SPECIALTY · TRAUMA & PTSD
What happened to you
is not who you are.
Trauma lives in the body and in the past tense. The work is helping your nervous system learn that the emergency is over.
Trauma is not a character flaw or a sign of weakness. It’s what happens when an experience overwhelms the nervous system’s ability to process it — when something happened that was too fast, too much, or too alone. The body keeps the record, and it keeps it faithfully. The intrusions, the hypervigilance, the way certain smells or sounds drop you back into moments that should be over by now — these aren’t overreactions. They’re an accurate record of something that was real.
What makes trauma particularly hard is that the very systems designed to help you survive it — the hypervigilance, the numbing, the urge to avoid anything that might trigger it — are also what prevent the processing that would bring relief. The goal isn’t to erase what happened. It’s to help your nervous system learn that it doesn’t have to keep living there.
What happened is not the whole story.
Sartre wrote that we are “condemned to be free” — that even within the constraints imposed on us by the past, we retain the capacity to choose what to make of them. That isn’t a demand to simply decide to feel better. It’s a recognition that trauma, however real and however defining, doesn’t get to be the last word.
From an ACT perspective, the goal isn’t to feel less. It’s to stop organizing your life around avoiding feeling. The technical term is experiential avoidance — the effort to control, suppress, or escape internal experiences — and research consistently shows it shrinks a life far more effectively than trauma itself. We’re not working to become unaffected. We’re working to move toward what matters anyway.
Where the work focuses
EMDR
EMDR works directly with the brain’s memory processing system to reduce the emotional charge of traumatic memories. You don’t have to describe what happened in detail. The brain does the work it was built to do, but couldn’t, at the time.
Trauma-Focused CBT
When trauma has left specific beliefs in its wake — “I should have done something,” “I’m permanently damaged,” “the world is only dangerous” — we examine those beliefs directly and build new, evidence-based ways of understanding what happened.
Somatic Awareness
Trauma lives in the body, not just the mind. Somatic approaches help you notice and work with the physical signatures of trauma — the contraction, the holding, the freeze — so the nervous system can complete what got interrupted.
ACT for Trauma
Rather than fighting the memories or trying to feel differently, ACT creates space between you and the trauma narrative — so it becomes something you carry rather than something you are.
What happened is not where you have to stay.
A free fifteen-minute conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If it feels like a fit, we go from there.