Trauma and PTSD treatment in Houston & across Texas

What trauma looks like years later

PTSD is not only flashbacks. It is a nervous system that never fully stands down: startling at ordinary sounds, sleeping badly for years, scanning rooms for exits, feeling numb or detached from people you love, irritability that arrives faster than the situation deserves.

It is also avoidance — of places, conversations, people, or of thinking about it at all — and avoidance is often the part that has quietly narrowed a life.

Trauma does not have to be a single dramatic event. Prolonged exposure to fear, instability, violence or neglect produces the same physiology. Many patients discount their own history because it does not look like what they imagine trauma is supposed to be.

When it is time to see a psychiatrist

• Sleep has been poor for months or years, with nightmares or difficulty staying asleep.
• You are avoiding places, people or conversations to keep symptoms manageable.
• You feel detached from people who matter to you.
• Anger or startle responses are disproportionate and hard to control.
• You are using alcohol or other substances to sleep or to stay calm.
• You are in trauma therapy and the symptoms are still too intense to work with.

How Dr. Torrijos approaches it

The evaluation does not require you to narrate the event. What is needed is an understanding of your current symptoms, their impact and their history — you control how much detail you give, and when.

Dr. Torrijos’s background in emergency psychiatry and in crisis clinic settings means considerable experience with acute trauma presentations, and with the reality that trauma is expressed differently across cultures. Distress that is somatic, or that is framed in religious or family terms, is read accurately rather than as something else.

Treatment options

Trauma-focused psychotherapy has the strongest evidence base for PTSD, and where that is the right lead you will be told so directly and helped to find it. Medication has a well-established role for hyperarousal, sleep disturbance, nightmares and co-occurring depression — and by reducing symptom intensity it frequently makes trauma therapy possible for people who could not previously tolerate it.

Treating co-occurring depression, anxiety and substance use is part of the plan, not a prerequisite for starting.

What treatment looks like at Tentie

An unhurried evaluation, a plan built at a pace you set, and close coordination with your trauma therapist where you have one. Nothing about the treatment requires you to move faster than you are able to.