Trauma Therapy:
Healing What Lives Beneath the Surface
When the Past Inhabits the Present
You're safe now. Logically, you know this. The relationship has ended. The situation has passed. You've moved on.
But your body hasn't gotten the message.
Your heart still races when you hear a certain tone of voice. Your chest tightens when someone gets too close. You freeze when faced with conflict. You fawn when you should speak up. You scan every room for exits, every face for danger, every silence for what's about to go wrong.
This isn't overthinking. This isn't weakness. This isn't something you can simply "get over."
This is trauma—stored in your nervous system, living in your body, shaping your responses beneath conscious awareness. And it requires healing that goes deeper than understanding, deeper than insight, deeper than willpower.
Trauma therapy offers this depth. It works with the roots, not just the symptoms. It speaks the language your nervous system understands—the language of safety, regulation, and integration.
What Is Trauma?
Trauma isn't defined by the event itself, but by its impact on your nervous system and sense of self. It's what happens inside you when your capacity to cope is overwhelmed—when something is too much, too fast, too soon, or goes on too long without relief or support.
Trauma can be:
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Single-Incident Trauma
A car accident, assault, natural disaster, or other discrete event that creates lasting impact.
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Complex Trauma (CPTSD)
Repeated, prolonged exposure to traumatic situations—especially in childhood or in intimate relationships where escape isn't possible. This includes emotional neglect, ongoing abuse, unstable caregiving, or growing up in an environment where your needs consistently went unmet.
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Relational Trauma
Wounds created through relationships—betrayal, abandonment, narcissistic abuse, enmeshment, or attachment disruptions. These injuries impact not just your sense of safety, but your ability to trust, connect, and experience intimacy.
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Developmental Trauma
Experiences during critical developmental periods that shape how your nervous system learns to regulate, how you form attachments, and how you come to understand yourself and others.
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Intergenerational Trauma
Patterns passed down through families—unprocessed pain, survival strategies, nervous system dysregulation, and beliefs inherited from those who came before you.
Trauma doesn't ask permission to linger.
It embeds itself in your biology, your beliefs, your behaviors, your relationships.
It becomes the lens through which you interpret new experiences, often without you realizing it.
Understanding the Traumatized Nervous System
When something overwhelming happens, your nervous system activates survival responses—fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. These responses are automatic, primal, designed to keep you alive.
In a healthy system, once the threat passes, your nervous system returns to a regulated state. You process the experience, integrate it, and move forward.
But trauma disrupts this natural cycle. The threat may end, but your nervous system doesn't register completion. You remain stuck in a state of activation—hypervigilant (always scanning for danger), hypoaroused (numb, shut down, disconnected), or oscillating between both.
This isn't a conscious choice. It's not something you can think your way out of. Your nervous system is operating from a survival template created in the past—a template that no longer serves you but doesn't know how to update itself.
Trauma therapy works directly with this stuck activation. It helps your nervous system complete what it couldn't finish then, so you can finally rest now.
How Trauma Shows Up
Trauma rarely announces itself clearly. It often disguises itself as:
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Anxiety and Hypervigilance
Constant scanning for threats, inability to relax, feeling "on edge" even in safe situations, difficulty sleeping, startling easily
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Depression and Shutdown
Emotional numbness, disconnection from your body, difficulty feeling pleasure or motivation, sense of being trapped or hopeless.
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Relationship Difficulties
Patterns of push-pull, difficulty with intimacy, choosing partners who recreate familiar wounds, inability to trust, fear of abandonment or engulfment.
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Somatic Symptoms
Chronic pain, digestive issues, tension, fatigue, illness—your body holding what your mind tries to forget.
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Dissociation
Feeling unreal, disconnected from yourself or your surroundings, gaps in memory, sense of watching yourself from outside, losing time.
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Intrusive Memories
Flashbacks, nightmares, unwanted images or sensations that feel like the trauma is happening again.
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Negative Self-Beliefs
Deep convictions formed in trauma—"I'm not safe," "I'm broken," "I can't trust anyone," "It's my fault," "I don't matter."
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Dysregulation
Difficulty managing emotions, rapid mood shifts, overwhelming feelings that seem disproportionate, or inability to access feelings at all.
These aren't defects in you. They're evidence that your system is still trying to protect you from something that already happened.
Your nervous system is loyal—it just needs help understanding that the past has ended.
Our Trauma-Informed Approach
Trauma therapy in our practice is grounded in several core principles:
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Safety First
Before processing trauma, we establish internal and external safety. We strengthen your capacity for regulation, develop resources for managing activation, and ensure you have tools for grounding when memories surface. Safety is the soil of transformation.
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Nervous System Focus
We work with your body's wisdom, not just your mind's understanding. This includes somatic techniques, breathwork, bilateral stimulation (EMDR), and practices that help your nervous system recognize it's safe to release survival patterns.
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Titration
We work with trauma at a manageable pace—small doses, sufficient integration between sessions. This isn't about flooding you with pain; it's about helping you build capacity to feel without fragmenting.
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Pendulation
We move between activation and regulation, between discomfort and resource, between past and present. This teaches your nervous system flexibility—that it can touch pain and return to safety, over and over, until the pain loses its charge.
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Integration
Healing trauma isn't about forgetting or erasing what happened. It's about integrating the experience—metabolizing it, placing it in your past where it belongs, and reclaiming the energy that's been bound in survival responses.
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Empowerment
Trauma often involves powerlessness. Healing involves reclaiming agency—choice in how fast we go, what we work with, when we need to pause. You're not a passive recipient of treatment; you're an active participant in your own healing.
Modalities We Use for Trauma Healing
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EMDR
(Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
Helps your brain reprocess traumatic memories so they no longer trigger survival responses. Particularly powerful for relational and attachment trauma.
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Internal Family Systems
(IFS)
Works with the parts of you that developed to cope with trauma—helping them release extreme roles and protective strategies so your Self can lead.
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Somatic Experiencing
Helps complete the body's trauma responses that were interrupted or frozen during the traumatic event. Focuses on sensation, allowing stuck survival energy to discharge.
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Cognitive Processing
Once the nervous system has settled, we work with the meaning you made of the trauma—the beliefs that formed, the narratives that took hold—and update them with truth and compassion.
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Mindfulness and Grounding
Practices that anchor you in the present moment, helping your nervous system distinguish between then and now, memory and current reality.
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Attachment Repair
For relational and developmental trauma, we work with attachment patterns, rebuilding your capacity for secure connection—first with yourself, then with others.
Complex PTSD and Relational Trauma
If your trauma was chronic, repeated, and relational—occurring in the context of relationships where you were dependent or couldn't escape—you may be dealing with Complex PTSD (CPTSD).
CPTSD goes beyond the symptoms of PTSD. It includes:
Persistent difficulties with emotional regulation
Negative self-concept and pervasive shame
Difficulties maintaining relationships
Dissociation and disconnection from self
Loss of sense of meaning or purpose
Somatic symptoms and chronic dysregulation
This kind of trauma doesn't resolve through processing single memories. It requires addressing the entire system—how trauma shaped your attachment style, your sense of self, your beliefs about relationships, your body's baseline activation level.
We take an integrative approach that honors the complexity of your experience. We work with parts (IFS), process specific memories (EMDR), regulate your nervous system (somatic work), examine beliefs (CBT), and integrate spiritual dimensions (transpersonal work). Because complex trauma requires comprehensive healing.
Narcissistic Abuse and Trauma Bonds
Narcissistic abuse creates a particular kind of trauma—one that targets your sense of reality, your self-worth, and your ability to trust your own perception. Through gaslighting, intermittent reinforcement, devaluation, and manipulation, narcissistic abuse doesn't just hurt—it confuses.
Trauma bonds form when periods of abuse alternate with moments of affection, creating biochemical addiction to the relationship. Your nervous system gets caught in a loop—craving the relief that only the abuser can provide, even as they're the source of your pain.
Healing from narcissistic abuse involves:
Validating that what you experienced was real, regardless of how others perceive it
Understanding trauma bonding without shame—recognizing it as a nervous system response, not a character flaw
Separating the abuser's voice from your own—identifying which beliefs are yours and which were installed
Rebuilding your capacity to trust your own perceptions and feelings
Processing the grief of what you thought the relationship was versus what it actually was
Learning to recognize red flags and green flags in future connections
Reclaiming your sovereignty—your right to your own reality, your own needs, your own boundaries
Who Benefits From Trauma Therapy
This approach is essential for those who:
Have experienced abuse, neglect, or abandonment (especially in childhood)
Are recovering from narcissistic abuse or trauma bonding
Struggle with emotional dysregulation or feel "broken"
Experience dissociation, numbness, or disconnection from body
Have tried talk therapy without resolution of symptoms
Recognize patterns repeating in relationships despite wanting change
Feel triggered by situations that remind them of past experiences
Want to heal at the root level, not just manage symptoms
The Arc of Trauma Healing
Healing isn't linear. There will be days when you feel whole and days when you feel fragmented. Days when you trust yourself and days when doubt returns. This is normal. This is the process.
But over time, you'll notice shifts:
The triggers that once consumed you will become less intense, less frequent. You'll catch yourself feeling calm and realize you're not waiting for something bad to happen. You'll set a boundary without collapsing into guilt. You'll feel anger without shame. You'll trust your instincts when they whisper warnings. You'll let someone in without losing yourself.
The nervous system will remember it has options beyond survival. The body will remember it can rest. The heart will remember it's allowed to trust—carefully, wisely, but truly.
Healing isn't becoming new. It's remembering who you were before trauma convinced you that you were broken, that connection was dangerous, that you couldn't trust yourself.
You weren't broken then. You're not broken now.
You're a nervous system that learned to survive. And now you're learning to thrive.
Beginning Your Trauma Healing Journey
This is the nervous system remembering safety. Pause. Feel the weight of your breath.
Trauma healing is sacred work—not because it's always comfortable, but because it returns you to yourself. To the parts you had to hide. To the feelings you had to freeze. To the truth you had to deny.
We don't heal trauma by avoiding it. But we don't heal by overwhelming ourselves either. We heal by creating the conditions—safety, support, regulation, presence—where your nervous system can finally complete what it couldn't finish then.
Your body has been holding this for you, waiting for the moment when it's safe enough to let go. That moment is now. That moment is here.
You don't have to carry this alone anymore.
Boundaries are love in form. And the first boundary we'll establish together is this: You will never be pushed beyond your capacity. You will never be asked to feel more than you can hold. You will always have choice in your own healing.
Safety is the soil of transformation.
And you are safe here.