If your nervous system learns to be constantly on guard scanning for threats, it can lead to chronic anxiety, worrying, and irritability. Maybe being anxious and vigilant helped you stay safe in the past, but this can make everyday life exhausting in the present. In trauma work we retrain your brain and body to interpret threats differently, and learn to feel safe again.

When the body spends extended amounts of time in anxiety and fear, it can lead to burnout, exhaustion, and autoimmune diseases. Years of being on edge, meeting others’ needs while ignoring your own, and not feeling able to say ‘no’ take a toll on the body. I’ll teach you how to shift into safety again and re-learn to meet your body’s needs.

People-pleasing, earning your worth, and fear of failure are simply exhausting. These behaviors are a survival response to some sort of threat of being rejected by our caregivers, families, or broader culture. Often they keep us in the ‘tribe’ but at the cost of real connection. To address this behavior we will explore how it functions for you so we can get to the root of the behavior.

If your trauma was a car accident, you might feel anxious while driving. But if your trauma occurred in relationships, you’ll feel triggered with colleagues, family, partners, etc. Some of the most potent traumas are those subtle moments in childhood of feeling scared, unseen, alone, or unaccepted. Those moments teach you that relationships aren’t safe, and you can’t trust people. We’ll use tools that unravel those stories and shift how you attach to yourself and others.

If you had to choose between feeling loved and accepted, or being authentic, you likely chose the first, since we are wired to survive through connection. However, this means you had to disconnect from yourself. A big part of trauma healing is building a relationship with yourself again, getting to know what you actually like and want, and learning to set boundaries so you can trust yourself.

When we experience overwhelming fear, pain, or simply never learned to regulate our emotions, we often cope by disconnecting from our body. This can be through addiction, distraction, or dissociation. Often clients describe a feeling of ‘fogginess’, or using substances/behaviors to numb. I use somatic (or body tools) to help you reconnect slowly and safely, so you can feel more alive and engaged.

Trauma fundamentally changes the way we see ourselves and the world around us. I often hear people say they feel unlovable, broken, or damaged, and believe people can’t be trusted. Talking about these won’t change much if they are related to trauma, which is why we use tools that target the body and subconscious beliefs to shift these beliefs on a deeper level.