Trauma Therapy
Reclaiming safety, meaning, and connection.
Everything Feels Different Now
You want your life back. You’ve experienced something that’s left you fundamentally changed and you’re so tired of feeling trapped in the same cycles, the same loops, the same thoughts. Sometimes you loathe getting out of bed. Sometimes you don’t want to be here. Oftentimes you wonder - why bother? Experiences, places, or even people once brought joy now create nervousness, anxiety, and tension.
Trauma rewires the brain and causes chaos for the nervous system. It creates stuck, closed loops that can cause intrusive and recurring thoughts, avoidance, and wreak havoc on the body. It’s awful, and you want to know what can help.
You can go home again… but you can’t go back home again.
— The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
How Trauma Changes the Mind and Body
Trauma lives in the body and the nervous system but it can help to visualize what it does. Imagine that, when you’re born, your mind is a wide open field. The grass is tall and untrodden. You can go anywhere. As time passes, paths form where you walk most often and become solidified and sedimented in your being. Trauma is like slapping the Colorado River right in the middle of your path. It’s intense, powerful, raging - disorienting. It blocks the path you were going down and creates confusion, chaos, and rumination.
It’s understandable to want to go back, to be who you were before. You just want this huge, roaring river to go away. But trauma changes you. It’s not possible to go back to before but you can experience healing, relief, and joy again.
Finding A Way Forward
In therapy, I approach the work around trauma as the work of finding ways to navigate this now unfamiliar terrain. It begins with us co-creating a space that allows your nervous system to begin to rest, like setting up camp alongside the river. From a place of relative safety we can begin to explore how to create new neural pathways, new meaning, and new ways of being. At times this may involve looking back and processing what’s happened; at other times it will involve looking forward towards what you want. It takes time to create new pathways that feel as familiar and well-trodden as the original ones and together we’ll hold space for all the bumps along the way. A book I like for beginning to understand “what it might mean to live again?” is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
