informed care recognizes both the impact of difficult experiences and the capacity people have to heal, grow, reconnect, and develop new ways of moving through the world.