Healing Trauma

HEALING TRAUMA

Trauma comes in many forms - physical and emotional, shared or alone, visible and invisible... Although there are well-documented universal reactions to trauma, we respond to what happens to us in our own, unique way. 

There is no one therapy for trauma that works for all traumas or all people. My goal in working with someone who has been deeply harmed by trauma, is to help us discover together an approach that fits where she or he is right now. Over the past 25 years, I have trained in a number of modalities (psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, exposure therapy, EMDR, IFS and somatic therapies) in order to reach individuals with different needs - or, indeed, the same individual at different stages of therapy.

One of the ways in which we cope when trauma overwhelms our capacity to bear terror, shame or other intense experiences, is by closing off those emotions, or even the parts of ourselves that experienced them. This is known as dissociation, which takes many forms - from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) in those subjected to severe, prolonged trauma in childhood to the less 'obvious' shutting down of parts of ourselves who were shamed or neglected. Dissociation can allow us to keep going until we are safe again, but later we may find that these feelings or parts of ourselves will not stay buried: they need us to attend to them, to heal them. In our work together it is my hope to offer you a safe place in which to attend to, and integrate, these feelings and aspects of self that have been too hard to bear.