Trauma Therapy
Are You Ready To Heal Emotional Wounds From Your Past?
Has trauma from your childhood impacted how you move through the world? Do you often vacillate between a flood of overwhelming emotions and emotional shut down? Are you challenged by close relationships, often feeling isolated, stuck, or reactive?
If you’ve been impacted by trauma, you may be dealing with a host of unwelcome symptoms related to stress, anxiety, and depression. Perhaps physical ailments within your body makes you feel uncomfortable in your own skin. Whether knowingly or subconsciously, people or events can trigger reactions to the unseen ghosts of past trauma. Your fight, flight, or freeze response can become activated, culminating in panic attacks, hypervigilance, flashbacks, or other debilitating symptoms.
Unprocessed Trauma Might Be Impacting Your Relationships
You may wish that you were able to better regulate your emotions but find you often over or underreact to what’s going on around you. Maybe it’s difficult for you to feel safe enough to be open and trusting with others. The energy you put into self-protection and avoidance is not only exhausting but may ultimately impact emotional and physical intimacy with your partner.
If emotional abuse and/ or neglect occurred, you might downplay your experience without realizing the long-term effects that trauma had on you. Growing up with psychological or mental abuse or neglect as a child may have caused you to feel anxious, overwhelmed, easily angered, fatigued, or to turn to compulsive or addictive behaviors to cope.
The 'stuckness' of your nervous system in the thwarted fight, flight, or freeze response can take energy away from your ability to move forward in life and find a sense of meaning and purpose. Energy put into looking out for danger leaves little room for care and love. Fortunately, therapy can help you process the trauma that’s been holding you back from fulfilling, healthy relationships.
The Isolation Prevalent In Our Culture Increases The Likelihood Of Trauma
Trauma is more prevalent today because of the fragmented nature of our society. Without intact families and tight-knit communities, we often go through big life experiences alone. Many of us lack the support of friends and family to help us deal with challenging events. As a result, our ability to respond to adversity from a place of safety and security becomes weakened.
Sadly, in a culture rife with isolation, we have far more difficulty restoring a sense of safety and connection than our indigenous ancestors had. And still, even in the midst of societal imbalances, there is much that can be done to find islands of safety and connection.
We Often Blame Ourselves For The Trauma We Experience
Additional layers of distress are added to our trauma when we blame ourselves for the pain we experience as a result of previous unresolved life events. Not only do shame and self-blame make it hard for us to ask for help; we often cope by minimizing or hiding our symptoms. If we self-medicate or avoid being vulnerable, we may become resigned to a stressful level of isolation and disconnection. We may fail to grasp that somewhere along the line our physiology has gotten stuck in normal survival responses that we need help to discharge, release, and integrate.
The good news is that whether big or small, it’s possible to resolve the trauma you’ve experienced. By seeking therapy for trauma or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) with a compassionate therapist you trust, healing is possible.
Trauma Therapy Can Help You Rediscover Self-Compassion
Until you address trauma, your good intentions to manage your emotions and cope with life events often won’t yield the results you are hoping for. Therapy allows you to reset and balance the sympathetic and parasympathetic parts of your nervous systems so that over time, you can develop a fuller range of emotional expression. As self-regulation increases, you will cultivate new confidence in your innate ability to heal and move forward in your life.
I aim to establish a safe space where you will feel open, vulnerable, and nonjudgmental of yourself and your survival reactions. By developing a trusting relationship with me, you will feel supported and more able to connect with and accept yourself, and expand your life sphere.
What To Expect In Sessions
As I lead the session, I’ll catch the threads of what’s bubbling up for you so that we can focus on what you bring forward. Trauma can be overwhelming to your physiology and get 'stuck' in the body. I will work collaboratively with you so that you can learn the language of your body as well as tools for self-regulation. Allowing the trapped energy of trauma to gradually be released can help you reintegrate it into your system so that you’re neither emotionally shut down nor swept away by it.
By providing you with psychoeducation about the neuroscience behind your survival impulses, you will begin to appreciate the hard work your body has done to protect you up until now. When you develop a greater awareness of your physiology, you can simultaneously gain greater self-mastery by learning to slow down, listen to yourself, and enjoy your own self-regulation. Gradually, avoidant and over-reactive tendencies can diminish and life experiences previously disowned can be met with acceptance.
The Modalities I Use
I draw upon Somatic Experiencing (SE), a modality based on psychology, neuroscience, and studies of animals in the wild who live under constant threat of predators but avoid getting stuck in trauma.[1] SE was developed by Peter Levine and is based on Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, which tells us that underneath traumatic reactions are thwarted fight, flight, and freeze survival systems.[2] SE gives you tools to restore these survival reactions to helpful positions within your body so that you can have a fuller range of emotional expression and a more embodied experience.
I am also trained in EMDR, an effective and remarkable means to heal trauma and reestablish well-being.
Trauma therapy will help you discover your innate resilience and your capacity to trust the wisdom of your body and emotions. You will become more at home in your own skin and reclaim a fuller expression of your authentic self, finding access to untapped parts of yourself, such as healthy aggression and increased self-regulation.
In the process of healing, the new energy that is released in your mind, body, and spirit can become fertilizer to nourish your whole life. You may come to therapy to heal one symptom but, in the process, will very likely achieve a bigger, more satisfying life.
But You May Wonder Whether Trauma Therapy Is Right For You…
I don’t think a therapist can help me with my trauma and PTSD—I’m too broken.
Symptoms from earlier trauma often persist long after we’ve become disconnected from the original event. Without a fuller understanding of our physiology, we may feel shame and think of ourselves as flawed, either sinking into quiet despair or compensating by trying too hard. However, working with SE, we can help that stuck energy move on and reintegrate. Trauma counseling can help you remove emotional blocks you may have built up over time and rediscover connection with yourself, others, and life.
Will I have to relive my trauma in therapy?
Our bodies hold our histories—we have visceral memories stored in our nervous systems. The key to healing lies in addressing our physiology, whether or not we have narrative memories. In cases where we remember a specific event or have relational trauma, it’s helpful to acknowledge what happened. However, having the freedom to revisit what happened within the protection of a safe and supportive environment can be very therapeutic. Once you release the underlying emotions and physiological sticking points of trauma, it can give you the ability to renegotiate your feelings surrounding the event and the freedom to finally move forward.
I worry that treatment for my complex trauma will be time-consuming.
Trauma does not have to be a life sentence. There is truth that when trauma occurs early in our development, it may need to be released and reconfigured slowly over time. Deep healing generally happens with steady, incremental change. Although it's hard to predict a timeline for healing from trauma, we can create a plan for you that includes homework outside of therapy to accelerate your healing. This treatment plan may include reading and self-guided exercises in between sessions that will allow you to grow and heal at your own pace.
You Can Find The Peace Within That’s Been Missing
Seeking therapy for trauma can help you shed fear and embrace the joy in life., For more information or to schedule an appointment, please contact me.
Recent Posts
