Due to its unspeakable nature, trauma often ducks and dives into the layers of your body and psyche without you even realizing it. It can become the invisible, omnipotent force driving your beliefs, reactions, emotions, physical symptoms, and even your sense of self. It's an interruption, a hijacking, of every level of your being.

How then, could your body not be involved?

Your body is extremely intelligent, including having the innate ability to respond to distress and traumatic events. Like a symphony orchestra, all systems of your mind-body are designed to activate in order to adapt to a dangerous or scary event, just as well it can restore and recuperate when safety returns. Trauma overtakes this natural flexibility and propels you into a vortex of fear, terror, and powerlessness. If traumatic events are chronic, especially if you experienced them in infancy or childhood, this creates a false you. A you that is plagued by nightmares, panic, outbursts, resentment, paranoia, and emotional collapse. But something deep inside is saying, this isn't me.

Having the sense that danger is always lurking could be part of your trauma story. Utilizing your body's impulses and intuition can help overcome what isn't working.

Getting startled easily, becoming red with rage, or itching to get out of your skin are defensive responses in your body. Knowing this will help us make sense of how teach your body about resiliency and flexibility. 

The way you go numb, have difficulty with memory, or feel blank or empty tells us that your mind-body is stuck and overwhelmed. Again, this information tells me something about how to help you move forward.

Your body and psyche are one and the same, they just speak different languages. And trauma is a bad interpreter. I'm ready and able to look inside-out and outside-in to help move you toward integration, wholeness and a steady sense of connection to those around you.

transcend the addiction of trauma

Trauma is a great seductress. We become habituated, perhaps even addicted, to the version of ourselves that trauma tells us we are. This perpetuates our suffering, even a tolerable form of it. This suffering is a chronic repetition of thoughts, feelings, actions and beliefs that continue to 'prove the truth' of itself, all the while distorting reality and keeping us in a swirling current of deficiency. 

It takes another person to hold up an accurate mirror to challenge this supposed reality. Trauma therapy can offer this solution. 

Working with stories that the traumatic event inscribed on you, you begin to speak the unspeakable.

Addressing how the body absorbed disturbing messages, we begin to reorganize your very cells.

Relating to each other in the here-and-now, you begin to understand the dynamics you create and influence in those around you.

Growing larger than your trauma is a bottom-up, inside-out, top-down, outside-in and upside down journey. It is the work of knowing yourself, and of becoming. You are possible of you more than you know. 

If you are ready to see what else life has in store, fill out the form below to contact me. I'm ready to help.

is your body keeping score?

What I do know is that trauma happens in relationships. And that can mean a thousand different things, depending on the matrix of your community, family, and life circumstances. Trauma cannot happen in isolation. It is always between you and another person/persons/event.

Your trauma- and your life- need to be understood within this complex web. The overwhelm, helplessness, numbing (and all the other pain) that arises in you can originate from a range of traumatic events, from shock trauma, emotional trauma, natural disasters, violence, exposure to war or forced emigration, or early attachment wounds. What do these have in common? They all involve you and at least one other person. So yes, trauma is a relational event. The specifics of those events are important to understand, but also how you understand what happened, how you experienced those events, and how you cope now are equally significant. 

This is what relational trauma therapy is all about. This is why I love the S. Kelley Harrell quote: 

"We don't heal in isolation, but in community. Often it isn't the initiating trauma that creates seemingly insurmountable pain, but the lack of support after."

it's all about relationships

Unlike grief, anxiety, and other mental health conditions, trauma seems to elude our very language. Google search 'trauma therapy' or 'trauma healing' and you'll come across hundreds of pages that each describe trauma from one specific perspective, unable to capture the depth of something so expansive and volatile. Descriptions can begin to feel scattered, dry or even un-human like. There are scientific-style approaches that discuss trauma therapy like a medical procedure. There are self-help approaches that seem to romanticize horrific traumatic experiences or are just plain superficial. All of this can leave your head spinning- and you give up on your search and you go back to managing the way you always have.

It's because trauma is hard to talk about. And words will often fall short (but yes, let's try anyway).

it's hard to talk about trauma

(let's try anyway)