Being trauma informed in treatment matters. In fact, Stephanie S. Covington, PhD, LCSW, Institute for Relational Development/Center for Gender and Justice, said it doesn’t even make sense to provide treatment without understanding an individual’s trauma history.
“The biggest impediment [in treatment] is unresolved trauma because it impacts people’s capacity to truly recover,” she said in the opening plenary session for the 2015 National Conference on Addiction Disorders (NCAD) in St. Louis.
While trauma can stem from a single event or a series of ongoing, chronic and complex happenings, Covington said trauma is all about the specific individual’s response. It can often overwhelm people’s ability to cope, create changes in the brain that become chronic and impact functions via the brain-body connection, she added. This is why trauma can be an underlying cause for substance abuse.
[For more of this story, written by Julia Brown, go to http://www.behavioral.net/arti...rd-operating-process]
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