counseling for trauma & abuse
restoring safety, connection and empowerment over your trauma story
Common Experiences
- Post-traumatic stress disorder
- Complex trauma
- Childhood trauma and abuse
- Sexual trauma, including assault and abuse
- Intimate partner violence (often called domestic violence)
- Religious trauma and spiritual abuse
- Secondary trauma and related compassion fatigue or burnout
How I Help
Because trauma lives in the body, I take a holistic, embodied approach to healing trauma with each client. This means we will explore how what you are experiencing in your thoughts and emotions is also being held in your body. We’ll work towards deepening your connection to your body and making it a safe home for you again so that you can move confidentally and bravely through the world.
I believe in establishing a secure foundation of trust and safety between myself and my clients before beginning to truly process trauma. This often looks like practicing coping skills during and outside of session, exploring window of tolerance, learning to manage and regulate emotions and beginning to build an internal sense of safety within oneself.
When it feels appropriate to do so, I may introduce the idea of using therapuetic approaches specailized for processing trauma, like EMDR and Brainspotting.
I work from a trauma-focused lens, which compassionately shifts the guiding question of therapy from “what is wrong with you?” to
“what happened to you?”
Understanding Trauma
Trauma is the Greek word for “wound.” It is experienced on a spectrum, which means we may undermine ours because they don’t look “as bad” as the person sitting next to us.
There are many definitions for trauma. Here’s mine:
Trauma develops when something happens to you that should not have, or something that should have happened to you did not and the event or experience was beyond your body’s ability to process it.
If you’ve experienced trauma, you may feel disconnected or even disassociated from your body because your experience within it has felt threatening, unsafe or beyond your control. These words by therapist and researcher Dr. Hillary McBride describe trauma’s relationship to the body well:
“There is one thing we can know for sure about trauma: bodies always tell the truth. Even if we find a way to cover it up first. The story always comes out, and if not in our thoughts, or in our relationships, then always in our bodies.”
Dr. Hillary McBride
The aftermath of trauma can be isolating and disorienting. You don’t have to go through it alone.
Don’t go through it alone.
Trauma-focused mental health therapy, rooted in self-compassion.