You are not what happened to you.

As a child, you didn’t get to write your own story. You didn’t get to choose the characters or design the plot. You didn’t get to edit or redraft. And now, you find yourself stuck in a storyline you didn’t create.

Your story might say:

  • You’re not good enough.

  • You’re not enough AND you’re too much all at once.

  • You’re not lovable OR you’re only lovable if you behave a specific way OR as long as people don’t see the dark bits.

  • People can’t handle the real you.

  • You have to follow all the rules for people to stay.

  • You’ll never have the relationships you want.

  • You’re broken or messed up.

  • People will always leave or hurt you.

  • You can’t trust your own judgment.

Are you ready to take control of your own story?

From the outside, you’re doing fine. Better than fine, even. You’re getting all the things done, for everyone. You’re got the education, the job, the relationship, maybe even the kids—all the typical markers of “success.” And everyone thinks you’ve got it all together.

But I see you.

Inside you feel one misstep away from falling apart. All these stories keep coming up in your head and you worry. All the time.

  • You worry about making others mad or hurting their feelings.

  • You worry that relationships will end and you won’t even see it coming.

  • You worry that you won’t judge people correctly, that you’ll be wrong about them being safe.

  • You worry you’ll be hurt or controlled or manipulated and you won’t recognize it or won’t be able to get out.

  • You worry you’ll get lost in the relationship and you’ll never know who you really are.

  • You worry you’ll be helpless.

  • You worry they won’t love you like you love them and that you’ll love them too much. You’ll be too dependent, they won’t feel the same about you, and it’ll be so painful when they leave.

  • You worry they won’t love you once they really know who you are and know everything about you.

  • You worry that you can’t really love them—that maybe you don’t even know what love is.

  • You worry that you’re constantly disappointing everyone—trying to balance what your family expects, what you need, who you truly are, and who you’ve been taught to be.

You’ve struggled this way as long as you can remember—there is no before the worry, before the stories felt true. You learned all the rules about how to keep others from getting upset, how to make yourself small and unproblematic, how to limit who you are to fit in the box you were given.

You try to keep your expectations low so you can’t be disappointed but somehow it never works to protect you—you’re constantly let down when people don’t see you, don’t understand you, and don’t care for you or show up for you in the way you care for and show up for others.

And now? Now you never feel safe.

Your body feels like it holds anxiety, you can’t get your mind to quiet down, and you feel unstable in your relationships all the time.

You don’t know how to feel safe, stable, healthy, secure, and confident.

You don’t know how to break the cycle.

And that’s what it all really comes down to: you want to break the cycle.

You want to rewrite your story, take control and decide where the action moves, who the characters are, and what the resolution of the story looks like.

You just can’t see the path there. You’ve done everything you know how to do and now you feel stuck.

That’s where I come in.

I can help you create the pathway from where you are to where you want to be.

I can help your body learn to be safe again (or for the first time). I can help your mind put those stories to rest and replace them with stories of truth and confidence. I can help you learn how to have healthy relationships with yourself and those you choose to keep in your story.

I can help you break the cycle so you can deeply feel as successful as you look from the outside.

My Approach to Therapy

My clients with trauma often say:

  • I know the story in my head isn’t true, but it feels true and I’m afraid others will think it’s true.

  • I know it wasn’t my fault, but I feel like I should have done something differently OR if I just hadn’t done what I did, it wouldn’t have happened.

  • I know it wasn’t my partner’s intention to hurt me, but I feel so much emotion it’s like I can’t control how I respond.

Often our “logical” brain knows our worries aren’t prophecies, our stories aren’t true, and not everyone has bad intentions. But our “emotional” brain, that deeper part of our nervous system, keeps repeating the cycle and reacting as though our fears are true. While sometimes we’ll adjust your “knowing,” my goal in therapy is to help your “emotion” brain deeply believe what you already know so that you can start responding out of that truth.

This is why I don’t rely on talk therapy alone. Talk therapy helps us with the “knowing” and somatic techniques like Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) and Brainspotting (BSP) help our “emotion” brain start to believe the knowledge so that the knowing can become instinct. It isn’t just about “white knuckling” your way through behaviors so you can “fake it until you make it.” I’m trained in a variety of techniques to best address trauma from multiple perspectives, helping you to shift deeply in your brain and nervous system so that the behaviors and changes follow naturally.

You don’t have to decide in advance which modality you’d like to use. I’ll be with you each step of the way to guide you through the techniques that best suit your needs.

Utilizing a variety of therapy modalities, including those listed below and a plethora of talk therapy techniques, allows me to adapt the therapeutic process to best meet your needs and personality.

I’ve spent the last 15 years studying varying modalities, deep diving into research, and specializing in trauma, attachment, and relationships so that I can be deeply knowledgable and practiced at working with attachment-based traumas.

I don’t believe that trauma and its resulting symptoms exist solely within the individual and their mind. The most insidious aspects of trauma are often how they change how we view ourselves, the people around us, and our world.

My approach involves not only helping your body to feel safe but also helping you to have better, safer, more secure relationships with yourself and others you choose to keep in your life.

We’ll work on your knowing by:

  • Helping you make connections from what happened in your past to how you’re feeling in the present.

  • Helping you to assign appropriate responsibility to those who’ve hurt you in the past while maintaining appropriate compassion for yourself and the way you’ve adapted to survive.

  • Helping you separate what is a past trigger and what is a current emotion so you can better decide how you’d like to respond.

And we’ll work on your feeling and believing by:

  • Deeply processing categories of beliefs using BSP or ART.

  • Removing flashbacks, nightmares, and triggers by processing out painful past images using ART.

  • Addressing negative symptoms by releasing stored traumas in your body using neurofeedback, BSP, or ART.

  • Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART)

    This form of therapy uses eye movement to resolve traumas in as little as 1-3 sessions.

  • Brainspotting (BSP)

    Your gaze affects how you feel, and we utilize gaze positions to deeply and profoundly heal trauma.

  • Neurofeedback

    Neurofeedback can help your brain learn to regulate itself so that regulated, focused states of mind become the default.

  • Intensives

    If weekly therapy has proven not to be a good fit for you, explore how 1-3 days of focused trauma treatment can help.

Therapy for trauma can help you…

  • Feel safe in your body.

  • Worry less.

  • Develop and maintain healthy, secure, safe relationships.

  • Have healthy boundaries and communication.

  • Feel more confident and compassionate about yourself.

  • Develop healthy coping strategies to be a more emotionally resilient person.

  • Feel more empowered to advocate for yourself and your choices.

  • Trust yourself and safe people in your life.

  • Put to rest negative stories about yourself.

  • Feel like trauma is no longer in control of your life.

Complex Trauma (C-PTSD)

Complex Trauma develops when a series of events such as neglect, childhood abuse, domestic violence, emotional abuse, gaslighting, abandonment, oppression, etc. occur repeatedly over long periods of time.

Areas of Expertise

Relational Trauma

Relational Trauma is trauma that happens within relationships, often but not always close relationships, such as childhood or intimate relationship abuse, neglect, enmeshment, non-consensual sexual experiences, power and control, oppression, loss of a loved one, bullying, etc.

Childhood/Family Trauma

Childhood or Family Trauma occurs within the family unit during childhood, such as divorce, loss of a parent, parental abandonment, physically or emotionally unavailable parents, controlling parents, parents with addiction or mental health struggles, generational trauma, emotionally immature parents, etc.

You don’t have to try to figure it out all alone, feeling lost and stuck. I’m here to help you create the pathway from where you’ve been to where you want to go.

Trauma can also look like…

People-Pleasing

You move through life wearing the mask of “I’m fine, everything’s fine,” but you also find yourself giving and giving to others. Sometimes it feels like you have nothing left to give, yet somehow you dig deeper, neglecting your own needs, just to meet the needs of others. Others love your generosity, but they often don’t return it. You don’t mention the imbalance or set boundaries because you worry about upsetting or losing them, but you’re getting resentful in your relationships. You’re stuck in people-pleasing and conflict avoidant patterns and you’re so frustrated with yourself for it.

Anxiety & Overthinking

You’re lying in bed at night, replaying every conversation that you had that day, looking for where you might have messed up, hurt someone’s feelings, or made someone angry. And then you’re playing over made up scenarios of what you should have said or what you’d say next time. AND THEN you’re thinking about what you should go back and say to that person so you can fix the problem that may not even exist—but you don’t want to look stupid or make it worse. You constantly look for signs that you’ve upset someone or said/done the wrong thing.

Insecurity in Relationships

You often find your anxieties minimized by friends and family. Maybe even yourself. You’re pulled to ask others for reassurance, but at the same time, you’re worried about being labeled as “too much” or “too sensitive.” So you started hiding your worries and vulnerabilities from others and eventually yourself.. You feel disconnected, unseen, misunderstood, and uncared for, and you can’t figure out why you can’t feel more secure and stable in your relationships. You want to be loved, but you don’t want to be too much, not enough, a burden, or unlovable.

Shame

You might have grown up in a dysfunctional family household with emotionally immature parents (EIP). You might have had parents who said awful things to you or about you. They might have been perfectionistic, judgmental, or impossible to please. You were always messing up or being blamed. From a young age, you’ve been taking care of others so you actually don’t know how to let others take care of you - in a way, you don’t even want them to. You also struggle in your relationship with your family and feel shame about how you’re not closer to them because you feel like you’re “supposed to be.”

Loneliness

Your relationship with your family might have always been rocky, and that was just normal, or maybe it was okay, but now you’ve noticed forming relationships with peers and romantic partners is hard. You might have had experiences of having a close friend for a period of time, but something happened and all the sudden, out of the blue, they stopped talking to you. And that’s not even diving into the struggles with dating and maintaining a romantic relationship. You can’t help but think “well I’m the common denominator… something must be wrong with me.”

Negative Self Stories

For as long as you can remember, you’ve never felt “enough.” Not for family members, friends, or romantic partners. Not even in academics or the workplace, despite being a high achiever. You constantly think “what’s wrong with me, why do I do that?” You really hate getting compliments from others; you tell yourself they don’t mean it, or they’re only saying nice things because they care, not because it’s true. Things happen and you immediately tell yourself a negative story about why: it’s your fault, something is wrong with you, you’re broken or messed up, you’re not lovable, or you’re not enough.

Frequently Asked Questions about Trauma Therapy

  • Trauma is subjective. At its core, I see trauma as something that happened to us that was beyond our ability to cope or manage. Common symptoms might include:

    • Flashbacks or nightmares

    • Dissociation or loss of memory

    • Difficulty regulating emotions

    • Feeling on edge

    • Struggling in interpersonal relationships

    • Low self-esteem or negative self-perception

    • Avoiding people, places, or scenarios that upset you

    • Difficulties with self-esteem

    • Problems setting or maintaining boundaries

    • Difficulty maintaining healthy relationships

    • Social or generalized anxiety

    • Difficulties being alone or fear of abandonment

  • Therapy for trauma will look different for everyone, and how we spend each individual session might vary.

    I have been trained in multiple trauma-focused modalities and utilize pieces from traditional talk therapy and relational models of therapy to meet your needs and goals.

    For example, you and I may utilize attachment theory or Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) to understand your relational patterns; the Enneagram to explore your coping skills and motivations; or Brainspotting or Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) to resolve flashbacks, phobias, and stored trauma in your body.

    We will always begin by forming a secure therapeutic relationship as I want you to feel comfortable and safe. And I always encourage feedback about ways to make your experience better!

  • It really depends on what your needs and goals are. I’ve worked with a number of trauma survivors for a short period of time (6-8 sessions) or longer (20+ sessions).

    I am trained in forms of therapy (Brainspotting and ART) that tend to help people experience relief more quickly than traditional talk therapy.

    While some people come to therapy to focus on one specific event (and therefore might finish their course of therapy in a shorter period of time), others choose to meet with a trauma specialist for an extended period of time to process multiple traumatic events or simply to have a safe space to come back to as needed when triggering events happen.

    It is my goal to work myself out of a job; I'll be here as long as you need me, AND my goal is that you reach a point where you comfortably feel you no longer need me.

  • I’m excited about the opportunity to support you on your journey towards trauma recovery! We’ll start with a consultation form and 20 minute phone chat so that we can see how we connect and answer any questions you may have.

    I truly believe the connection between therapist and client makes all the difference in therapy, so if either of us decides we are not the best fit, I will be happy to provide you with referrals that better suit your needs or personality.