Trauma Therapy
Do you fear letting others see you in your messy, imperfect self? Does your need to appear strong - to have everything together - convince you it’s better not lean into the supports around you, for fear they might leave, or that you’ll become dependent, too much, or it’ll all come crashing down?
Do you long for a way out of isolation and into connection?
Whatever its source, be it unresolved trauma, societal oppression, insecurity in relationships and current stressors, walking around feeling like there’s nowhere safe to land can be an angering, stressful, overwhelming and exhausting experience.
I want to offer you a compassionate space where you can feel safe enough to let go of the pressure to be somebody, as you come into deeper understanding and acceptance of yourself, what’s gotten in the way, and how you can come to live inside your life and within the expression of who you truly are.
Relational & Intergenerational Trauma
There is a branch of our nervous system, called the social nervous system, directly responsible for navigating interpersonal relationships. This nervous system capacity starts growing in the womb and in early life, and moves and shifts throughout our life span - it’s flexible. In repeated moments when you felt vulnerable and weren’t responded to in ways that you needed, it can set up patterns of distress later in life.
A parent can’t give what they’ve never received. A culture can’t offer what it doesn’t give value to.
Luckily, because this process of hurt and wounding is flexible and moves throughout life, it means it also can be healed through responsive, safe relating! You can become sovereign, begin shift the cultures you are immersed in, and offer gifts of healing to generations before and beyond you. Simply by learning about who you truly are, and how to navigate your experience.
Trauma Therapy
First, we’ll delve into your history, as far as you’d like to go - to understand your unique hurts, your strengths, and the ways you’ve learned to cope. I’ll meet you where you are in providing education about big T and little t trauma symptoms, and start to explore together the resources you can access when trauma symptoms arise, allowing you to hold part of yourself in the present moment. We’ll also be developing safety in the therapeutic relationship, and move a pace you’re comfortable with.
In the next stage, you’ll begin to own and integrate past memories and events through cognitive, somatic, and emotional processing. I will guide you in learning to own and tolerate powerful emotional responses, such as fear and rage, overwhelm and numbing sensations. This integration process will allow you to place these memories and events in context, giving them a place to live in the past - allowing them to wisely inform you, rather than control your present. As this happens you’ll be able to start developing a more coherent narrative of your life, which will help to restore a sense of self. This process may involve grief and loss that arise as you start to sense an internal change. I will hold that with you. I draw from many techniques in this stage and find the best fits for you.
In the third stage, we check in with the gains you’ve made through therapy, I’ll offer reflections when I notice the areas in your life that are moving with greater ease, where you are clarifying your sense of meaning and purpose, and we’ll explore the areas where you’d like to deepen, widen, and become more empowered.
Healing is not linear. You may move in and between these stages throughout the therapy process, and the body has its own timeline. I track and collaborate with you on understanding where you are and what you need, and learn from and about you as a person, continuously. *
~ I will be certified in Somatic-Based EMDR in April 2024 ~
~ I have limited Medicaid spots available, virtually ~
“Eventually, you will go alone and unafraid, into your life - feeling into the dark and without doubt, that your heart is open,” Earthlyn Zenju Manuel