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Intensive Trauma Therapy (ITT) is a brief, time-limited outpatient treatment for trauma survivors. In a relatively brief time, trauma survivors can make considerable gains in reducing and/or eliminating intrusive, avoidant and arousal symptoms without the use of medications. They can learn to manage troubling auditory hallucinations that come from trauma.

At ITT we offer one-week and two-week programs that provide an effective and cost-efficient way to address the trauma-related disorders. Unlike other programs in a hospital or partial hospital setting, our treatment is in the less restrictive environment of an outpatient clinic.

Many trauma survivors suffer in silence, believing that their severe depressive symptoms, suicidal urges, and auditory hallucinations mean that they are “crazy.” In fact, these symptoms as well as those of panic attacks, hypervigilance, social phobia, self-mutilation, eating problems, recurring nightmares, flashbacks, and substance abuse are often the result of trauma. At ITT we treat all these symptoms as we process the traumatic events.

ITT has programs for trauma survivors of all ages, regardless of the type of trauma. The types of traumas we treat include:

- Motor vehicle accidents
- Domestic violence
- Physical abuse or assault
- Sexual abuse or rape
- Severe neglect and abandonment
- Captivity and torture
- Combat
- Natural disasters
- Industrial and mining accidents
- Awareness under anesthesia (“becoming light”)
- Invasive medical tests such as heart catheterization
- Dental and medical procedures (including early childhood operations and catastrophic illnesses involving febrile convulsions, prolonged bed or home confinement, or repeated procedures such as urethral probes or enemas)

Intensive Trauma Therapy (ITT) is a small outpatient clinic in Morgantown, West Virginia, owned and staffed by experienced trauma therapists. ITT is devoted exclusively to treating the range of trauma-related disorders from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to the dissociative disorders including dissociative identity disorder (DID).

Typically clients and clinicians are most familiar with weekly one- hour psychotherapy sessions over a period of time to treat mental illness. Individuals suffering with symptoms that originate from a traumatic event however are finding they need more long -term therapy with the traditional approach. Our experience and research has found that a time-limited outpatient approach which we term an Individual Intensive Trauma Therapy (IITT) can be effective in reducing and managing trauma symptoms. We use a team approach, which allows our trauma therapists to focus on processing the specific traumatic events with clients rather than the therapeutic relationship between a client and the trauma therapist. Our thorough assessment and introduction to the treatment along with the preparation a client does with their outpatient therapist prior to coming to ITT allows our clients to focus on trauma processing. We use a set of integrated techniques and procedures so that you will not re-live the trauma. By concentrating on what happened in the traumas rather than on the meaning of the events we can re-connect the fragments to their origin and thereby eliminate them as triggers.

In one-hour weekly therapy sessions it is too easy to avoid focusing on the traumas because the emphasis is often on what transpired since the previous session. Also, appointments of only one hour are too short to complete most of the trauma techniques. At ITT we establish a momentum for processing the traumas that would be impossible in another outpatient program. In a two-week period away from home one’s everyday life seems to stand still while the trauma work is being done.

ITT Building

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