Therapeutic Specialties
Trauma & Complex PTSD
Sometimes what looks like anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or relationship difficulty has deeper roots.
Trauma does not always come from one catastrophic event.
Sometimes it develops through experiences that were chronic, relational, or difficult to escape—growing up around unpredictability, emotional neglect, criticism, abandonment, family conflict, abuse, or repeatedly having to adapt yourself in order to stay connected or safe.
Over time, the ways you learned to survive can become the very patterns that make adult life difficult.
You may understand intellectually that you are safe now, yet your body reacts as though something dangerous is happening. You may become highly attuned to other people's moods, struggle to trust, shut down during conflict, fear abandonment, over-function for others, or feel shame that seems much larger than the situation in front of you.
Trauma-informed therapy can help us understand not only what happened to you, but also what your mind, body, psyche - and relationships learned to do because of it.
Areas I work withIs this you?
I have extensive training in various therapy modalities that address trauma across the mind, body, and psyche. Together, we can work with the symptoms and patterns that may be affecting your life today.
The
Wounds
Your story might have included:
Emotional neglect or chronic emotional disconnection
Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse
An unpredictable or chaotic home environment
A highly critical, controlling, or demanding caregiver
Abandonment, betrayal, or repeated disruptions in attachment
Growing up around addiction, mental illness, violence, or chronic conflict
Parentification or having to take on adult responsibilities too early
Having to suppress parts of yourself in order to maintain connection
Repeated bullying, humiliation, discrimination, or social exclusion
Chronic relational experiences in which safety, autonomy, or trust were compromised
The
Patterns
How you learned to adapt:
People-pleasing
Perfectionism
Hyper-independence
Difficulty asking for help
Constantly anticipating what might go wrong
Overthinking and anxiety
Emotional shutdown or dissociation
Avoiding conflict
Becoming highly reactive during conflict
Harsh self-criticism
Difficulty setting or maintaining boundaries
Feeling responsible for other people's emotions
Staying busy or productive to avoid uncomfortable internal states
Struggling to identify what you feel or need
The
Echoes
How those adaptations show up in your life now:
Feeling stuck
Difficulty trusting others
Repeating painful relationship dynamics
Chronic shame or self-criticism
Struggling to know what you want
Difficulty making or sustaining major life changes
Feeling disconnected from joy, creativity, or pleasure
Trouble resting or feeling safe
Career or relationship choices shaped by fear rather than desire
Feeling like you intellectually understand your patterns but still cannot change them
Trauma Lives in the Nervous System
Traumatic experiences can affect the body's expectations of safety and danger.
Your nervous system may respond to an argument, facial expression, silence, mistake, or change in someone's tone as though something much larger is at stake.
You may move quickly into fight, flight, freeze, or appeasing responses (fawn) before your conscious mind has had time to evaluate what is actually happening.
For this reason, trauma therapy often involves more than telling the story of what happened. Developing awareness of bodily sensations, emotional states, triggers, and nervous-system responses can help create greater choice between what you feel and how you respond.
Understanding the Parts of You That Learned to Survive
I often incorporate parts work and inner child work, including ideas informed by Internal Family Systems (IFS), into trauma therapy.
Parts work recognizes that different aspects of us may carry different emotions, beliefs, memories, and protective roles.
One part may desperately want closeness while another becomes uncomfortable as soon as someone gets too close. One part may know that making a mistake is normal while a younger part experiences that mistake as evidence of failure or rejection. Rather than trying to eliminate these reactions, we become curious about them. What is this part afraid would happen if it stopped protecting you? How old does this part of you feel? What did it learn about relationships, safety, achievement, anger, or love?
You can read more about Healing Trauma Through Parts Work: How IFS Can Help.
My approach to trauma is psychodynamic, relational, trauma-informed, somatically aware, and depth-oriented.
Depending on the person, our work may draw from attachment theory, parts work and IFS-informed approaches, nervous-system awareness, family-of-origin exploration, psychodynamic therapy, and depth psychology.
I am interested not simply in reducing a symptom, but in understanding what function that symptom has served, where the pattern may have originated, and what becomes possible when it is no longer required in the same way.
Trauma work can involve the mind, the body, relationships, and the parts of the psyche that developed in response to experiences that once felt overwhelming.
The intention is not to become someone untouched by your history.
It is to develop enough awareness, safety, and freedom that your history no longer has to determine how you relate to yourself, other people, and the life you are building.
My Approach to Trauma Therapy
Growth May Look Like:
Recognizing a trigger before automatically acting on it
Feeling emotions without becoming completely overwhelmed by them
Developing a more compassionate relationship with yourself
Experiencing greater safety in your body
Asking for what you need more directly
Setting boundaries without overwhelming guilt
Becoming less governed by shame or self-criticism
Choosing relationships rather than repeating familiar relational patterns
Remaining connected to yourself while also being close to another person
Recovering parts of your identity, creativity, desire, or spontaneity that once had to be suppressed
Developing a stronger sense that your present life does not have to be organized around your past