Our Approach
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Our Approach
At TRT Center of Georgia, we look beyond symptoms to address the root causes of mental health challenges. Our etiotropic approach means we seek to understand and treat what’s creating your difficulties, not just manage the effects.
Resolution, Not Just Management
Most mental health treatment focuses on helping you cope with symptoms. We focus on something different: complete resolution.
This distinction isn’t just philosophical—it’s the foundation of everything we do.
The Difference Between Coping and Cure
Traditional therapeutic approaches are nosotropic, meaning they focus on managing the consequences of psychological distress: the symptoms, behaviors, and emotional reactions you’re experiencing. These approaches can be helpful, but they often require ongoing management strategies because the underlying source remains unaddressed.
We use an etiotropic approach, which means we identify and reverse the root cause itself. When you resolve what’s driving the distress at its source, symptoms don’t require lifelong management—they simply stop manifesting.
This deeper work requires more from you. Achieving cure-level results rather than symptom relief alone demands commitment, honesty, and willingness to engage intensively with the therapeutic process. Our program is more thorough and can be more intense than traditional therapy approaches.
For some people, this level of commitment doesn’t fit where they are right now—and that’s okay. Timing matters in healing. But for those who have suffered long enough and are ready to do what it takes to truly get well, or for those who want to prevent trauma from developing into chronic disorders, this approach offers something fundamentally different: the possibility of complete resolution rather than lifelong management.
If you’re ready to invest deeply in your healing, we’re ready to walk that path with you.
A 30-Year Clinical Legacy
Our approach is built on Etiotropic Trauma Management (ETM) and Trauma Resolution Therapy (TRT), developed over three decades by Jesse W. Collins II and rigorously documented through six licensed treatment facilities under State of Texas licensure and Joint Commission accreditation.
I trained directly under Jesse as his clinical protégé and have been entrusted with preserving and advancing this methodology. With 22+ years of clinical experience, I’ve seen what’s possible when you address psychological distress at its true source rather than simply managing its effects.
How Psychological Distress Actually Works
Whether from trauma, accumulated stress, substance use patterns, or complex mental health conditions, psychological distress creates contradictions to your identity—to the values, beliefs, images, and realities that define who you are and how you see the world.
These contradictions get retained in memory, creating loss: of self-worth, trust, safety, connection, hope. Your brain tries to manage this paradox through survival responses—the symptoms you’re experiencing now. But those survival responses themselves create new contradictions, which create more loss, which requires more coping… and the cycle continues.
Etiotropic treatment reverses this cycle at its source. We identify the specific contradictions affecting your identity and provide structured support to reconcile them. Reverse the source, and the survival responses—your symptoms—naturally resolve.
Why This Matters for Crisis Managers
First responders, law enforcement, emergency medical personnel, firefighters, and military personnel face a unique challenge: they carry two identities into traumatic events.
Professional training creates a system of values, beliefs, and psychological protections that allows you to function during crisis—to care for others, make critical decisions, and accomplish difficult tasks. This professional identity often remains intact.
But your personal identity—your beliefs about how life should be, how people should treat each other, what you expected from the world—still experiences contradictions. And the very training that protects you professionally can paradoxically reinforce the defenses that prevent your personal identity from healing.
We understand this dual identity framework deeply and know how to address both the individual impact and the systemic effects on organizations.
An Integrative View
Our etiotropic lens extends beyond traditional talk therapy. We recognize that mental health is influenced by multiple factors, including metabolic function, inflammation, nutrition, and other physiological processes. When appropriate, we may explore how these biological factors contribute to your mental health challenges and work collaboratively with you to address them alongside psychological treatment.
This integrated perspective allows us to develop more comprehensive, personalized treatment plans that address your unique situation from multiple angles.
For more information on metabolic approaches to mental health, see our Learning Center.
Our Therapeutic Approach
There are many different psychotherapies available today, and varying views of how to diagnose and address human problems continue to proliferate through media and professional channels. We believe these differing perspectives enhance people’s knowledge and understanding of mental health treatment.
In our practice, the methods we use depend on your specific needs. Because needs change over time, we adapt our approach accordingly. For example, when achieving a particular goal is urgent, we may use behavior-oriented therapies suited to that purpose. At other times, you may need help understanding your emotional responses to specific issues, which requires an entirely different process. Relationship dynamics may call for approaches drawn from couples or family therapy—whether that’s developing better communication skills, strengthening agreements between family members, or helping people adjust to changes in their relationships.
Because different therapies have different goals and are often based on competing philosophical premises, we provide clear explanations of these differences in our educational materials. Our experience shows that the more you understand what you’re doing and why, the stronger your therapeutic results.
When Trauma Resolution Becomes Primary
Sometimes people who have experienced significant trauma don’t realize how deeply they’ve been affected. Trauma can shape your life in ways that feel normal because you’ve adapted to survive it. If during our assessment we identify unreconciled traumatic experiences, we will recommend Trauma Resolution Therapy™ (TRT™).
Unlike other therapies that address many aspects of coping with life, TRT™ has only one goal: to help you completely resolve trauma you have experienced. When severe trauma is affecting your life, TRT™ becomes the key that unlocks all other therapeutic progress. We consider your right to resolve trauma—regardless of when it occurred—to be primary.
What follows is an explanation of how TRT™ works and what makes it different from other approaches to trauma treatment.
How ETM and TRT Work Together
Etiotropic Trauma Management™ (ETM™) provides the structure and guidelines that make complete trauma resolution possible. When you begin treatment, ETM’s assessment framework helps us identify and understand the full scope of issues you’re facing—including co-occurring conditions, multiple trauma sources, and other complicating factors that might interfere with resolution.
ETM™ then creates a clear, systematic path forward that ensures these issues don’t obstruct your healing. This might mean stabilizing certain conditions first, addressing trauma sources in a specific order, or coordinating various aspects of your care in a particular sequence.
Once this path is established, Trauma Resolution Therapy™ (TRT™) implements the actual trauma resolution work. TRT’s highly structured approach focuses all therapeutic effort on the trauma’s source, allowing the thoughts, feelings, and behavioral responses created by trauma to dissolve completely. This complete resolution cures both psychological trauma and its behavioral manifestation, PTSD.
Trauma Resolution Therapy (TRT™)
Trauma Resolution Therapy™ is our primary methodology for working with psychological trauma. TRT™ has one goal: to reverse trauma etiology. “Reversing etiology” means undoing what the traumatic event created in your system—essentially curing the trauma itself.
What TRT Does (and Doesn't Do)
TRT’s exclusive focus is resolving trauma at its source. It is not designed to change your behavior, make you a better partner or employee, or teach you life skills—though these improvements often happen naturally as a result of trauma resolution.
The purpose of this focused approach is to remove trauma’s effects from your reality system entirely. When trauma etiology is resolved, it no longer influences how you experience the world, make decisions, or relate to others.
How TRT Works
Rather than working through extensive discussion, analysis, or cognitive reframing of your trauma, TRT™ facilitates what we might call a biological extinction process. Through precisely directed therapeutic attention at specific increments of trauma dissolution, the molecular substrate that trauma created naturally breaks down and is eliminated.
This is fundamentally different from insight-based therapies that aim to help you understand or reframe your trauma, or exposure-based therapies that help you tolerate trauma triggers. While awareness and understanding may occur during TRT™, they’re not the healing mechanism—they’re simply byproducts of addressing trauma at its actual source.
The TRT Clinical Environment
TRT™ is delivered within what we call a “clinical module”—a structured therapeutic environment specifically designed to support complete trauma resolution. Think of it as creating optimal conditions for healing, similar to how a surgeon needs a sterile operating room to perform surgery effectively.
This structured environment includes specific agreements between you and your therapist, clinical standards, and interactive guidelines that focus all therapeutic attention precisely on your trauma’s source. These aren’t arbitrary rules—they’re essential conditions that allow the healing process to work at its deepest level.
What Supports Complete Resolution
Achieving complete trauma resolution—what we call cure-level results—requires certain conditions to be in place. Some factors can interfere with TRT’s ability to work at the biological level where trauma actually exists. Understanding these factors helps us work together to create the best possible conditions for your healing.
Why do these factors matter? Because TRT™ works by facilitating a natural biological process of trauma dissolution. When certain substances or conditions are present, they can block access to the neural pathways where trauma exists, preventing the complete resolution that makes TRT™ unique.
During your initial assessment, we’ll have an honest conversation about these factors. Our goal isn’t to exclude people from care—it’s to ensure that when you engage in TRT™, you have the best possible chance of achieving complete trauma resolution rather than partial symptom relief.
If any of these factors are present in your situation, we’ll work with you to determine the best path forward. Sometimes this means addressing certain issues first, coordinating with other providers, or adjusting our approach to fit your circumstances while still maintaining the integrity of the treatment.
Factors that can limit complete resolution include:
Psychotropic medications
While medications can be essential for managing certain conditions, they can interfere with TRT’s ability to access and resolve trauma at its source. If you’re currently taking psychiatric medications, we’ll discuss this during your assessment. In some cases, past medication use may also affect treatment outcomes, depending on how recently you discontinued use.
Substance use
Even occasional alcohol or recreational drug use can prevent complete trauma resolution. This includes social drinking—for example, having wine on weekends while participating in TRT™ during the week. This isn’t a moral judgment; it’s a biological reality about how substances affect the brain’s ability to process and resolve trauma.
Active addiction
If you’re currently struggling with alcohol or drug dependency, this needs to be addressed before TRT™ can be effective. Interestingly, addiction itself is often a source of trauma that we can address with TRT™—but only after you’ve achieved stable sobriety.
Co-occurring conditions
Conditions like Bipolar Disorder need to be stabilized before we can effectively address trauma. This doesn’t mean you can’t receive TRT™—it means we first stabilize the co-occurring condition, then proceed with trauma resolution once you’re ready. We don’t address these issues simultaneously because each requires its own focused treatment approach.
Concurrent behavioral programs
Rigorous behavioral control or modification programs running parallel to TRT™ can interfere with trauma resolution. The focus on controlling symptoms can actually prevent us from accessing and resolving the source.
Ongoing threats to safety
If you’re currently living in a situation where your physical safety is actively threatened—for example, an ongoing domestic violence situation—we need to address your immediate safety first. Specialized approaches exist for these circumstances.
Very early childhood trauma
TRT™ has limitations with trauma that occurred before approximately age three, though these traumas can sometimes be addressed when working on later trauma sources.
Addressing Multiple Sources of Trauma
Many people have experienced trauma from more than one source over their lifetime. A “source” might be a single devastating event, like the sudden death of a loved one, or it might be an extended period of trauma-causing circumstances, like living with an addicted family member or experiencing repeated combat deployments.
Our approach brings order to addressing multiple trauma sources. We typically work on the most recent source first, resolving it completely before moving to earlier trauma. This systematic approach ensures consistent, thorough resolution of each trauma source rather than partial treatment of many.
Between addressing different trauma sources, clients often take breaks from therapy—sometimes for months or even years—before returning to work on another source. This is not only acceptable but often beneficial, allowing you to integrate the changes and live without that particular trauma’s influence before addressing the next.
Measuring Resolution
How do we know when trauma is truly resolved? Rather than focusing primarily on whether symptoms have ended, we measure something more fundamental: the restoration of your identity.
Throughout TRT™, you'll develop a clear understanding of three distinct versions of yourself:
- Who you were before the trauma occurred—your values, beliefs, and sense of reality before the traumatic event contradicted them.
- Who you became during and after the trauma—how you had to change, what you had to do to survive, and how these survival adaptations may have created further contradictions to who you really are.
- Who you are now that the trauma is resolved—a restoration of your core identity, freed from trauma's distorting influence.
This process is documented as part of your treatment, and both you and your therapist must agree that trauma has been completely resolved before concluding TRT™ for that particular source. The goal isn’t just feeling better—it’s being free from trauma’s influence on your identity and reality system.
Our Commitment
Above all, our approach is guided by focused-caring for each person as they are. We don’t fit you into a predetermined treatment protocol. Instead, we tailor our etiotropic methodology to your specific situation, your unique trauma history, and your individual needs.
Whether you’re a first responder who has given everything to protect others, a trauma survivor seeking genuine healing after years of symptom management, or someone newly confronting the effects of trauma, we’re here to focus our care on resolving what’s at the heart of your struggle.
Ready to learn more? Explore our Learning Center for in-depth information about trauma, TRT™ methodology, and the science behind our approach, or contact us to discuss whether our approach might be right for you.