My Approach
Insight alone doesn’t heal trauma. If it did, you’d already be done. You’re insightful, and you’ve probably read the books, listened to the podcasts, and can explain your patterns better than most therapists could. Understanding what happened to you is not the same as healing from it.
My approach is built on that distinction. It’s experiential before it’s intellectual, it’s paced to your nervous system rather than your calendar, and it treats you as someone capable of doing real work, not someone who needs to be managed with coping skills alone. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
1. Safety in the Therapy Relationship
Before any technique matters, the relationship has to be a place where your system can actually exhale. Many of my clients come in highly attuned to other people’s moods, quick to manage the room, quick to perform “fine.” That skill kept you safe once. In here, it’s the first thing we gently set down.
Healing happens in relationship, not in isolation. The way I show up with you (steady, honest, non-judgmental, unafraid of your hardest material) is not a warm-up act before “the real work.” It is the real work, and it’s often the first corrective experience many clients have had.
2. Safety Within Yourself
Once there’s safety with me, we build safety with you. This is where most of the deeper work lives, and it includes:
Non-judgmental self-observation. Learning to notice your thoughts, reactions, and body sensations without immediately criticizing yourself for having them.
Inner child and parts work. Understanding the different parts of you (the protector, the perfectionist, the scared younger self, and also your functional adult, or inner loving parent, who can care for those younger parts) not as flaws to fix, but as strategies that made sense at the time and can be updated now.
Self-compassion, cultivated on purpose. Fear is a biological reflex. Self-compassion is not. It’s a skill you build, one small choice at a time (see the research of Kristin Neff and her Mindful Self-Compassion co-founder, Christopher Germer). Practicing it helps shift your body out of a stress response and into your parasympathetic nervous system, your body’s rest-and-digest state.
Polyvagal theory, in plain language. Understanding why your body reacts the way it does (shutting down, snapping, going numb, needing to flee a conversation) isn’t a character flaw. It’s your nervous system doing what it learned to do to keep you safe. We also talk about what a trigger actually is (drawing on Janina Fisher’s work on trauma and implicit memory, and Daniel Siegel’s concept of the “window of tolerance”) so you can recognize one in real time instead of being ambushed by it.
Imagery and imagination. On purpose, picturing something, a safe place, your younger self, something that comforts you, and letting your body respond to it the way it would if it were real is a way of helping your body catch up to what your mind already understands. It’s an inner resource that is a bridge between insight and what your body actually feels.
Somatic work. Trauma lives in the body as much as the mind, so we work with breath, sensation, and nervous system regulation directly, not just talk about them. Somatic work is noticing what's actually happening in your body right now, a tight chest, a held breath, a clenched jaw, and working with it directly, through breath and sensation, rather than only talking about what happened.
3. Building Critical Thinking and Emotional Maturity
Something I’ve noticed after years of doing this work: therapy is a lot like learning to read.
You start with the alphabet, the most basic building blocks. In therapy, that means learning (and often unlearning) things that can sound almost too simple to say out loud: What is a thought? What is a feeling? Can you feel anything in your body right now? Many high-functioning clients have spent years operating almost entirely in their heads, and questions like these can feel surprisingly unfamiliar.
From there, we build toward words, then sentences: concepts like boundaries, limits, or codependency. You may already know these words; they cycle in and out of pop-culture therapy-speak. But knowing a word isn’t the same as being fluent in it, in your own life, under real pressure. With enough practice, you’re not just reading sentences anymore. You’re writing your own novel: living with self-reflection, flexibility of thought, and the ability to hold nuance instead of collapsing everything into black-and-white.
I don’t think of progress as “healthy” versus “unhealthy.” I think in terms of emotional maturity, a direction you keep growing toward, not a finish line you either reach or fail to. Emotional maturity looks like self-awareness, the willingness to sit with ambiguity instead of needing instant certainty, and enough critical thinking to question a belief, even one you picked up in therapy, instead of adopting it wholesale.
4. Trauma Reprocessing Therapies
Talking about a memory and reprocessing it are two different things. When you’re ready, I offer guidance in and access to therapies specifically designed to help your brain and body finish processing what happened, so the memory stops firing like it’s happening now:
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
ART (Accelerated Resolution Therapy)
DBR (Deep Brain Reorienting)
Flash Technique (also known as 4 Blinks)
Neurofeedback
I’ll help you understand which approach fits your history, your goals, and your nervous system. You don’t need to arrive already knowing the acronyms.
5. Building a Team of Support
I don’t believe deep healing happens through weekly talk therapy alone, and I don’t try to be the only support you have. Part of my work with you is helping you build a team, practitioners and communities who support the parts of recovery that happen outside the therapy room. Depending on your needs, that might include:
Gentle body-based therapies, such as acupuncture or trauma-informed massage to help regulate the nervous system directly
Peer support and process groups, including Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families (ACA) meetings and other recovery-focused communities
Psychiatric medication support, when it’s a helpful part of the picture
Non-western medicine, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine, herbal medicine, or Ayurveda
You don’t have to build this team alone or all at once. We figure out what you actually need, together, as we go. You can also browse my full Resources page for books, practitioners, and community suggestions.
A Note on What This Work Requires
I want to be upfront about something the therapy industry doesn’t always say out loud: this approach isn’t plug-and-play, and it isn’t the right fit for everyone.
This work asks you to sit with discomfort before it resolves, to practice the basics even when you’re intellectually far beyond them, and to keep showing up when progress feels slow or nonlinear, because it often is. If you’re looking for a quick fix, a diagnosis-and-checklist approach, or symptom relief without looking underneath the symptom, this may not be the right style of therapy for you, and that’s genuinely okay. There are many good therapists doing many different kinds of valuable work.
But if you’re ready to build real change from the ground up, at the pace your system can actually integrate, I’d love to work with you.
Ready to Begin?
If this approach resonates with you (layered, paced, and built around real change rather than quick fixes) I’d love to talk.
Contact me to schedule a consultation.
This approach informs how I work across all areas of focus, including betrayal trauma, emotional abuse, relational trauma, childhood trauma, the mother wound, adult children of addiction and family dysfunction, and spiritual gaslighting.