Trauma Therapy
Are you having difficulty moving beyond a painful experience? Do you struggle with negative thoughts, vivid memories, or overwhelming emotions tied to a traumatic experience in your past? Does it feel like you’re stuck in an unfulfilling life—forced to sacrifice your dreams and goals on behalf of fear and insecurity?
Despite your best efforts to put on a good face, perhaps you’re helplessly pessimistic or self-judgmental, making it nearly impossible to savor any wonder and goodness in life. Or maybe you are so on guard all the time that you can’t be fully connected or present in your relationships.
Trauma Can Influence Your Life In Unique And Unseen Ways
Some days you may feel emotionally numb and disconnected—and others, you might find yourself over-reacting to relatively benign situations. The chronic stress from worrying about the past and future is often accompanied by racing thoughts, trouble sleeping, and even panic attacks.
Emotionally, you might be feeling trapped in survival mode, making it even more difficult to navigate conflict, manage relationships, or advocate for yourself effectively. To mask the pain, you may throw yourself into work or engage in coping behaviors that ultimately do more harm than good.
Right now, I know you must be in pain—but there is a way for you to find happiness, feel safe, and love yourself fully. With my compassionate, holistic approach to trauma therapy, you can mend the wounds of the past, deepen your relationships, and enhance your personal, professional, and spiritual life in profound ways.
Many People Experience Trauma Without Even Realizing It
As a trauma therapist, I interpret trauma as the body's response to anything that overwhelms your capacity to feel and process what happened. That covers a lot of ground outside of the typical culprits of Big “T” trauma, such as violent assault, sexual abuse, and serious accidents.
Performing poorly on a high-stakes test, botching a public presentation, going on a bad date, feeling misunderstood or misattuned to, or having a negative experience at the doctor’s office can all be traumatic. That means a lot of individuals experience little “t” trauma regularly, sometimes weekly or even daily. Those experiences can have a deep and lasting impact that folks aren’t always aware of.
The Roots Of Trauma Often Run Deep
Trauma frequently gets passed down from generation to generation. In fact, much of modern Western culture can be understood as a result of trauma: the desire to fight and conquer perceived enemies; the need to repress emotions or numb feelings; and the unrealistic pursuit of individualism, self-reliance, and the perpetual growth mindset of capitalistic lifestyles.
Compounding that tragic reality is the collective trauma of climate crisis, the pandemic, patriarchy, white supremacy, systemic racism, and corrupt and dysfunctional public institutions. While these larger forms of systemic and multi-generational trauma are not any one person’s fault, we as individuals need to live with and navigate the current realities.
Unfortunately, most of us aren't taught how to work with intense emotions or regulate the nervous system. And because trauma lives in the body, it can’t be resolved through reasoning or merely understanding it. We have to let the body sequence the sensations and emotions associated with trauma to release it, and that’s where counseling can be beneficial.
Trauma Therapy Can Help You Reconcile The Pain Of The Past
Our society often views any deviation from an imagined ideal of healthy normalcy as a sign of weakness, something to feel ashamed or embarrassed about. However, trauma thrives in the shadows of avoidance and ignorance, and it can only be healed by facing it and feeling it.
Working with a trauma therapist helps you do that by giving you support, resources, and the sense of safety needed to finally relax and step out of survival mode. Therapy enables you to connect with your inner resilience and strength—your untarnished, pure, essential self—so you can release the pain and suffering of trauma stored in the body.
Part of that involves learning simple and effective tools you can quickly utilize at any time to regulate intense emotions and recenter. As we work together, I’ll provide you with skills to help you communicate more clearly and advocate for yourself effectively. You’ll also learn to recognize what you're experiencing in the moment and how to navigate difficult situations and feelings in the future.
What My Trauma Counseling Sessions Typically Entail
To provide you with some immediate relief, we’ll start by looking at the symptoms of trauma to give you clarity on what's really happening, and I’ll teach you practices to work with and reduce those symptoms. This may also involve identifying recurring patterns in your present life, untangling their history, and giving yourself a conscious voice in how you want to live.
We’ll also work directly with the core of the issue—often including the inner child parts that need acknowledgment, validation, care, and support. My goal is to help you reframe the past, how it affects you, and what it means to you. In doing so, you can transform your pain into an opportunity to discover the internal strengths and resources needed to live your best life.
To facilitate healing trauma in the most direct, powerful, and lasting way possible—through the body—I use somatic therapy. This mind-body approach to healing enables clients to develop an active felt sense of awareness in the body that allows us to work with emotions in an immediate, tangible, safe, and incredibly effective way.
Somatic therapy can be exceptionally attuned to your nervous system, emotions, and internal strengths. Going at a pace that you control, I’ll help you build your capacity to experience difficult emotions, to feel strong and secure in yourself no matter what's happening in your life, and to build trust in your body's wisdom, gifts, and abilities.
What You Can Hope To Gain From Trauma Treatment
Throughout the process, I’ll provide you with nervous system regulation techniques—quick and easy strategies for grounding, resourcing, and self-soothing. I’ll offer you methods for relaxing the mind and body in ways that help you sleep better, communicate effectively, and manage conflict peacefully.
To clear other people's energy from your field, I can guide you in meditations to help you become more present, embodied, and connected to yourself and your truth. You’ll also gain valuable skills that can help you reinforce and honor your boundaries. And you’ll discover tools for identifying, accepting, and expressing your needs and desires.
When talking about trauma, we often hear about its debilitating effects. However, what often gets overlooked is post-traumatic growth—the maturation, personal development, and transformation made possible by healing trauma. By working with the pain safely and effectively, you will discover within yourself an incredible capacity for resilience, strength, and self-actualization.
As you awaken your autonomous, sovereign, and inter-connected self, the power you will feel from healing trauma will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Perhaps You’re Considering Trauma Counseling But Still Have Some Concerns…
I feel like going to trauma therapy is a sign of weakness—like I should be able to take care of this myself.
One of Western culture's primary values is independence. Yet, we are never fully independent. From farmers, mechanics, and doctors to friends and family, we are hardwired to be inter-reliant. So working with a trauma counselor is not a sign of weakness—it’s a sign of inter-connected strength that shows your willingness to heal, grow, and acknowledge that some burdens are just too heavy for one person to lift alone.
I'm too busy for trauma therapy sessions.
Think of therapy as one moment in your week where you can prioritize yourself. Though it may sound counter-intuitive, this simple act will create more space in your life, enabling you to bring more of yourself, your presence, and a sense of connection to your relationships and all that you do. As you grow more self-aware through our work together, your life will begin to accommodate you rather than you having to accommodate it.
My trauma is too painful to feel and too overwhelming to talk about—even with a counselor.
I understand how you must feel, which is why we’ll start by working together to reinforce your internal feelings of support, strength, and safety well before we directly address the trauma. At the same time, I'll teach you skills for stepping out of the overwhelm and returning to your calm, regulated self. When you are ready, we’ll use that secure foundation of inner resilience and trust we built together to explore your experience layer by layer at a pace you control. I’m just here to help you navigate.
Let Me Help You Heal Trauma and Reclaim Your Life
If you're ready to release the past and look forward to a future where you feel calm and confident in yourself, I can help. Please reach out for a free 20 minute consultation to see where my approach to trauma therapy may be able to free you from the burden of the past.