The Richards Trauma Process

The Richards Trauma Process is a safe, gentle and highly effective modality for resolving past trauma’s and distressing events which are the main reason why clients get stuck and suffer from a range of mental health issues. 

The Richards Trauma Process helping clients recognises the powerful influence of distressing life events as pivotal to shaping our personalities and identities.  These events, when unresolved, manifest negatively and set us up for maladaptive ways of coping in the world.  Some maladaptive ways of coping are anger, appeasement, anxiety, depression, emotional shutdown, control and PTSD just to name a few.

The Richards Trauma Process is a three/four step process which rewires limiting beliefs, stops self-sabotage, releases the emotional charge locked in from past distressing events (anger), resets the nervous system and moves the client to a position of empowerment. Once this is done the unhelpful coping strategies lessen.

Trauma’s gets stuck in the part of the brain called the amygdala.  The amygdala is responsible for the perception of emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness, as well as the controlling of aggression. The amygdala helps to store memories of events and emotions so that we can recognise similar events in the future, and protect ourselves.  Over time the amygdala can misread situations and trigger us when there is no danger, inadvertently embedding the distressing event over and over.  This is how we over- stress the nervous system.

The Richards Trauma Process uses the imagination as the tool for change because the body believes what the mind imagines. So, when you create different scenarios, using the imagination we are able to shift the distressing event to the ‘warehouse of memory’ where it belongs. In this way we have resolved the trauma.

This process is a naturalistic process that resolves trauma symptoms by gently discharging the high levels of nervous system arousal associated with trauma (anger) and helps the body to return to a normal level of functioning. As the nervous system is reset, integration organically occurs, and the physical, emotional, cognitive and interpersonal aspects of the self can start to work together as a whole.