I help those with trauma find peace with the past and live their lives fully.
Something happened that threatened your survival. It may have been a single event, like an injury or assault, or many events stretched out over time, like prolonged abuse. The threat to your survival may have been physical, in the case of a car accident or assault, or it may have been a threat to your emotional survival, as in long term abuse.
And you cannot seem to move on from it, no matter how much you, or other people in your life, think you should. It comes back to you again and again, in memories and dreams, or in the unshakable feeling that you are constantly in terrible danger. You may be robbed of your ability to trust others, to feel safe, to find comfort in relationships. You may become fearful, withdrawn, depressed, or angry.
Strangely, we often do not recognize the signs of trauma in ourselves. Others see it before we do. One reason for this is that trauma victims are also trauma survivors. You may downplay the severity of your experiences. This is especially true when the trauma stems from abuse. In those cases, the trauma survivor may have internalized a message from the abuser that nothing really bad ever happened, or that the abuse was their own fault. Teenagers are tragically vulnerable to believing that they should not talk about what happened to them.
In my experience, trauma survivors are particularly troubled by the many questions that do not seem to have answers. “Why did it happen? What does it mean? Why can’t I stop thinking about it? Why can’t I just let it go?” Something so terrible must have happened for a reason, but we can’t understand the reason, so it must have been something we did wrong. The experience of trauma sends us messages that take us out of our lives, away from our loved ones. “It was my fault. I must have deserved it. I can never let my guard down. Something terrible can happen at any moment.” These messages become beliefs that trap us in cycles of pain and isolation. But there are answers to these questions.
Counseling for Post-Traumatic Stress
Thoughts, memories, and emotions from traumatic events come back to us over and over because they don’t fit anywhere. Our brains don’t know what to do with them, so they cannot find a resting place. A treatment called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming) is particularly helpful at putting these events in the right perspective, and giving us peace from them.
I want to help you decide for yourself what the events in your life really mean, not what they keep telling you they mean.
This website has helpful information for individuals and families.