Trauma

Trauma can affect our lives in various ways. Sometimes you’re able to identify your traumas without any type of emotional reaction, other times you can’t quite figure out why you’re so distressed at an otherwise harmless trigger.

Trauma is complicated.

Whether you’re a survivor of childhood abuse or a combat veteran, your daily life is wrought with the residual effects of all you’ve gone through. In some ways, it’s helped you be effective at managing stressful situations. Other times it makes intimacy and relationships really difficult. Let’s figure out together how to manage this.

The goal is not forgetting…

Renegotiating trauma is not about forgetting that it ever happened, but shifting the response from fear and loss of control to recognizing the survival instinct and safety in the here and now. We will create space for the nervous system to uncouple traumatic experiences with present stimuli. This will make way for greater intimacy, more instances of enjoyment, and the honoring of your basic survival instinct that has you here now.

But how?

This depends on you. As a student of Somatic Experiencing, I believe that the body’s need to renegotiate the trauma is going to have the greatest impact on your life. This means we will take our time moving through difficult topics and giving your body time to evaluate what it’s going through. We will never go right through the trauma, nor will we avoid the topic and move only in to experiencing joy. We will take our time in connecting, learning to listen to the body, and giving the body space to orient itself to the here and now.

What about psychadelics?

There’s a lot of literature praising the healing power of psychadelics and plant medicines. Right now, most psychadelics are still Schedule I drugs and are not legal for consumption outside the context of a medical study. However, if you have had a psychadelic experience and want to process and integrate that experience, I would be honored to share a therapeutic space with you. I have gone through parts A & B of the MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy training with MAPS and believe that the healing experiences are very real and transformative. My approach with psychadelic integration pulls in concepts from somatic experiencing and attachment-based approaches.