What Does It Mean to Have Trauma?
Trauma is your normal nervous system response to stressful events—the way you adjusted and adapted to stressors. While these adaptations are designed to keep you safe, they can sometimes leave you feeling hijacked by your experiences or numb and disconnected from them. This can result in a loss of trust in the world, but mostly in yourself, creating a fundamental problem: you stop trusting yourself to reliably handle or experience life.
When you’re recovering from trauma, there are two key components we’re working with:
- Learning how to BE safe – regulating your nervous system
- Learning how to FEEL safe – creating internal safety through self-compassion and understanding.
The Foundation: Self-Compassion and Your Inner Expert
When you understand trauma this way, something powerful happens. Instead of feeling broken, you start to understand yourself. You start to really see and potentially even value yourself. Instead of shame, you gain agency. Instead of being at the mercy of your reactions, you begin to work with them.
“This understanding creates the foundation for self-compassion, which is essential for healing.” When you can look at your responses and say “of course my brain did that—it was trying to protect me,” you create the internal safety needed for real foundational change. Self-criticism and judgment keep your nervous system activated, but creating an internal culture of compassion and understanding allows you to begin to settle and to heal.
“YOU are uniquely qualified to understand what your nervous system needs and what works for your healing. You are the expert on your own experience.” No one else lived in your body, felt what you felt, or adapted the way you did.
Reclaiming Your Expertise
One of the most devastating aspects of complex trauma is how it disconnects you from your own lived experiences and needs. You learn to dismiss your own feelings, doubt your perceptions, and ignore what your body is telling you. When you start trusting your own experience again, you’re actually repairing your relationship with yourself. Becoming your own expert again? That is healing!
I meet you where you are and work alongside you to discover which therapeutic approaches resonate most with your healing process. With experience in various trauma treatment methods, I’m here to help you figure out what works best for you as we create a path forward together.
Areas of Specialized Trauma Expertise:
- Complex Post Traumatic Stress (CPTSD)
- Relational Trauma and Abuse
- Acute Trauma Response
- Pre-Verbal and Developmental Trauma
- Troubled Teen Industry (TTI) Related Trauma
- Cult/Cultic Systems and High Demand Groups
- Coercive Relationships
Compassionate and collaborative care for complex trauma survivors at the intersection of therapy, self-empowerment, and lived experience.