THERAPY for TRAUMA
Trauma impacts your life. But it doesn’t have to decide the rest of your life. Redefine your narrative with holistic trauma therapy in Sacramento, CA and across California.
As someone who lives with trauma, you’re all too familiar with feeling lost, lonely, and stuck. You’re on guard for potential threats, walking on egg-shells in almost every interaction. Your mind is racing, and you're always trying to read between the lines, worrying there’s a hidden expectation you’ll be punished for not meeting.
This leads to anticipating a bad reaction or for someone to blow up at you, holding your breath and preparing for the worst even during conversations that are neutral. Trusting your gut doesn’t really feel like an option at this point as past experiences have completely altered your sense of safety and security, making it challenging to develop and engage meaningfully in relationships.
Your own moments of lashing out at loved ones or shutting down leave you feeling paralyzed, ashamed, and disconnected from the world around you. It’s no wonder that anxiety, depression and a profound sense of disconnection have become staples of your daily experience.
UNDERSTANDING TRAUMA
Trauma is incredibly disruptive to our sense of self-trust, turning our world and ability to trust our gut upside down. And when we feel incapable of trusting and feeling confident in ourselves, we cannot move securely through the world; we get stuck. Feeling weighed down by trauma is overwhelming and all-consuming. As a trauma-informed therapist, I understand the complexities of trauma and its profound impact on your life.
Trauma is our emotional and physical response to distressing events that overwhelm our nervous system and ability to cope. It includes both what happens to us and what doesn’t, such as unmet needs and emotional neglect from caregivers.
In addition, trauma can arise from life-threatening events like natural disasters, serious accidents, and medical trauma. It can also stem from chronic, non-life-threatening experiences like bullying, family dysfunction, parental neglect, and verbal abuse.
Trauma Expert Dr. Gabor Maté explains that "Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you." Trauma affects us internally and triggers survival responses like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, leaving us feeling dysregulated. Trauma can show up as:
Hyper-vigilance (always on alert, scanning the room)
Hyper-arousal (struggling to relax)
Increased anxiety & panic
Intrusive thoughts, memories & flashbacks
Depression & low self-esteem
Codependency & poor boundaries
While I have an emphasis on helping adults heal from childhood trauma, I work with those who have experienced trauma at all stages of their lives. I help both those who have experienced single-incident traumas, and those who experienced complex trauma.
Complex trauma involves repeated, prolonged traumatic experiences, often within power-imbalanced relationships (e.g., chronic verbal abuse from a parent). Many of my clients are affected by relational trauma in childhood, which has deeply impacted their sense of self-worth and safety as adults. Some examples of childhood relational trauma are:
Parental Substance Abuse and/or Parental Mental Illness
Witnessing Domestic Violence
Physical, Emotional, or Sexual Abuse
Emotionally Unavailable or Immature Parents
Excessive Parental Criticism
Experiencing trauma creates instability within core frameworks: Our framework of our sense of self-worth, our sense of safety & identity, and our attachment style– who we tend to seek out in romantic relationships and friendships.
Healing from trauma involves rebuilding these core frameworks, letting go of what has kept you stuck so you can restore your sense of self-worth, cultivate safety within yourself, and create healthier, more fulfilling relationships.
Therapy with me may be a great fit if you:
Feel stuck in relationships where it's hard to set boundaries, and your own needs often get ignored
Struggle to connect with your own emotions and feel out of touch with your body
Carry deep and lasting grief from painful past experiences & traumas
Deal with constant anxiety and a fear of being abandoned in relationships
Struggle to regulate your emotions during disagreements, freezing up or becoming reactive
Feel overwhelming guilt, shame, or self-blame related to things that happened in the past
I help you heal from trauma, build up self-trust, and develop resilience.
Holistic Trauma Therapy for Transformative Healing:
Holistic Trauma Therapy can help you process painful and distressing experiences regardless of whether or not you experience PTSD. As a trauma-informed therapist, my approach to therapy always looks to understand how trauma impacts all of you; physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We explore the intricate system of your inner parts that have been affected by traumatic experiences, providing a safe and nurturing space for each part to be heard and understood. Through this process of exploration and integration, you are able to develop self-compassion and heal from past traumas.
Using EMDR Therapy, we also reprocess past traumatic experiences so they are no longer triggering, and create new ways of seeing yourself and the world. One great aspect of EMDR is that you don’t have to verbally share details of the trauma you have experienced in order to heal; this helps prevent you from feeling re-traumatized. Through EMDR, your brain is able to create new neural pathways and integrate previously triggering memories in a more adaptive way. This reduces the current distress around these memories such as flashbacks and visceral reactions to related triggers in the present. As the traumatic memories become less charged, EMDR also addresses the underlying negative feelings about yourself such as worthlessness or powerlessness, and integrates more positive and empowering beliefs to increase well-being.
To learn more about my Trauma-informed approach, click here.
Change through holistic trauma therapy can look like:
Finding a renewed sense of purpose and confidence
Ability to let go of shame and guilt around past trauma(s)
Reduce intrusive thoughts and flashbacks
Feeling less triggered by past trauma in your present experience
Developing and practicing emotion regulation coping skills
Finding self-trust, and enhanced intimacy and connection in your relationships
Increased sense of safety and stability in your daily life
