Coping / Support / Resilience / Interpersonal / Safety / Trust / Hope / Impact / Minority Stress / Stigma / Shame / Numbness / Capability

Making sense of trauma, and the impact of trauma, can be accompanied by the fear that you will never be able to overcome the distress you feel when you remember the experience or when those intrusive nightmares, flashbacks, and negative thoughts come crashing into your awareness. Through trauma-focused therapy, we reclaim confidence, hopefulness, intimacy, safety, self-esteem, and trust. I have received expert level training and certification in the gold standard trauma-focused therapy called Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT). I also have expertise in Prolonged Exposure (PE), and Cognitive Behavioral Conjoint Therapy (CBCT).

I specialize in treating trauma symptoms related to sexual assault, intimate partner violence, stalking, childhood and complex sexual trauma, and emotional or physical abuse. These experiences often have lasting effects on both physical health and daily functioning.

In addition, I have years of focused experience providing trauma-informed care to members of the LGBTQIA+ community—individuals who are disproportionately impacted by both interpersonal and discrimination-based traumas due to their identities as sexual and gender minorities.

Trauma manifests in various ways, and its effects can be far-reaching. You may be experiencing some of the following symptoms:

Nightmares, flashbacks, or intrusive memories

Panic attacks or sudden bouts of rage

Feeling numb, detached, or “checked out” from your life

Difficulty with intimacy and relationships

Struggles with feeling different in different environments

Feeling stuck in the past or that your life is repeating itself

Emotional dysregulation and difficulty managing distressing emotions

If any of this sounds familiar, you may be struggling with the effects of trauma, including PTSD, C-PTSD, or unresolved attachment trauma. Trauma therapy can help you process these experiences and develop healthier coping strategies. Many people will experience a form of trauma in their lives. Trauma can come with feelings of shame, anger, and confusion. Posttraumatic stress is a normal human reaction to traumatic events. However, for some individuals, this stress persists and interferes with their ability to live the life that they want. I work with complex cases that sometimes include dissociation, numbness, anger, risky behaviors, and years of avoidance. The treatments I provide are the most powerful and effective treatments available for these conditions. I have expertise in individual, as well as relationship (i.e., with a partner) based trauma-focused therapies. I have experienced many times how these treatments help people gain new perspectives about what happened to them, develop a sense of empowerment over their trauma, and improve their lives.

These treatments can also be helpful if you feel stuck following experiences of trauma, bullying, or discrimination even if you don’t have PTSD. If you’re unsure whether you want to discuss your trauma, or unsure which approach feels like a good fit for you, we can discuss your concerns. We will explore trauma-focused care that builds upon your current support, coping skills, and personal experience. We can begin at your pace, whatever that may be, and engage in therapies that can range from processing or supportive therapies, to modular skill-based interventions.

I primarily employ time-limited, evidence-based Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies (CBT) such as CPT, PE, and CBCT. In general, Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapies (TF-CBTs) are short-term interventions that generally last anywhere from 8 to 25 sessions. (See Individual and Couples Therapy based Trauma-Focused Services.)

Trauma Lives in the Body — and So Can Healing

Trauma doesn’t always show up as flashbacks or panic attacks. Often, it lives quietly in the background: in chronic tension, emotional numbness, hyper-alertness, or that exhausted feeling that never fully goes away. When your nervous system has learned to stay braced — for impact, for rejection, for disappointment — it can become hard to feel safe even when you are safe.

In therapy, we can work gently with the body to begin shifting those patterns. You don’t have to retell everything that’s happened to begin healing. Somatic (body-based) approaches help you tune in to your physical responses to stress and trauma in real time — and begin building new ones.

Adaptive, Evidence-Based Treatment Design

Depending on your needs and comfort level, we might use:

• Grounding techniques to reconnect with the present moment when you feel overwhelmed or disconnected. These might include using breath, posture, or sensation to anchor your awareness in your body.
• Titration — the practice of approaching trauma in small, manageable doses so you stay within your window of tolerance instead of feeling flooded.
• Improving emotional regulation by integrating mindfulness, self-awareness, and distress tolerance tools that help you stay present and feel more in control during difficult moments.
• Tracking body sensations to notice patterns, and begin listening to what those signals are telling you.
• Identifying stuck points — unhelpful beliefs or internalized narratives (like “It was my fault” or “I can’t trust anyone”) that keep trauma responses alive. Together, we work to gently challenge and reframe them.
• Exploring trauma-related beliefs about safety, trust, power, esteem, and intimacy. These core areas are often impacted by trauma and deserve focused attention to rebuild clarity and confidence.
• Developing more balanced thinking to replace black-and-white or catastrophic thoughts with more grounded, nuanced perspectives — without minimizing your experience.
• Addressing avoidance patterns — emotional, mental, or behavioral — that may have once been protective but now stand in the way of healing and connection.
• Resourcing, where we identify internal or external sources of safety, strength, or comfort you can return to when things feel destabilizing.

These tools are about helping you feel more at home in yourself — and more resilient in the face of everyday stress and uncertainty. Resilience doesn’t mean you never struggle; it means you bounce back more quickly, with greater self-trust and emotional flexibility. When your body no longer feels like a place of conflict, survival, or alarm, everything else becomes more possible: rest, connection, clarity, and the ability to move forward on your terms.

Stress & Trauma:

In psychological literature, stressors are defined as events and conditions (e.g., losing a job, death of an intimate partner) that cause change and require that the individual adapt to the new situation or life circumstance. Stress processes can include the experience of prejudice and discrimination, expectations of rejection, hiding and concealing your authentic self for protective purposes, internalized homophobia, intimate partner violence, and ameliorative coping processes that have become bad, ineffective habits. These experiences can be particularly painful when there is social pressure to conceal your experiences, or stigma. In therapy, we will address what it’s like to have few people, or no one, to talk to about these experiences, and any distress that comes from having nowhere to do this work safely.

In general, I practice LGBTQIA+ affirming therapy that considers the impact of minority stress and chronic stress responses. Notably, aside from these stress processes, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and heterosexuals who report any same-sex sexual partners over their lifetime, have greater risk of childhood maltreatment, interpersonal violence, trauma to a close friend or relative, and unexpected death of someone close.

See:

• Individual Therapy
• Trauma-Focused Couples Therapy