Trauma Healing

Do you ever feel stuck in a feeling? Do your moods or your reactions sometimes not sync up with the situation at hand?

If yes, this may be your natural response to trauma.

Do you ever:

  • Find yourself feeling disconnected and detached from your body?

  • Snap and react with more agitation and anger than you used to?

  • Struggle to focus?

  • Feel uncomfortable or even scared in quieter and more still moments?

  • Act more dramatically or recklessly to feel in control again?

Whatever you may be experiencing, you are here because you notice the impact of this shift in your day to day life, and you want to gain some sense of control again.

You don’t have to keep surviving this on your own. Together, we can heal.

Skills we will utilize together:

EMDR

  • An evidence based therapy model used to treat PTSD and trauma, depression and anxiety.

  • Our goal is to help you feel safe enough to explore what has felt too distressing to process, and help you heal from within.

  • Utilizing bilateral stimulation (scanning eyes back and forth or tapping the body) we keep the body safely grounded in the present, while allowing the mind to float back to the past or forward to the future to move you through distressing memories/images for a deeper processing.

  • We will go through this process collaboratively, always checking in with how distressing it feels and strengthening your grounding skills to help keep you safe and in control enough.

  • This practice will allow you to feel more empathy for yourself and others, as you move towards neutrality and away from judgement and criticism. It can allow you to shift the way you see yourself and the world around you.

  • PICTURE THIS: a splint is stuck in your finger. Your body’s natural response is to heal around the splinter, grow over it, but the splinter itself prevents healing. The longer this goes on, the more likely there is irritation and infection. We need to remove the splinter to fully help the mind/body regulate once more. EMDR replicates this process, and helps you remove the “splinter” and begin to heal.

Somatic Psychotherapy

  • “Somatic” relates to your body and how you feel, or do not feel, the sensations within it. We will focus on reconnecting the mind and the body and strengthening their ability to talk to one another.

  • Becoming more attuned to your somatic cues allows you to become more diverse in how you describe your experiences. It allows you to strengthen language about how you feel and where you feel it in your body. An example of this can be a knot in the stomach signals anxiety, whereas a lump in the throat may signal guilt.

  • Somatic awareness gives another set of language to help explain what you feel, especially when cognitive language may be more difficult. It can help us go from “I don’t know what I’m feeling” towards “I notice that my mouth goes dry and my hands shake when I think about this”. This builds clearer insight, which we use to deepen understanding to the why you feel it.

  • Somatic language helps us connect the dots between trauma and how it can be trapped in the body. Using these tools we can restore a sense of safety in your body as we re-wire the misaligned nervous system responses.

  • We live in a world that does not prioritize this attunement. We are taught to move fast, act decisively, and push past pain. Blending somatic language and tools in our work helps us to understand your automatic responses and helps us restore agency to how you respond to what you feel.

FAQS

  • There is no one type of trauma. It is simply defined as “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience”. I work from the belief that if the experience is distressing to you, throwing off the balance of how you feel and move through your days, then we will honor and validate this experience as trauma. We will work towards helping you heal.

  • EMDR has proven to be effective in reducing anxiety and depression as well as other trauma symptoms, but this is not the only way to heal. This is your space and your therapeutic journey. You and I will collaborate to decide what is the best fit for you and make our time what you need it to be.

  • It is ok to feel disconnected from your body or your emotions. We will take time growing this connection at the pace you need it to be. We will work through an open and curious lens, noticing cues without judgement.

  • The short answer is, kind of but not really. Both of these practices have regular talk therapy sessions woven throughout them. There is flexibility we have in incorporating talk therapy sessions in between processing sessions for EMDR, making sure you are getting the support you need when and how you need it.