Every Therapy Should be “Trauma Informed”
by Dr. Stephanie Vaughn
The first time I heard the phrase “trauma informed care,” was on my first day as part-time interim Clinical Director at a women’s residential treatment program. As a Clinical Psychologist and DBT-Linehan Board of Certification, Certified Clinician™, I had already spent years treating trauma in nearly every form. I provided individual and group therapy to veterans and active-duty combat soldiers with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at Nashville’s Veteran’s Administration (VA) as well as individual therapy to veterans in their Military Sexual Trauma (MST) program. I was hired to develop a DBT adherent program at one of the houses and I started by assessing the current status of things.
One of the therapists and I began talking and I asked what model of psychotherapy she practiced. She said “we all do trauma informed care.”
As I had truly never heard the phrase before so I asked, “What does that mean?”
She said something about recognizing the “role of trauma” and “creating safety,” but I was confused.
I asked, “Isn’t that what we just do? As therapists? Are we saying there are therapists out there doing trauma uninformed care?” I thought surely I must be missing something.
By the end of the day, she asked to be reassigned to another house.
That was my first introduction to “trauma informed care,” and to be clear, it is not a model of psychotherapy. A model offers a defined theoretical foundation, guiding principles, and specific methods for intervention. Examples of actual models of psychotherapy include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Psychodynamic Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Humanistic Therapy to name a few. The term “trauma informed care” is merely a perspective meant to guide how a model is applied, not the model itself. It reminds clinicians about the importance of establishing safety, considering pacing, and recognizing the potential impact of trauma in every interaction. It does not tell you how to, say use Prolonged Exposure (PE) to treat PTSD.
Competent therapy has always been “trauma informed.” It is not a niche or a specialty. It is fundamental to psychotherapy.
Unfortunately, popular culture has blurred the line between what sounds therapeutic and what actually is therapy. This has created a kind of pseudo-literacy about mental health. People begin to believe that familiarity with the language of therapy equals understanding of the process itself. And as that happens, clinicians start to feel pressure to adapt.
Agencies, training programs, and private practices start using the same buzzwords in a kind of surrender to what the public wants to hear and what it is searching for online. That’s how we ended up with “trauma informed” showing up on websites, brochures, and even therapist bios…it was a marketing necessity, not a new treatment. It’s related more to “money keywords”and SEO strategy than any clinical distinction.
I get why it happens. The phrase sounds warm, safe, and compassionate… and oh so official. But when our language starts catering to what sounds good instead of what’s accurate, it’s the patient who suffers. It confuses people into thinking they’re getting something new when it’s really the same work repackaged in a fancier wrapper.
Some patients will even leave effective therapy in search of the next “specialized” treatment they saw online, not realizing they’re chasing marketing, not mastery. I once had a patient pay for “CBT-I” sessions (without me knowing it) and they discovered it was the exact same sleep hygiene protocols we’d been doing in therapy—it just had a new label and a price tag on it.
Here’s a hot take: Great therapy doesn’t change much. It just keeps getting rebranded by people who don’t know what it is.
If you’re looking for a therapist who practices with clinical precision, not buzzwords, contact us. We’ll match you with a therapist who knows the difference between therapy that works and therapy that is #trending.
