How do you work with clients with trauma and PTSD?

Regardless of what caused your trauma, you deserve to heal. The only reason I am able to continue in this profession is because I have regularly seen humans heal from some of the most horrific traumas. When you are ready to process your trauma, it becomes a small chapter in your story rather than the entire story. It becomes something that happened to you, outside of your control, rather than something that defines who you are. Healing is always possible. 

You’re overwhelmed by being everything to everyone. While everyone else sleeps, your mind races with worst case scenarios as you dissect a minor experience from earlier in the day. It’s hard making decisions about even the simplest things. Life just isn’t as much fun as you want. You’ve tried talking to your friends about this stuff, but it never seems to help or change anything. Stacks of self help books go unread on your nightstand and following lifestyle influencers makes your self esteem plummet. Life is hard and it doesn’t come with an instruction manual. You deserve to be truly seen and heard without judgement. Your own answers live within you, and when you reach out for support, I’ll help you find them. 

Two people can go through the same traumatic experience and react or cope with it differently depending on their previous life experiences. Some people may not consider it a trauma while others. This doesn’t mean that one person is stronger than the other. If something hurts you, it hurts, and your natural emotional reaction is valid. No one gets to define your trauma for you—not even a therapist. I specialize in medical trauma, which includes being dismissed by medical and mental health professionals, interacting with fatphobic medical and mental health professionals, undergoing surgery, having cancer, giving birth, and living with a chronic illness or chronic pain. You are the only one who gets to decide if you’ve experienced medical trauma. I also specialize in relational and attachment trauma, which is a trauma that has occurred within a close relationship. This can happen with anyone you loved, trusted, and/or relied on, either as a child or adult. Finally, I specialize in complex trauma, including those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Complex trauma is not always the result of childhood trauma. It can also occur as a result of an adult’s experience of violence in the home, family, neighborhood, and workplace. If you have experienced complex trauma, you may experience feelings of worthlessness and shame, difficulty in connecting with yourself and others, and difficulty in managing your emotions. You may feel like you don’t know who you are and that you can’t trust yourself or the world around you.

Are you experiencing grief and loss? Are you navigating health challenges, chronic illness, and/or chronic pain? Do you have parts of yourself that are difficult to share with others? Have you experienced medical or relational/attachment trauma? You've come to the right place. I believe that therapy can be a reparative experience and that the relationship between a therapist and client has the ability to foster immense change and growth. Everyone deserves to have a life worth living, and I am here to help you get there. I specialize in grief and loss, chronic illness/chronic pain, trauma, and depression. I enjoy working with clients who are experiencing a non-death loss (the ending of a platonic or romantic relationship, a new health diagnosis, infertility, etc.). I also love working with individuals who have Borderline Personality Disorder and complex trauma. As someone who is neurodivergent and queer and has multiple chronic illnesses, I draw from both my professional and lived experiences. I am an active therapist in the room, which means I like to provide psychoeducation when appropriate and gently challenge you to see things from a different perspective or dig deeper. I also frequently utilize humor because therapy doesn’t have to always be so serious.

There are many different times of trauma, and understanding how your experience(s) have impacted the way you engage in the world and with others can be really impactful.  Understanding what protective mechanism you use and ways to decrease the ineffective ones is usually beneficial.  Having a space to talk about what you've experienced and creating an internal sense of safety helps to increase a feeling of safety in the world and in healthy relationships.

Many of the people that I work with are use to taking care of other people while pushing down their own feelings and challenging experiences. Many of the people I work with struggle to share, often reporting feeling like a "burden" or that they "have to be the strong one." The people that I work with often have had to be stronger than they should have had to be. Having a space to talk about and focus on you is what I provide.

Our body remembers emotional experiences, and these past traumas can affect the way we feel and respond to things when triggered, or subtly in our daily lives. I practice a therapy called EMDR that targets the negative associations you’ve made with past experiences, helping your brain and nervous system reprocess those associations so you move forward with less reactivity to certain things. 

Hello! I have been practicing therapy for 9 years, and truly enjoy what I do. Working with me, you’ll likely connect some dots about relational and personal patterns you see in yourself (the “what is this?” and “why am I the way I am?”), and we will also explore what this means for you (“so what now?). My hope is that insight into yourself, and a willingness to create a change in your system will guide you to more spaciousness and freedom in anxiety, depression, reactivity in relationships, etc.  I’m not saying that therapy will solve everything. But I do think it’s worth a shot to see if you can start to untangle a few things, or grow in self-compassion and self-understanding. 

I will incorporate evidence-based trauma-focused treatments, including; EMDR, CBT, CPT, and TIST.

Hello and welcome to HOPE Trauma Therapy! I am a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC) with more than ten years of experience counseling individuals, couples, and families. My specialty is treating individuals suffering from trauma, PTSD, depression, anxiety, and interpersonal relationship issues due to trauma. Training received includes: Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST) Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) Seeking Safety Interpersonal Therapy. These evidence-based therapies are essential for holistic healing and wellness of the body, mind, and spirit. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you think we are a good fit. I would be so honored to walk alongside you in your journey toward healing and wellness. I look forward to speaking with you. Thank you!

Experiencing trauma and/or abuse can cast a shadow on everything else whether you realize it or not. For treatment of trauma, I utilize Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART), an evidence-based approach that uses bi-lateral stimulation (aka eye movements) to suppress your fear instinct so that we can help your brain re-process those traumatic events. The facts about what happen remain the same (and you're able to recall them), but your emotional and fear responses will have changed. Clients that have used ART to process their trauma typically say that the effects are immediate and long-lasting.

Hi there! I'm Elaine. I like to call myself a nurturer of weary souls. (But formally speaking, I'm a psychotherapist specializing in infertility and also trauma resolution.) I’m dedicated to helping weary souls who are bogged down with these issues find healing and hope again.

There are a variety of approaches that are effective in healing from trauma. I think there are many factors to consider with any approach as well as what the trauma involves. Sometimes processing in the way this is asking would require one to "relive" the events as part of the processing. There are other ways in which trauma can be managed with a client have to bring up every painful detail they likely have spent years suppressing. It is so important for therapists to assess the type of trauma as well as supportive factors that clients may have. Understanding how a client can manage "processing" is the first concern. I always insure clients understand and can utilize grounding techniques. Sometimes sessions need to be more than 1x per week for a short time. I think a good analogy is trauma is a wound. A wound that over time has at least scabbed over. When you reopen that wound, you need to be able to open it and get it bandaged back up all in a 50 min session. I always insure that clients have someone who will see if the start to "bleed" through the bandage between sessions as it can be harmful and unsafe to take a client back to a trauma if the can not manage things that may reemerge like flashbacks. There are many other modalities such as EMDR which can be very effective.

I have been licensed since 2006 gaining my clinical experience in both inpatient and outpatient settings with individuals, couples, and families 12 years and up.