Specialty · Trauma & PTSD
What happened to you is not who you are.
Trauma lives in the body and in the past tense. The work is helping your nervous system learn that the emergency is over.
Trauma is not a character flaw or a sign of weakness. It’s what happens when an experience overwhelms the nervous system’s ability to process it — when something happened that was too fast, too much, or too alone. The body keeps the record faithfully. The intrusions, the hypervigilance, the way certain smells or sounds drop you back into moments that should be over by now — these aren’t overreactions. They’re an accurate record of something that was real.
What makes trauma particularly hard is that the very systems designed to help you survive it — the hypervigilance, the numbing, the urge to avoid — are also what prevent the processing that would bring relief. The goal isn’t to erase what happened. It’s to help your nervous system learn that it doesn’t have to keep living there.
What happened is not the whole story.
Sartre wrote that we are “condemned to be free” — that even within the constraints imposed by the past, we retain the capacity to choose what to make of them. That isn’t a demand to simply decide to feel better. It’s a recognition that trauma, however real and however defining, doesn’t get to be the last word.
From an ACT perspective, the goal isn’t to feel less. It’s to stop organizing your life around avoiding feeling — and research consistently shows that avoidance shrinks a life far more effectively than trauma itself. We’re working to move toward what matters anyway.
Where the work focuses
EMDR
EMDR works directly with the brain’s memory processing system to reduce the emotional charge of traumatic memories. You don’t have to describe what happened in detail.
Trauma-Focused CBT
When trauma has left specific beliefs in its wake — “I should have done something,” “I’m permanently damaged” — we examine those beliefs and build new, evidence-based understandings.
Somatic Awareness
Trauma lives in the body, not just the mind. Somatic approaches help you notice and work with its physical signatures so the nervous system can complete what got interrupted.
ACT for Trauma
Rather than fighting the memories, ACT creates space between you and the trauma narrative — so it becomes something you carry rather than something you are.
What happened is not where you have to stay.
A free fifteen-minute conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If it feels like a fit, we go from there.