Life is hard.

When you were growing up, you faced something a child shouldn’t have to deal with. 

As an adult, your life is still affected by everything you went through.

You’ve spent most of your life putting aside your own feelings and experiences to take care of others. At this point, you don’t even know what you feel, want, and need, let alone know how to communicate that.

You know you struggle with people-pleasing but don’t really know how to stop caving to everyone else’s demands. This leads to resentment and anger - of other people and yourself.  

At times, you feel like all those stuffed-down emotions are spilling over. You find yourself randomly yelling at a co-worker or your partner. Emotions can be overwhelming. You worry that if you let yourself feel, it just might consume you and send you completely out of control. You think, “If I could just control my emotions, I would have the most amazing life.” 

You are “sensitive” and seemingly small things can set you off - loud noises, large crowds, having to eat with other people, a furrowed eyebrow, a backward glance, a change in tone.  

You avoid letting people get too close because if they did you might lose them. If people really knew the real you, they would leave. Yet, you secretly long for someone to be close with, someone to love you for you.

You work hard to hold it all together. When you get stressed, and everything feels out of control, you do things - sleep too much, eat too much, stop eating entirely, binge watch TV, exercise excessively - just to feel a sense of control. But then those behaviors just lead to more shame and pain. You spend so much time and energy just to manage and stay afloat that it’s tough to feel like you are actually living and being productive at work. 

You wonder if you will ever be able to move past all this and live like a “normal” human. Is that even a thing?

Childhood Trauma

All of this is related to stuff that happened to you when you were growing up - your parents got divorced, your mom got sick and died, a caregiver was addicted to drugs or alcohol, you were bullied, someone abused you.

It’s unfortunately common to experience something really painful in childhood that continues to affect you into adulthood and those affects are real and documented. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, two thirds of children will experience at least one painful event before the age of 16. According to the CDC, 64% of adults experienced a trauma before the age of 18. And that’s just what is reported. 

You may also be aware of the Adverse Childhood Events study that was conducted by the CDC and Kaiser and showed a correlation between experiencing something painful in childhood (like parental divorce, death, abuse, neglect, and community violence) and having chronic medical and mental health challenges. 

Therapy can help.

Counseling has been shown to help reduce the negative effects of childhood trauma. Since the 90’s, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing has reduced distress for trauma survivors. Somatic-based therapy is an approach that addresses the kind of pain that is beyond words, moving the trauma through the body so that it can be released. A combination of both somatic therapy and talk therapy can help move you towards being able to talk about the trauma without becoming overwhelmed.

Here’s where I come in

Each of us has an innate capacity for healing and wisdom. My job is to help you understand and connect with that healing and wisdom. By bringing your darkness into the light, you can find healing for your deepest wounds. 

I provide a safe environment for you to be able to explore what brought you to this point and how to move forward. I’ll ask some clarifying questions, summarize what I am hearing and seeing, provide some evidence-based helpful hints, and use other techniques like EMDR to help you get unstuck.

What if therapy stirs up more issues than I can handle right now?

Since therapy often involves discussing unpleasant aspects of your life, you may experience uncomfortable feelings like sadness, guilt, anger, frustration, loneliness, and helplessness. On the other hand, therapy has also been shown to have benefits for people who go through it. Yes, things might get worse before they start to really get better. In the long run, though, therapy leads to better relationships, solutions to specific problems, and significant reductions in feelings of distress.

I work in a very empathetic and gentle way so as to build safety and trust prior to discussing anything painful or traumatizing. We can go as fast or as slow as you feel comfortable with. My goal is to keep you within the “window of tolerance” to provide maximum growth and healing without further traumatizing you or giving you more than you can handle at any one time.