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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.
Treatment options
Trauma-focused psychotherapy has the strongest evidence base for PTSD. 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.
All treatment options are carefully reviewed with you, and you will have ample time and understanding to make the right decisions without feeling pressured.
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.
Reviewed by José M. Torrijos, MD Board-certified adult psychiatrist, licensed in Texas. Last reviewed August 2026.
Related
Frequently asked
Do I have to talk about what happened?
Not in order to be evaluated or treated with medication. Trauma-focused psychotherapy does involve processing the experience, but that is done with a therapist, at a pace you set, and only when you are ready.
What if my trauma wasn’t ‘bad enough’?
Symptoms are the threshold, not the event. If your nervous system is behaving this way, that is the clinical fact that matters. Nobody here will rank your history.
Can medication treat PTSD on its own?
Medication treats symptoms — sleep, hyperarousal, nightmares, co-occurring depression — effectively. Trauma-focused therapy addresses the underlying processing. For most people the combination is what produces durable change.
Is telehealth appropriate for trauma treatment?
Yes, and for many patients it is preferable — being in your own space can make difficult material more tolerable. It requires a genuinely private setting on your end.
Do you work with veterans and first responders?
Yes. Dr. Torrijos has extensive experience with acute and chronic trauma presentations from emergency psychiatry settings.