You don't have to keep carrying this alone.
Trauma has a way of staying with you long after the event is over — showing up in your body, your relationships, and the way you move through the world. You don't have to keep white-knuckling your way through it. Healing is possible, and it starts with having a safe place to finally put it down.
What is Trauma?
We hear a lot about trauma today. It can feel hard to define because so many things seem traumatic. This is because trauma isn’t the event; it’s your body/mind’s response to the event(s).
Some trauma like car accidents, combat, sexual assault, natural disasters, and other events can overwhelm your ability to cope, leaving you stuck in emotional states you can’t quite move through. Flashbacks, panic/anxiety around memories of the event, or feeling ‘shut-down’ are all signs of being stuck.
Other trauma can come from childhood experiences of neglect, abusive relationships, negative spiritual experiences, or stressful life events. This type of trauma can make it hard to engage in healthy relationships with yourself and others, leaving you longing for closeness while also fearing relationship.
Trauma therapy can help you process and integrate the pain from the past so you don’t keep reliving it.
How counseling can help with trauma
Make sense of how past experiences are showing up in your present life
Understand your nervous system's responses — why you shut down, react, or brace
Process painful memories in a way that reduces their grip on you
Rebuild a sense of safety in your body and in relationships
Untangle shame from what was done to or around you
Move from surviving to actually feeling present in your own life
Common Questions About Trauma
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Signs of trauma can include flashbacks, nightmares, difficulty trusting others, feeling numb, heightened anxiety, or avoiding reminders of the event. You don’t need to have a “major” event for your experience to be considered traumatic—what matters is how it impacts you.
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There’s no fixed course of treatment for trauma. The slow, careful work of relating to a trusted person, getting inner stability, and reprocessing from a higher level of health takes time. Everyone’s course is different, but I believe in taking the time to establish relational safety together and build coping skills for distress is a crucial step in trauma treatment. Engaging with your trauma narrative happens after we’ve done those things first.
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It makes complete sense to be nervous - especially if you’ve been dealing with this alone for awhile. We’ll go at your speed (and possibly slower) so that you have time to build trust and safety within yourself. Re-establishing this trust is a major part of healing trauma.
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I use what’s called an integrative approach to working trauma. Together we’ll work with the thoughts, emotions, experiences, and bodily sensations that trauma often disrupts. In this way trauma work is similar to normal counseling, but it focuses more on safely experiencing your emotional states and reactions to stress.
This often will look like like identifying signs of activation in your nervous system or attachment patterns related to the trauma and developing self-regulation skills that help you feel safe again. As our work deepens, we’ll shift toward becoming curious about where trauma has shut down aspects of your core self so you can reconnect with yourself and practice greater self-acceptance. Over time, through cycles of activation and regulation, you’ll increase your tolerance for distress and reduce your time feeling hyperactive/anxious or shut down/depressed.