Trauma Therapy & Trauma Healing

Trauma is the result of experiencing something that feels overwhelming to you. It effects our lives in many ways. You may find you’re having difficulty moving beyond a painful experience, or struggling with negative thoughts, vivid memories, or overpowering emotions. Does it feel like you’re stuck in an unfulfilling life—forced to sacrifice your dreams and goals on behalf of fear and insecurity? This may be the result of trauma that is stuck in your body.

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. Trauma is essentially indigestion of emotions. 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.

Trauma is overwhelming emotions stuck in the body, and it can come from anything.

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 that completely disregards other life.

Compounding the tragic reality of intergenerational trauma masquerading as culture is the collective trauma of climate crisis, the pandemic, patriarchy, white supremacy, systemic racism, and corrupt and dysfunctional public institutions (See “Kyriarchy”). While these larger forms of systemic and multi-generational trauma are not any one person’s fault, we as individuals are responsible for how we 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 digest, process, and sequence the sensations and emotions associated with the trauma to release it, and that’s where counseling can be beneficial.

Trauma is a physiological phenomenon, so the key to healing trauma is working directly with the body.

Trauma Therapy Can Help You Reconcile The Pain Of The Past

Our society often views any deviation from an imaginary normal of perfect health as a sign of weakness, something to feel ashamed or embarrassed about. However, trauma is actually normal and ubiquitous, and it thrives in the shadows of avoidance and ignorance. Trauma can only be healed by facing it and feeling it.

Working with a trauma therapist helps you do that by providing you with a container of support, resourcing practices you can use anytime, 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 process involves learning simple and effective tools you can quickly utilize at any time to regulate intense emotions and recenter. As your resiliency grows, along with your confidence in yourself and the body’s innate wisdom and capacity to sequence intense emotions, you’ll find that you need to manage your emotions less and are able to experience their movement through you more fully as they arise.

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. In this his way, trauma will not continue to build up and affect your life, and you can become more engaged, intimate, and active in your life.

What My Trauma Counseling Sessions Typically Entail

At the beginning of sessions, I like to offer a guided meditation to help you ground and learn practices that help clear your mind and connect you to your authenticity and inner wisdom. As we move into the work, 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. As we progress, the process usually involves identifying recurring patterns in your life, untangling their history, and giving yourself a more 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-heart-body sensational 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 more effectively, and manage conflict peacefully.

When feeling dysregulated, an important question to ask is: “Is this emotion or energy mine?” I can help you discern what is yours to work through and what you can let go of. You will learn different practices to clear foreign energy from your field and 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 you may have never known without the trauma as a catalyst. You will learn to see your life from a more generous and loving viewpoint, able to utilize any experience to increase your capacity to love and show up for yourself and others.

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, construction workers, 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.

Facing trauma is one of the most challenging and bravest things you can do, and it’s incredibly helpful to have support along the way.

I'm too busy for trauma therapy sessions.

Think of therapy as one moment in your week where you can prioritize yourself. This simple act will create more space in your life, enabling you to bring more of yourself, your presence, and a greater sense of connection to your relationships and all that you do. As you grow more self-aware through our work together, your life will shift to fit around you, rather than you trying to fit into a life that doesn’t suit your truth.

Make more time for yourself and your life will be filled with more goodness for you.

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 I approach trauma gently, layer by layer, only touching into what you have capacity to feel. We’ll start by working together to reinforce your internal feelings of support, strength, and safety well before we directly address the trauma. I'll teach you skills for stepping out of the overwhelm and returning to your calm, regulated self, which we can do many times in a single session, and which you’ll be able to do throughout your days and weeks. As you’re ready, we’ll use that secure foundation of inner resilience to explore the effects of your experience at a pace you control. I’ll help you navigate the territory, but you will always be the one to choose to pause or continue moving forward towards a freer, more whole, well, and authentic version of yourself.

Healing starts with establishing safety—from there, we go at your pace, only working with what you can tolerate. By starting and continuing this process, your tolerance (resilience) will grow, and life will become a lot less painful.

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 how my approach to trauma therapy may be able to free you from the burden of your past.