What happened to you does not have to define you.
Therapy for
Difficult Childhoods &
Trauma
You had to grow up fast amongst all of the chaos.
Your parents tried their best, or at least that’s what they told you. But you look around at other families and know deep down, things should have been different for you. Living in a chaotic household required you to learn how to survive with emotional turmoil and stay guarded when it comes to trusting others. You learned how to predict the fights so that you could avoid them, and as a teenager you probably found any excuse you could to not be home, if your parents even allowed you to spend time with friends.
And now you’ve escaped as an adult. Maybe you still have a relationship with your parents, or maybe you don’t, either way, you don’t have to deal with that stress anymore, right?
Then why do you feel so bad?
Why can’t you feel secure in your relationships? Why can you not stop overthinking every interaction you have with people? And why do you feel so guilty for having emotional needs?
You want to be able to stop focusing on the Past so you can build the Future you want.
Feel familiar?
You might be…
→ Constantly overthinking what you say and do around other people
→ Feel responsible for other people’s emotions or hate the idea of letting anyone down.
→ Unsure what you want in life or feel disconnected from you own needs
→ Stuck in patterns you know logically don’t make sense, but can seem to change.
Here’s How We Can Change That
Therapy helps you better understand your past—so you can stop feeling controlled by it.
Therapy for difficult past experiences isn’t about blaming your past.
Our earliest experiences shape who we are. When clients come to therapy to explore past experiences, some of them traumatic memories, they are making sense of their own personal history in order to learn and grow from it. If we do not understand how our early memories impact us as adults, we are doomed to repeat the same patterns our families repeated with us that perpetuate our self-hatred and criticism, mistrust in relationships, and inability to connect deeply with other people.
In our work together, we look at the patterns that formed in response to your earliest environments—how you learned to cope, protect yourself, and navigate relationships. Then we begin to shift those patterns in a way that feels steady and manageable, so that you can create something different with your life moving forward.
I integrate EMDR Therapy, attachment-focused work, and nervous system awareness to help process experiences that are still “living” in your body, not just your mind. Even when we have tried to mentally dis-attach from old memories, the pain of these memories can cause illness and suffering in the body. We work towards change happening on a deeper level; this means not just better understanding your past and how it influences you in the present, but also taking actions to feel less reactive, more grounded, and more able to respond in line with your own thoughts instead of automatically falling into an old role.
Trauma therapy, and exploring challenging childhood memories. requires building up strength over time. This means meeting at least once a week with your therapist so that coping skills can be built and deep work can begin in a timely manner.
Trauma Therapy can help you…
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We work with the parts of your past that still feel active, helping your system process them so they’re no longer coming up without your permission.
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Instead of constantly bracing or shutting down, your body can begin to settle and feel less tense—so you feel more present in your day-to-day life.
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We connect how your early experiences shaped your relationships, so you can start showing up in ways that drive connection between you and other people, rather than disconnection and dysfunction.
FAQs
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While it can feel uncomfortable at first, the emotions we avoid feeling are the “muscles” of the mind that need to be worked if we are to get mentally stronger. Having a therapist who can hold space for distressing emotions can guide become more comfortable with feeling “bad” emotions.
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Traditional therapy involves approaches that primarily help clients talk through what is happening in their current life, but does not allow for clients to have deep insights into the patterns of their life.
Trauma therapy is designed to meet clients where they are at in a way that does not put the blame on the client for what is happening in their life. In trauma therapy we orient the work towards more understanding of the self and the internal world, and learning how to hold multiple difficult feelings at once.
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With therapy, we don’t need a timeline or a list of details. For us, we will focus on what is showing up for you now and follow that back to relevant memories and experiences.
