• experiences of not feeling seen, heard, accepted, & understood growing up
• emotional & physical neglect
• verbal & physical abuse
• sexual abuse
• parental / familial narcissistic abuse
• religious trauma
• adult children of alcoholics (ACOA)

These are just some of the most common areas I work with under the childhood trauma / complex trauma umbrella. If your experience is different than the ones mentioned above and you are still interested in working together, please feel free to reach out.

I am eclectic in my approach to working with childhood trauma / complex trauma. Below is a brief summary of some of the approaches I incorporate.

• Relational – I care deeply about the relationship with my clients and will meet you with compassion, respect, & genuineness. If a rupture or miscommunication occurs, I prioritize communicating about this and offering repair.

• Client-centered – I trust you are the expert on your experience and will follow your lead on what you are open to working on in each session. I’ll also offer suggestions and reflections along the way if you would like more guidance.

• Mindfulness & Somatic Based – trauma lives in our bodies in emotions and sensations. Somatic and mindfulness skills can help people get in touch with and experience their emotions and sensations in their bodies in the present moment, in manageable doses. Learning to do this, can help us process our experiences both in the present and past.

• Polyvagal Theory / Working with the Nervous System – Polyvagal theory is a framework for tracking different states your nervous system goes through when feeling safe and when feeling a sense of threat. When people experience childhood / complex trauma it is not uncommon for the nervous systems to get stuck oscillating in states of continual stress / activation / and shut down. Polyvagal Theory can be a helpful framework to learn about your nervous system & tools to move back into states of safety, presence, & connection.

• IFS-informed parts work – people are made up of a core self and many different parts of themselves. Getting to know our parts & core self can often lead people to greater self-understanding, self-compassion, and feelings of wholeness. Often, when people have experienced childhood trauma, they have parts that learn strategies to protect them. These protective strategies were essential for the person’s survival growing up, but may no longer be serving them in adulthood. People also have parts that hold the pain of their early life experiences. This pain has often not been seen, understood, or validated in relationship. All of these parts need loving attention from our core self to heal. 

• EMDR – also known as ‘Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing’, is an evidence-based trauma treatment therapy that combines somatic tools and mindfulness skills to help people process past traumatic experiences. EMDR helps people work with their past distressing experiences, present challenges, and address possible future situations. EMDR can help people feel a sense of resolve with their past and resilience in their present. Learn more about EMDR here. 

Generally therapy for childhood trauma / complex trauma is a longer course of therapy. When trauma has occurred over many years of ones life, the healing process can be slow. It won’t mean you will feel the same way each day as before you began the therapy process, but change and healing is often a gradual process.

Length of therapy is very specific to each individual and can depend based on what your goals are for therapy and where you are at in your healing journey when you begin.

Most commonly people coming for this type of therapy stay for a year or more. I work with each individual to create goals in therapy and check in along the way to ensure we are focusing on the work that is most important to you.

Not all people who experienced childhood trauma develop C-PTSD or PTSD, but some do. If you’d like to learn more about differences between these terms, you can read more here.

For PTSD there are 3 main areas of experiences people have:

• re-experiencing aspects of their traumatic events
• avoiding reminders or triggers from their traumatic experiences
• feeling fear of threat in some situations or in general even when the trauma is over

For C-PTSD people, have the experiences of PTSD listed above and additional experiences of:

• having a challenging time regulating emotions (i.e. feeling emotions in an intense or overwhelming way or cutting off from feelings through numbing or dissociation)
• having a negative sense of self. (i.e. feeling guilt, shame, blaming themselves for traumatic experiences, struggling with self worth and esteem, being overly harsh to oneself, or not having a sense of ‘self’ or who they are)
• having difficulty in relationships with others. (i.e. having challenging or failed relationships with other people, struggling with unhealthy patterns in relationships, having highly conflictual relationships, difficulty trusting others, or avoiding connections with others altogether)