Trauma and Overwhelming Stress
I work with people who have experienced:
Growing up too fast because the adults around us couldn’t be safe and available resources for us
Abuse and Assault - Verbal, emotional, physical, sexual (including incest)
Traumatic loss of crucial relationships and identities
Our dreams of our life before disability, caretaking stress, and chronic illness
Lack of choice and control over our own safety and well-being
Waiting for the next shoe to drop or the next relationship to hurt us
Trauma takes a lot of different forms - feeling “crazy,” knowing we need to change and not knowing how, perfectionism, self-criticism, imposter syndrome, weird relationships with food and sleep, difficulty with safety and trust in relationships and/or dating, difficulty with sex, low self-esteem, obsessive thoughts, need for reassurance and control, feeling stuck, and feeling ambivalent about the things that help us feel control because they are frustrating the people whom we care about most.
My job with trauma is to find out with you what choices are available to you, and support you in taking one step after another toward a new way of approaching our same life and body with much more wisdom and strength and kindness.
Here are some of the tools I use to do that:
Being nonjudgmental and frank about naming your patterns in therapy, such as apologizing repetitively or seeking reassurance. Usually these are ways you learned to survive real and scary and hurtful things; and, they’re usually what’s now keeping you anxious, distressed, obsessive, or traumatized
Gestalt Therapy: Doing parts work with the traumatized parts of us that rise up to defend us by making us angry or terrified when things remind us of past overwhelm or are actively and currently traumatizing us
Being interested in the emotions, physical sensations, and memories that come up for you when you share with me
Radical acceptance of where and who we are, together
Providing psychoeducation to help you feel educated about trauma and the body, to help you negotiate your legitimate needs for control and safety, your emotional patterns and what I observe with you in session, and recovery
Helping you find coping tools from Somatic Experiencing Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy that work for you when you’re dysregulated emotionally
Coaching you on interpersonal communication using tools from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
Highlighting times that I see you grow in case you miss them
Encouraging the lifestyle pieces that are crucial to recovery - sleep, food, laughter, emotional connection, nature, and exercise
Note: I refer out for moderate-to-severe substance use disorders and disordered eating, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, in order to help clients move toward care from clinicians who have years of training and experience in these presentations.