Trauma

You know there were some things in your childhood that weren’t great, but surely other people had it worse, right?

Maybe the constant anxiety, the recurring dreams and nightmares have you at your wits end and you're ready for a change. You’re tired of having to make compromises like staying home or avoiding the people/places/things that send you into a blind panic – you don’t want your world to keep getting smaller. You would like to feel more in control of your reactions, and you’re determined to grow and heal.

It’s easy to feel like the problem is you, to think maybe it wasn’t that bad. But trauma doesn’t have to mean surviving war and torture. It can show up in smaller ways, like parents who were too busy dealing with their own problems to show up for you in the way you needed. It could be blank spaces in your memories from your childhood, or an insidious feeling that you just don’t fit. Trauma at its core, is any situation that overwhelms your ability to cope.

Healing from trauma is a process, but it can be done. We start by focusing on building a sense of safety and developing the skills to deal with difficult emotions so that you don’t get overwhelmed by them. Then, only when you’re ready, we look at the trauma more directly using approaches such as EMDR or Written Exposure therapy. Throughout, we are paying careful attention to both mind and body, because trauma lives in both and healing has to work on both levels.

Trauma work is challenging, to be sure, but it also offers a rare opportunity for growth that goes beyond symptom management or even just “moving on.” One client described watching her PTSD go into remission and realizing that all the skills she'd developed just to cope provided her with a springboard into a full, meaningful and connected life she had previously thought impossible. Others have built the kind of solid, supportive friendships they'd always wanted but kept running away from. Some have broken patterns that go back generations by finally resisting the pull of old family dynamics and giving their children the stable, loving home they themselves never had.

If you’re determined to grow and heal, let’s talk.