Trauma Therapy

How We Might Work

My role in the process is to meet you where you are and help you move at a pace that feels manageable for you, building safety first and confidence over time in a way that fits your experience rather than forcing you into it.

Approaches I draw on include trauma-informed care, narrative therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatic, attachment-based, and CBT approaches, depending on what fits each person.

Trauma Is Only Part of the Story

Two things matter enormously to me in therapy: relationship and story. Trauma can affect both, but it does not get to own either one.

Trauma can influence the story you tell yourself about who you are. I should have known. I caused this. I am weak. I cannot trust anyone. The world is not safe. This is all I am now. It can also make it harder to trust other people enough to let them get close.

That is one reason I believe healing happens partly in relationship. Not because a therapeutic relationship magically fixes trauma, but because being believed matters. Having your boundaries matter matters. Having someone stay present when the story is hard matters. Not having to manage the other person’s reaction matters.

And then there is the story itself. I do not think we can write trauma out of our story, and I am not sure we should even try. Sometimes we survive by blocking things out, numbing ourselves, disconnecting, refusing to feel, or simply putting things somewhere in the back of our minds so we can keep functioning. That may be exactly what we need to do for a while.

The problem is that we do not have a perfectly selective emotional mute button. If we shut down sorrow hard enough, we often shut down joy too. If we disconnect from the painful parts of ourselves, we can end up feeling disconnected from everything else as well.

Trauma can become part of the story without becoming the whole story. It can be a chapter without remaining the central theme. Relationships, choices, losses, love, work, humor, growth, healing, and everything else that happens afterward are part of the story too. We may not get to decide what happened to us, but we still get some say in what the larger story becomes.

Complex Trauma Is Not Always One Terrible Thing

Sometimes trauma is one catastrophic event. Sometimes it is cumulative.

It can be years of instability, repeated losses, abuse, neglect, frightening relationships, violence, medical experiences, poverty, discrimination, caregiving stress, or simply never having enough time or safety between difficult experiences to recover before the next one arrives. We are still learning about the ways trauma builds on trauma.

Sometimes there is no single dramatic event that explains everything. There was simply too much, for too long, without enough opportunity to process it. That matters, and it also means healing may not happen in one dramatic breakthrough. Sometimes it happens gradually, through hundreds of moments when you respond differently than you once did, recognize what is happening sooner, ask for help, set a boundary, stay present a little longer, or find your way back more quickly after being knocked off balance.

I Will Work With Your Trauma. I Will Not Promise to Erase It.

There are many approaches to trauma treatment, and some can be tremendously helpful. I use the tools and approaches within my training, and I continue to learn and grow.

What I will not do is promise that I can erase what happened. I do not think healing means becoming the person you would have been if nothing bad had ever happened. We cannot know who that person would have been.

What we can work toward is helping you become more fully the person you are now: the person who survived what happened, the person who was affected by it, the person who may still get knocked off balance sometimes and knows more and more about how to find solid ground again.

Trauma may always be part of your story. It does not have to be the whole story, and it does not get to decide by itself what the story is about.