PTSD and Trauma Therapy
If you’re considering trauma therapy, you might be feeling scared or uncertain. But you’re here! So let’s celebrate that. And let’s be real, deciding to work on your trauma is scary. You need a space where you feel safe enough to share your thoughts, sensations, and emotions, when it may never have been safe to do so. As a trauma counselor, my goal is to offer the care, compassion, and connection needed to do this work. I focus on affirming your experience (because so often trauma teaches us not to trust ourselves) and helping you learn to regulate your nervous system so you can integrate the echoes of trauma that live in your body and mind.
Trauma is described in many different ways. I appreciate this definition of trauma: anything that is too much, too soon, or too fast for your nervous system to handle. Trauma is not defined by the event, but by your felt experience of and response to the event.
“The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.”
Reactions to trauma are different for different people. Trauma responses and PTSD symptoms include strong emotions you can’t manage; unexplained physical issues; making choices you know aren’t good for you but feel compelled to do anyway; sleep problems; hypervigilance. Different types of dissociation are also a common product of trauma, especially developmental trauma. You may have been given some other diagnosis but are not sure it fits. You may simply be moving through life numb and checked out, wanting to change but not sure how to.
Healing is possible.
Whether you are struggling with a one-time event or many years of traumatic experience, I can help you reconnect with your inner wisdom and find what you need to heal from trauma. I provide trauma therapy for adults using relational, systemic, existential, and somatic practices. Using more than one type of trauma therapy helps us address the way trauma affects your whole system.
Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) supports trauma healing by helping you reconnect to your inner wisdom and shift your relationship to all your inner experiences and parts. IFS can help you increase your capacity to process traumatic material and release the traumatic energy you hold.
Brainspotting therapy, a somatic modality, is founded on the belief that your brain knows what it needs to rework your neural pathways. This gets you out of chronic sympathetic nervous system states and makes it easier to start creating the embodied experiences that trauma disrupted. I use other somatic tools to help you reconnect with your body and find your boundaries.
Existential therapy helps you make your own meaning of the traumatic experiences that have been inflicted upon you, so that you can learn to reject the narratives of those who caused it, whether that’s a person or a society.
Please note that I also offer disability therapy. Disabled folks often experience medical trauma, which can be treated like other trauma.
There are many types of trauma, including:
Developmental trauma as a result of significant stressors in early childhood
Complex trauma from ongoing abuse or neglect
Intergenerational trauma related to historical oppression or family histories of abuse
Acute trauma from a specific incident, like an assault or serious accident
Oppression trauma caused by the micro and macro effects of living as a marginalized person
Medical trauma that happens with a loss of body autonomy in medical procedures or continuous mistreatment by medical professionals