Trauma Therapy

Trauma does not always announce itself. Sometimes it looks like anxiety that will not settle, relationships that keep following the same painful pattern, or a body that stays tense even when there is nothing immediately wrong. If you have been carrying something heavy for a long time without fully understanding where it came from, trauma therapy offers a way to start making sense of it.

Our approach draws from mindfulness, somatic and body-based practices, grounding techniques, and guided relaxation and hypnosis. These are not separate methods applied one at a time. They are a coordinated clinical framework built around the understanding that trauma is held in the body as much as the mind, and that many clinicians find it helpful to address both emotional and physical aspects of trauma. You do not have to know exactly what you are dealing with before reaching out. A first consultation is simply a conversation. Book a free phone consultation or contact our team to take the first step toward getting support.

Trauma Takes Many Forms, and So Does the Path Through It

The word “trauma” derives from the ancient Greek word for “injury” or “wound”.  It is often used interchangeably to refer to an event or events, as well as the physical or emotional response to the events.  The most typical associations with the word trauma are events such as sexual abuse, assault or rape, domestic violence, physical attack, natural disasters, and medical trauma including traumatic brain injury, among others. This type of trauma may be referred to by older literature as “big T” trauma, as it is often associated with the T in PTSD.  There are many evidence-based treatments available for PTSD, including Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD and EMDR.    

However, trauma also includes events that occur more than once, including early childhood neglect, emotional, or psychological abuse.  Older literature poorly named this type of trauma as “small t” trauma, but has since appropriately termed this type of trauma as “developmental trauma” or “complex trauma” (C-PTSD), as it happened during childhood development and is a result of prolonged and repeated interpersonal trauma. It involves direct harm, neglect, or abandonment and a fundamental betrayal of trust by caretakers.

Generational trauma is a relatively new term used to describe a long-standing process by which the psychological and emotional impacts of oppression, genocide, or racism are passed down from people who lived through the event to their future generations.  This may be a major contributor to many of the health disparities we see in individuals of color.

Trauma may also result from witnessing or hearing about trauma, also known as secondary trauma.  It may also result from workplace bullying or harassment, or from being in an environment where one experiences prolonged stress without the capacity to change one’s circumstances.  The fact that the word “trauma” has so many different definitions and connotations may be confusing, but the impact of trauma on our lives, relationships, and mental and physical health is indisputable.  Our clinicians work with the full range of traumatic experiences, including experiences that do not fit neatly into a category.

What Treatment Actually Looks Like Session to Session

Trauma therapy at our practice will not follow a rigid protocol. The early stages of treatment will focus primarily on building trust with your provider while creating scaffolding for internal resources and a sense of safety necessary for deeper processing. This phase is not filler. It is foundational clinical work that determines how effectively the processing phases go. As treatment progresses, sessions move toward the traumatic material itself, using body awareness, guided relaxation, EMDR, and somatic approaches to help you process experiences that may have been stored without full integration.

 The closing phases of treatment focus on consolidating what has changed, building a stable sense of self that is not organized around the trauma, and developing the skills to navigate future difficulty without being pulled back into the original wound. Our approach is oriented toward early symptom relief, so you should begin to notice changes within the first few weeks of treatment, even if the full arc of healing takes longer. Our psychotherapy services overview describes how our broader clinical approach works across presenting concerns.

How do I know if I may be experiencing long-term symptoms of developmental trauma or neglect?