Trauma is what stays with you after something overwhelmed your capacity to cope with it at the time. That might have been a single event. It might have been a pattern that ran for years — childhood neglect, relational harm, chronic instability, identity-based harm. Either way it lives in the body and in patterns of relating, long after the circumstances have changed, and either way it responds to the same work.
You do not need a diagnosis, a category, or a certain amount of it to belong here.
The approaches below are the ones used in this practice. They are listed in roughly the order the work tends to move through, though not rigidly — you set the pace.
- Nervous system regulation — Trauma lives in the body as much as the mind. Before any story can be processed we work within your window of tolerance — the zone where you can stay present with difficult material without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down — so your nervous system learns safety and ways to regulate through activation and shutdown, so healing can take place.
- Somatic therapy — Healing the relationship between body and mind means learning to recognize what your body is telling you. How we do this is learning the language of physiological reactions. You learn to read those signals, build healthy boundaries, understand your limits, and create a life that’s in alignment with your authentic self.
- Internal Family Systems (IFS) — This work helps you understand the different parts of yourself. As you familiarize yourself with those parts you gain control of the whole.
- EMDR — For memories that feel stuck — where the emotional and physical distress hasn’t faded even though the event is long over — EMDR uses bilateral stimulation to help your brain finally reprocess what got frozen in place. This comes later in the work, once you’ve built the coping skills and regulation to stay within your window of tolerance while revisiting difficult material.
Trauma work that is rushed is trauma work that re-traumatizes. Part of what trauma does is ask you to move faster than was safe; therapy does not repeat that pattern.