Trauma and Complex Trauma

Trauma can shape the way we experience ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us. The responses that emerge (such as anxiety, hypervigilance, emotional numbness, or people-pleasing) often reflect the nervous system's remarkable capacity to adapt for the sake of survival--psychological, emotional, spiritual, and/or physical.

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Although frustrating, our trauma symptoms are not signs of weakness or personal failure. They represent a body that got stuck in a survival state and that is still trying to protect us and show us where we've been injured.

Complex trauma often develops through ongoing experiences such as childhood neglect, emotional abuse, chronic criticism, relational betrayal, or environments where we did not feel consistently safe or seen.

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Trauma can come in big T's, which are the big traumatic events that we can often point to. Or, trauma can come in small t's, which are the events that may not have been harmful in isolation but that compounded slowly and consistently across time. Small t trauma's can be hard to recognize because they don't fit our culture's popular ideas of what trauma is or looks like.

​I approach trauma with warmth, curiosity, and respect for the wisdom of your nervous system. Drawing from contemporary trauma research, Polyvagal Theory, somatic (body-based) approaches, and parts-oriented therapy, we work gently with the protective strategies that once helped you survive.

 

Rather than trying to eliminate symptoms, our goal is to understand them, support nervous system regulation, and create the conditions for lasting healing to emerge through the therapeutic process. Healing is a process of re-integrating body, mind, and spirit back to whole.

I've been there--in such deep trauma that I truly feared I might never heal. I understand how defeating that experience is. How much sorrow there is in feeling broken.

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Healing isn't an end point or a matter of never experiencing the trauma symptoms again. Healing is in the daily choices we make as we re-build relationship across our parts and develop our agency to find safety and resilience even in uncomfortable experiences. It is our capacity to confront the dark and transmute it into wisdom, growth, and light. As humans, we retain the ability to re-wire ourselves across the lifespan.