Trauma Therapy

Support for relational and interpersonal trauma

Do you desire deeper and closer relationships, but also struggle to feel close with others because of how someone(s) has hurt you in the past?

It’s challenging for you to trust people or even know who you can trust because so many people have hurt or let you down in the past. Even though you logically know this event(s) was in the past, it can feel like you’re reliving it. You might be struggling to make sense of the event and struggling to believe that it wasn’t your fault.

Those painful memories can pop up at a moment's notice and you might not even understand why those memories or feelings pop up when they do. You struggle with staying present, feeling like you either zone out or get consumed with panic at what seem like relatively small things. Your body responds to things in a way that doesn’t make a lot sense to you because all of the sudden your heart will start racing or you’ll feel numb without any obvious cause.

I can help you put the hurtful experience in the past and be able to really start living and enjoying life again. 

Starting off, we’ll focus on getting to know each other. It’s important for us to take it slow because if we dive into hurtful experiences without establishing trust and safety first, therapy can do more harm than good.

We’ll explore your past experiences bit by bit, at a pace that feels okay enough for you. I say okay enough, because I know this is difficult work and any pace can feel daunting at times. We’ll start by ensuring you have ways to cope both inside and outside of session. The goal is that even when sessions cover difficult topics, you can take care of yourself outside of session so that it doesn’t wreck your entire week.

We’ll work through the difficult experience slowly and gently, so that you’re able to stay present with your current moment experience rather than getting completely overwhelmed or flooded by the thoughts, feelings, or memories. I will support you in learning to understand why your body is responding the way it is, being able to stay more in the present moment even when those painful memories are triggered, and finding ways to release or resolve the thoughts and feelings associated with those experiences.

Trauma therapy can help you:

  • Reduce the impact of the hurtful experience(s) so it no longer feels like you are reliving those experiences or they are consuming you

  • Grow your understanding about why your body reacts to things in a certain way (like why you’re zoning out or panicking in certain situations) 

  • Be able to trust other people and feel more connected in your relationships 

  • Feel more connected to yourself so you can feel more present and centered, even when overwhelming or negative emotions/sensations come up 

  • Release difficult emotions and resolve habitual patterns of fight, flight, freeze

Let’s put the past in the past and help you find more peace and connection in the present.

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FAQs

  • Trauma is a threatening or distressing experience that overwhelms a person’s ability to cope with it. With trauma, a person can get stuck in one of the survival responses (fight, flight, freeze, appease), be unable to shake off the experience, and return to a state of feeling relatively ok, safe, and able to cope with the demands of daily life. 

  • These are types of traumatic experiences that happen within relationships and experiencing hurt because of another person’s actions or inactions. This might be experiences from childhood that you experienced with a parent or caregiver or could be experiences from an intimate relationship with a partner or friend. 

  • SE is considered a bottom up approach for trauma therapy, meaning that instead of primarily focusing on helping you think differently about an experience (top down approach), we are going to start with helping you cope with the emotions and complete the survival responses (fight, flight, freeze, appease) that you are experiencing. SE helps you learn more about your autonomic nervous system, build your capacity to cope with distressing situations so you don’t keep falling into habitual patterns, and have more choices in how you move through your day to day life. You can learn more about somatic experiencing here.