What is Trauma?

Trauma is a lasting emotional response that often results from living through one or repeated distressing events. Trauma isn’t just a bad memory. It’s a full-body experience that can leave you feeling perpetually unsafe, perpetually on guard, and perpetually behind- even when your external life looks completely fine. If you’re a driven person who can’t understand why success hasn’t made you feel better, this is often part of why. Trauma doesn’t reside only in your thoughts about what happened. It reorganizes how your nervous system perceives safety- what your body braces for before your mind has a chance to weigh in.

Examples of trauma include:

• A single, traumatic event (e.g., car crash or natural disaster)

• A single, traumatic event that occurred in the past (e.g., a sexual assault or death of a spouse or child)

• Long-term patterns of traumatic events (e.g., ongoing childhood physical or sexual abuse or neglect)

A person who has experienced a traumatic event might develop:

• PTSD- most often the result of a single traumatic event and interferes with your ability to function in your daily life for a minimum of one month

  Or

• Complex PTSD- most often the result of prolonged or repeated exposure to traumatic events, such as abuse or neglect

How can trauma therapy help?

In therapy, I take a trauma-informed approach by assisting you with processing your trauma history and how this impacts your daily life, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. I will work with you to help you reestablish your sense of self and safety through focusing on:

• Identifying triggers that elicit trauma responses (e.g., people, places, situations that are reminders of the traumatic event/events)

• Increasing self-awareness through learning to recognize your trauma responses and how this impacts your daily life and relationships

• Developing strategies that help you understand your reactions and emotions on a deeper, more compassionate level.

• Coping with intense feelings about the traumatic event/events by improving emotion regulation and ability to tolerate distress

• Reconnecting with parts of yourself that have felt lost and disconnected

Types of trauma-informed modalities I utilize:

• Internal Family Systems is a non-pathologizing, evidence-based approach to psychotherapy that views every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts guided by a core Self. It teaches that the mind is naturally multiple—In the past, you may have heard yourself or someone else say something like, “A part of me feels joy, but another part of me feels sad.” Like members of a family, our inner parts can be pushed into extreme roles but also have valuable inherent qualities. IFS helps people access their undamaged, compassionate Self, which knows how to heal, and from that inner leadership, understand and transform their parts, fostering both inner and outer connectedness.

• Somatic Psychotherapy is highly effective with trauma-associated symptoms because these are often experienced very physically in the body. Somatic psychotherapy uses mindfulness, body awareness, breath awareness, and body-oriented tools to guide you toward your inner and outer resources in promoting regulation and resolving emotional and physiological patterns.

• Polyvagal Theory reveals how our nervous system and vagus nerve within the nervous system regulates our responses to the world around us, influencing both our stress levels and sense of safety. By understanding how our nervous system works and how it reads social cues in our environment, we can harness practices to help manage our stress responses more effectively.

• Dialectical Behavior Therapy is a skills based form of therapy designed to help people who experience strong, intense emotions. It focuses on four main skills: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness.