Healing from Trauma

“Trauma” is a big word.

And people use it a lot because the reality is… it’s everywhere.

Trauma occurs whenever your mind or body is overwhelmed to the point that you can’t cope. As a result, life becomes about surviving instead of thriving.

Our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health is impacted by how we heal from painful and challenging experiences we have in life. Whether those experiences are thought of as horrific, violent, aggressive, or sexual traumas or as ongoing seemingly subtle messages telling us we don’t belong.

Big “T” trauma or little “t” trauma both impact our wellness.

Here’s what life with trauma looks like…

You feel fractured and foggy.

It’s like parts of yourself go “offline” randomly.

Suddenly, you might become irritable, anxious, depressed, tearful, or shaky… and can’t control it.

You struggle to focus and maybe lose track of your thoughts. You feel depleted.

No matter how much sleep you get, you often feel on edge or hypervigilant. Often sick, you experience more pain, poor digestion, hair loss, or skin rashes.

You feel out of place at work and struggle to focus on tasks that used to be easy for you to get done.

Feeling isolated and alone makes you feel less like reaching out to others, even people you love and trust.

You develop the powerful coping skill to cover up your feelings; you wear a mask so often you might not even remember it is a mask.

You just want to move on, feel better, and not deal with it anymore.

Trauma therapy isn’t about “recovery”…

… because we can never go back to how we were.

It’s about “healing.”

Healing is a path forward… where we are empowered by creating meaning from our experiences.

I’m here to help you heal, giving you new meaning, purpose, and a more compassionate and supportive view of yourself.

Healing is possible, and we can do it together.

We will use talk, movement, art, and other forms of therapy to explore your inner world.

Talk is helpful because it can bring awareness to how we perceive and experience our worlds, and awareness is the first step.

Processing our experiences through images, color, and other art approaches helps give us new and refreshing perspectives. It provides new ways of looking at the same old painful story. This refreshes our nervous system and allows for new insights and experiences of our repetitive narrative.

Using movement brings closer our powerful mind-body connection so we can start to allow our whole system to nurture and heal itself as the incredible unit it is. Our bodies are so integrated as one system. When we experience trauma, that system is fractured and rendered less effective in healing, and this is one of the places we lose a lot of our healing and intuitive power. To gently reconnect our mind and body is to begin healing and reconnecting with our strengths.

You’ll learn how trauma affects your nervous system and inner dialogue.

Our stress response system is a life-saving mechanism – when engaged for short durations of time. When our stress response system is engaged for extended periods, our entire system is maxed out past its capacity. We develop physical health issues and develop mental health issues.

Our entire frame of seeing the world and ourselves shifts, and our adrenal system becomes fatigued and over-sensitive, telling us there is a danger when there is not. We begin to tell ourselves things about the world and ourselves that are not true, are deprecating, and deteriorate our sense of worth.

Our stress response system is engaged when we feel unsafe for extended periods. Once you can begin to calm and regulate your nervous system, you will be able to explore and rewrite some of those narratives to begin to make you feel safer, stronger, and more whole.

You’ll learn how to work WITH your systems, so you’re no longer battling yourself.

Telling yourself how you feel is a problem, that you’re broken, and that if you could “Get over it,” then you’d be ok is a survival mechanism. This further perpetuates your sense of worthlessness on a deeply subconscious level.

If you could learn to appreciate some of these troubling symptoms for being a survival mechanism that has been maxed out, that would open the door to working WITH your body and working to heal together. Your body is powerful; sometimes, that power turns on itself due to trauma.

Learning how to look inwards with compassion will begin to heal the wounds and soften the internal battles you are experiencing.

You are powerful, and when aligned, your power can be used to help you feel better.

There is healing after trauma.

Trauma is not what happens TO you, but what happens WITHIN you due to what happened.

Working with me will begin healing the pain and invisibility that is held within you so that you will no longer be held captive by those circumstances that were out of your control.

The control you have starts now. Call me and start your healing journey today: (406) 212-2456.