Trauma Therapy
Trauma is a lasting emotional response to an event that has overwhelmed your ability to cope. Unresolved trauma can make you feel stuck in the same painful memories, sensations, and thought patterns.
There’s a way out - let’s find it together.
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.
Types of Trauma
“Trauma is severe emotional pain (that) cannot find a relational home in which it can be held.”
Your path to healing
Find Safety & Stability
This is where you start. It’s about helping you find skills to cope with overwhelming feelings and sensations so you feel more in control and able to deal with distress. This takes time, but the slower you go, the faster you get there.
Processing The Trauma
Gently work through thoughts, memories, and emotions around trauma. This isn’t about forcing yourself to relive an event. It’s making sense of your mind and body’s response to an event.
Moving Forward
Develop a stronger narrative around your past, choose how you want to understand your experiences, and live more freely in the present. Develop closeness with others and reconnect with life beyond the trauma.
Frequently Asked Questions
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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 on 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.