Trauma can be a single life-threatening incident, physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or the insults and injuries that build up over a lifetime and affect our self-esteem, our beliefs about ourselves, and our relationships with ourselves and others. Developmental and attachment trauma in particular can shape how safe connection feels well into adulthood. Traumatic experiences can surface in dreams, intrusive images and thoughts, distorted perceptions of self and other, mood, and somatic symptoms. We develop habits to avoid and shut down that affect our day-to-day functioning, our sense of ourselves, and our internal and external relationships.
Trauma keeps us from being fully alive in the present.
Even while you are struggling to manage trauma, you are also trying to move toward wholeness, to trust, let go, and be open. What feels like too much when you are alone or cut off can be seen and moved through when you have an embodied awareness and connection to compassion and understanding, both within and beyond yourself. Working with Internal Family Systems (IFS) alongside EMDR, we get curious about the parts of you carrying that weight, rather than trying to push past them. Together we work to create a space where your innate healing intelligence can move you toward healing, without becoming flooded and having to shut down to manage uncomfortable feeling states inside your body, mind, and heart.
Much of this work is mindfulness in practice: learning to meet what's here, in the present moment, rather than the story about it. That means moving intentionally into the internal maze of the unconscious with curiosity, not force, and trusting that you can come out the other side with a deeper understanding, and maybe even acceptance, of what you find there.
When you have cleared trauma, you open up a space inside of you. Old habits and patterns can come back to fill that space. So, in addition to processing through trauma, we will work to help you consciously fill that space with new ways of being, perspectives, and beliefs that more accurately reflect what you now know, and look at ways to carry that insight and joy into every area of your life.