Trauma & PTSD Therapy

That can be one major, life-threatening event, or a threat to someone close to you. It can also be a series of experiences that simply max out your ability to cope, where you didn’t have the understanding to make sense of it or the support to hold the bigness and the pain. What it leaves behind is a nervous system that learned to respond to what happened back then instead of what’s happening now.

Take a child who grew up around hostility, anger, and risk. Even if they were never directly in danger, their nervous system read it as a threat and wired in to stay on guard, to startle at loud noises or sudden movement. They carry that into adulthood, still reacting to a danger that’s long gone.

A lot of people don’t think of what they went through as trauma. If your body reacts like the threat is still here, it’s worth looking at, whatever you call it.

The good news is those responses can be un-wired.

1. People carrying a single, life-threatening event
2. People shaped by years of hostility, instability, or fear growing up
3. Anyone who startles easily, stays on edge, or reacts bigger than a situation calls for
4. Survivors of sexual trauma
5. People whose relationships keep hitting the same painful pattern
6. Anyone who suspects something back there is still driving them and can’t name it
7. A lot of people don’t think of what they went through as trauma. If your body reacts
8. like the threat is still here, it’s worth looking at, whatever you call it.

We spend the first stretch building your tools and your footing, emotional and physical, and we don’t rush it. When you’re ready, we process. That might mean EMDR or rewriting your narrative, or moving emotions through the body. Most forms of trauma processing let people work through an experience without retelling every detail of it. Over time the old alarm stops firing, and you get to react to your actual life instead of an old one.

Trauma work is available in person or by telehealth.

It’s how the event lives your brain and body. Picture your life as a river and the trauma as a boulder dropped in. The moss and sticks that snag on that boulder are the pileup, and that’s what we clear away, so you can finally see the boulder for what it is and decide how to move around it.

We won’t process a trauma when it wouldn’t be safe or ethical to, for instance if someone’s still living in an active danger, because telling the brain it’s safe when it isn’t does real harm. That’s why the footing comes first. Several of our clinicians specialize in trauma, and our EMDR training runs deep across the team.