What brings someone here
Something happened — or a series of things happened — and your nervous system learned a set of responses that were designed to keep you safe. The problem is those responses don't always know when the original danger is over.
Hypervigilance. Flashbacks or intrusive memories. Emotional numbness or sudden flooding. Avoiding places, people, or memories that carry the weight of what happened. Feeling like you're watching your own life through glass.
These aren't signs that you're broken. They're signs that your system is still working overtime to protect you from something it couldn't process.
How I approach trauma work
I do not do trauma therapy by mining for details or constructing timelines of what happened. Retelling traumatic events in detail can re-activate what's trying to heal.
Instead, I work with where trauma lives — in the body, in protective patterns, in the parts of you that developed to make sure you'd never have to feel that again. The healing happens not through exposure but through developing the capacity to be with your own experience, gradually and safely.
The IFS lens on trauma
In IFS, traumatic experiences become exiles — parts of us that are frozen in the moment it happened, still carrying the shame, fear, or helplessness from that time. Other parts develop whose whole job is to make sure those exiles stay locked away, because feeling that again feels unbearable.
IFS creates a way to approach exiles gently, from your own Self-energy, rather than being overwhelmed by them. We do this slowly, with your internal system leading — never forced, never rushed.
Somatic and attachment-informed approaches
Trauma is stored in the body, not just in memory. Somatic awareness is woven throughout our work — noticing where activation lives, when your nervous system is moving toward safety, and how to work with that process rather than talk over it.
Attachment-informed work addresses the relational dimension of many trauma histories — the ways that harm happened within relationships, and the ways that healing happens within them too.
How we track what changes
I use the PCL-5 — a validated trauma assessment — to establish where you are at the start of our work and to track changes over time. Trauma recovery is often non-linear, and having a concrete measure helps us both see the real movement that's happening even when it doesn't feel like it.
Ready to take the first step? Schedule a free 15-minute consultation — no commitment, no pressure. Just a conversation to see if we're a good fit.