Many mental health issues that people face as adults result from traumas they faced as a child.
Christopher Conway, 56, a therapist, decided to address this problem by creating a foundation based out of Reno that helps people facing such traumas to open up about their experiences and receive resources to be able to manage them.
Conway started the National Foundation for Adult Victims of Childhood Trauma last year after moving to Reno in late 2020.
“As a child, I faced sexual, physical and psychological abuse … and have been shamed for it,” Conway told Our Town Reno.
With his non-profit organization which is at a very nascent stage currently, Conway is trying to create a network of people who have a special relationship and understanding with each other.
“Any therapist that we bring aboard has faced childhood traumas themselves and have worked their way through it. So it's that kind of an understanding where we have one adult victim talking with another adult victim,” he said.
Conway, while working with adult victims and their childhood trauma, realized that if one can get back to those traumas and try to isolate the triggers which he calls “trauma triggers,” including rejection, shame and a sense of betrayal, one can go back and recapitulate and use the knowledge of those events to cognitively reconstruct a better understanding of the situations. This may help relieve those triggers he feels. Conway has designed this in the form of a program which he calls “TRT” or “Trigger Response Therapy.”
He says if the traumas are not treated correctly these can lead to more situations of “domestic violence, substance abuse or even social displacement.”
Conway believes that not addressing these traumas adequately and in the right time can lead to adverse outcomes. “It could hit your autoimmune system, and that's something, unfortunately, that happened to me,” he said. “And now my autoimmune system doesn't like me very much.”
Another issue he confronts like others is what he calls “doctor bullying,” doctors who just don’t take their patients seriously, or believe they have low intelligence, and try to force them in a direction they know will only make matters worse.
Conway says it’s happened to him in Minnesota and here in the Biggest Little City.
“I had to prove to him that I had issues walking, I was outraged,” Conway said of a recent doctor who didn’t believe he needed to be in a wheelchair.
Despite all that he faces , Conway wants to keep serving the Reno community. He does not charge anything to his clients, so he is striving to find resources for his foundation as well as volunteers and collaborators.