What is trauma?
When an experience is so emotionally overwhelming that it’s beyond your mind and body’s ability to cope, it doesn’t get filed away like an ordinary memory. Instead, it gets frozen and held within the nervous system in a kind of suspended state. From your brain’s perspective, a part of you is still trying to survive something that you might intellectually know is long over.
If you’ve found yourself struggling to trust, to feel at ease in your own body, or to move on from your past, it’s not your fault, and it’s not because you’re not trying hard enough. Your nervous system is carrying the burden of trauma.
But trauma isn’t a life sentence, and you don’t have to find your way to health and wellbeing on your own.
Types of trauma
There are many types of trauma, some obvious and others more subtle.
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Stems from one overwhelming moment—an assault, accident, natural disaster, or sudden loss.
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Develops through repeated or prolonged exposure to threatening experiences, such as domestic violence, ongoing abuse, or living in an unsafe environment.
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Involves chronic, interpersonal trauma, often beginning in childhood, and often at the hands of someone who was supposed to provide safety. Because it’s relational and repeated, it fundamentally shapes how a person sees themselves and others.
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Perhaps the most common type of trauma, this occurs during critical windows of childhood when the brain, nervous system, and sense of self are still forming. It includes experiences like emotional neglect, having a parent who was chronically unavailable or unpredictable, growing up in a home where expressing needs wasn’t safe, or never quite feeling securely loved.
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The enduring impacts of genocide, slavery, systemic oppression, or displacement can continue for centuries. These wounds can be passed down through epigenetics (they become coded into a person’s DNA), parenting patterns, and cultural memory.
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Comes from bearing witness to others’ trauma and suffering. First responders, caregivers, journalists, and therapists, for example, can “absorb” the trauma they witness around them.
Living with unresolved trauma
Trauma has a way of reorienting life around itself, and the impacts of trauma on day-to-day life are often mistaken as personality or character flaws—emotional reactivity or numbness, no capacity for tasks or people, constant anxiety and tension, scanning for danger, craving but mistrusting connection.
For some people, trauma is loud and obvious: flashbacks, panic, or an inner world that feels overwhelming and out of control. For others, it’s a bit quieter: a persistent sense that something is off, difficulty experiencing joy, or feeling like there’s a chasm between who you are and who you want to be.
Why is trauma so difficult to recover from?
There’s a cultural myth that healing is mostly a matter of time and willpower—that if you try hard enough, think about it the right way, or simply decide to move on, eventually you will.
And when that doesn’t work, it’s easy to conclude that something is wrong with you. That you’re not resilient enough, or not trying hard enough, or that maybe this is just who you are now.
But trauma doesn’t respond to willpower, because trauma memories aren’t stored the way ordinary memories are. They get frozen in the nervous system with their full emotional intensity intact, and no amount of insight or positive thinking can unfreeze them. This isn’t a sign of failure or defectiveness. Fully resolving trauma memories isn’t something most people can do without the right kind of support.
How I work with trauma
I work with trauma using Internal Family Systems (IFS) and EMDR therapies. These evidence-based approaches are known for their ability to heal trauma at its roots by changing the way those experiences are stored within the brain and body. The work we’ll do will loosely follow three main phases.
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Before we go anywhere near the deeper material, we build a foundation. This means developing coping skills, building your capacity to move through difficult emotions without becoming overwhelmed, and getting to know the parts of you that have been working hard to keep the trauma contained. This phase is genuinely therapeutic in its own right, and many clients experience meaningful shifts before any deep trauma processing begins. It’s also essential groundwork. Trauma can’t be healed when the body is actively in survival mode, and this phase is where we ease the internal alarm and build a sense of groundedness and stability.
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Once you’ve found stable ground, we’ll move into deep trauma processing and healing. This process is experiential, meaning we’re not going to talk about your trauma as much as I’m going to guide you through experiences designed to help get trauma memories unstuck and defuse their emotional charge. This is careful, intentional work, always led by what your nervous system is ready for.
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Healing from trauma doesn’t always mean the work is over. With healing can come grief for the years lived in survival mode and a life that could have looked different. And sometimes a quiet but equally disorienting question arises: who am I now, without all of this? The final phase of our work is where we sit with these questions together, make sense of what has shifted, and set you on a path toward a fulfilling life.
What healing looks like
Trauma therapy doesn’t change what happened to you, but it does change what it means and how you feel about it. People who do this work often report:
- Traumatic memories lose their charge, and in some cases even become simply neutral memories of the past
- Triggers disappear or become much more manageable
- Relationships become sources of connection and safety
- They develop a kinder, more compassionate relationship with themselves
- They develop a clearer sense of who they are and what they want from life
- They develop the capacity to actually be present in their life—to feel things, enjoy things, and show up in ways that weren’t accessible before
Frequently asked questions
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PTSD typically develops in response to a specific, identifiable event—a car accident, an assault, a natural disaster. CPTSD, or complex PTSD, develops from trauma that was repeated and relational, often starting in childhood. Things like emotional neglect, growing up with an unpredictable or unavailable parent, or years of abuse at the hands of someone who was supposed to keep you safe. Because it’s woven into the earliest fabric of how you learned to see yourself and the world, complex trauma tends to run deeper and touch more areas of life than single-event trauma does.
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A lot of people who carry trauma don’t think of themselves as “traumatized,” because nothing obviously catastrophic happened, because they grew up being told their experience was normal, or because other people “had it worse” and they feel like they don’t qualify.
But trauma isn’t defined by how an event looks from the outside. It’s defined by what your nervous system did with it. Emotional neglect, chronic criticism, an emotionally absent parent, growing up in a home where it never felt fully safe to be yourself—these experiences can be traumatic, and your trauma is worthy of care and attention, no matter how “mild” it might seem.
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We never want you to relive trauma as if it’s happening in the present. That being said, you can’t heal trauma without activating the traumatic memories to some degree. We’ll do this in safe and structured ways, however, like having you watch a part of the memory on a movie screen with the sound off. I’ll also make sure you have the internal resources needed to handle any intensity that might arise when working with trauma. And the goal is to prevent you from being overwhelmed by the trauma memories.
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Trauma therapy can help reduce or even eliminate the emotional charge associated with trauma memories. This, in turn, has the side effect of diminishing or eliminating triggers and emotional reactivity, and freeing up space for joy and connection. That being said, trauma can change the physical structure of the brain, which may mean that some people find themselves prone to depression, anxiety, and hypervigilance even after trauma therapy. The difference is that the volume on these experiences gets turned way down, and they become much easier to manage.
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The styles of therapy I practice—IFS and EMDR—are quite a bit different than traditional talk therapy. Many people who have spent years in therapy with other styles find that these are more effective at getting them the relief they’ve been hoping for.
That being said, in our initial consultation, we can talk through whether these therapies can help you reach your goals.
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An unfortunate reality of any trauma therapy is that it can make things feel worse before they start feeling better. This happens because we sometimes unpack trauma material that requires multiple sessions to work through. You can think of it like remodeling a house—there’s always a messy in-between phase.
That being said, I place a lot of emphasis on preparation and stabilization, so that you’re prepared for this reality and have the tools necessary to stay grounded. I also won’t push you anywhere you’re not ready to go, and we’ll check in along the way to make sure everything is feeling safe.
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It depends on what you’re working with. Some things shift meaningfully in a few months. Deeper work—healing complex or developmental trauma, rebuilding a sense of safety in your body and relationships—typically takes longer, often a year or more of weekly sessions. That said, you’ll notice changes along the way, not just at the end.
Let’s get you out of survival mode
and into your life.
I see clients in person in Seattle’s U-District and online throughout Washington state. I offer a free 20-minute introductory call, where we can get to know each other, talk about what’s bringing you to therapy, and see if working together feels like a good fit. If it does, we’ll schedule your first session before we hang up.