Trauma Therapy -

Trauma therapy is a niche form of psychotherapy that helps people safely process and heal from overwhelming experiences - whether those experiences were recent or long ago, or whether a singular experience or an extended experience over years ("death from a thousand cuts"). It is based in the understanding that behind our current stuck patterns behaviors and symptoms is a brain and nervous system stuck reacting to past events or circumstances. It is based in an understanding that the way to get unstuck is to not just focus on the symptoms (the effects) you are having, nor to focus only on your thoughts about what happened, but rather to work directly with how your brain and body are still reacting as if "still in response to" these previous circumstances. Sometimes our anxiety, brain fog, or our digestive problems arent going to respond to the latest medication or other strategies until we take ourselves out of our body's trauma responses.

As mentioned above, trauma can come from a single overwhelming event—like an accident, assault, medical procedure, or natural disaster - or from ongoing experiences, such as neglect, abuse, or chronic stress: soul-crushing jobs, marriages, long term care-taking roles, or unpredictable environments as a child. Trauma occurs anytime experiences interfere with a person’s capacity to cope and fully integrate the experience - leaving a lasting impact on their sense of safety, identity, or bodily regulation. Unfortunately, many situations occur where we dont realize their impact on our ability to cope until much later.

To clarify, the hallmark of trauma, and the underlying focus of our treatment, isn’t a certain event itself, but how the body and mind were effected and became less optimal / disordered. Ultimately, trauma therapy is less about revisiting traumatic content and more about restoring regulation, integration, wellness, and the capacity to engage with life in the present!

Two of my primary modalities I use when focusing on trauma are EMDR and Somatic Experiencing (SE).

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

Is an efficient and effective way to process through the effects past life experiences can have on us. In EMDR, you nonverbally process through the array of thoughts and feelings that can surround overwhelming experiences and your years of responding to them. EMDR can get to the center of how the trauma is held in the body and mind often much faster then verbal processing. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation between the left and right brain hemispheres as you process, which has been found to increase the capacity to then reorganize the material in a more adaptive way - where the experience only adds wisdom and unattached history to your life - not stuck responses in your body and mind.

My job is to first do the proper assessment and preparation, preparing you to feel resourced and ready to do the work without becoming more traumatized. I then hold a container, supporting, offering understanding and guiding the process as needed when the processing may otherwise get unwieldy or stuck.

Somatic Experiencing (SE)

SE resolves how trauma and past stress and experiences live in your body. It helps build inner capacity and resilience, and return to a sense of vitality and connection with yourself and the world around you. It’s strategies are ideal for those stuck in anxiety, hypervigilance, dissociation, chronic irritability overwhelm or depression, and all PTSD symptoms.

SE focuses on bottom-up change: making changes in how you manage the physiology of your body (literally the wiring of your brain and body) in order to shift how you feel, think and act in the world. so that you then create change in your thoughts and feelings and behaviors. This is strategically different then traditional talk therapy which focuses on cognition or changes in how you think about your challenges, in the hope that that creates changes in how you feel and act. SE actually utilizes any one of the realms of information as a way in to transformation (thoughts, sensations, feelings, images, memories, behaviors). The focus on the body largely stems from neuroscience research revealing how our past gets stored in the brain and body in unconscious ways that then effect how we feel, think, and behave in the world, in addition to studying how animals respond to trauma and how wild animals almost never have trauma symptoms nor the host of mental and physical disorders that humans have due to how we hold stress.