Trauma therapy for the woman who has held it together for years
You've already done the work of surviving. You've been functional, capable, the one who keeps going. This is the work of letting your body finally put it down.
Get in TouchDoes any of this sound familiar?
- You're high-functioning on the outside—and quietly braced, dreading, or numb on the inside.
- You feel things in your body before you understand them in your head: your throat clamps, your chest tightens, you go quiet at the moment you most want to speak.
- You know logically that what happened wasn't your fault. You still can't stop feeling like it was.
- Talk therapy has helped you understand your story—but the story still runs you.
- You wonder if what you went through “counts” as trauma. Or you remember nothing, but your body keeps reacting as if it does.
- You over-give, over-function, or shape-shift in relationships—and you can feel it's costing you something.
- You're ready to stop intellectualizing what happened and actually feel it move through.
The kinds of trauma I work with
I specialize in the trauma that doesn't always look like trauma from the outside. The kind that gets called “just anxiety” or “a tough childhood” or “you turned out fine.”
Relational and developmental trauma. The slow, cumulative wounds of growing up unseen, parentified, or held responsible for the emotional weather of the people around you.
Pre-verbal and early-life trauma. Premature birth, early misattunement, anything that happened before you had words. It lives in the body, not in narrative memory— and that's exactly where we meet it.
Sexual assault and the long aftermath. Including the silent kind that you may have spent years not naming.
Single-incident PTSD and complex PTSD. Whether it's one event or a lifetime of them, the work is to give your nervous system a chance to finish what it never got to.
From “what's wrong with me?” to “what kept me alive?”
Most of my clients arrive having spent years asking some version of: “Why am I like this?” The hyper-vigilance, the people-pleasing, the freezing, the dread—they read as personal flaws.
They aren't. They're adaptive survival strategies your nervous system built when it had no other options. Once we can see them that way, we can finally thank them and let them rest.
How we'll actually do this work
This isn't talk-only therapy. It's a specific, embodied rhythm I've refined over years.
Catching the freeze in the moment. The throat-clamp, the held breath, the disappearing—we slow down the micro-second before the protector takes over, and stay with what's underneath.
Talking to the parts of you that learned to hide. There's a younger part of you who decided long ago that being seen wasn't safe. We listen to her, instead of overriding her with logic.
Building the inner resources you didn't get. We use vivid, embodied imagery—a metal box for what isn't safe to feel yet, a nurturing inner team for the presence you didn't have growing up—to build the steady ground EMDR processing needs.
Letting your body finish what it never got to. We don't just talk about anger or grief. We twist a towel, push against a wall, find the voice in your throat that got silenced. The nervous system finally completes the sentence it started years ago.
The methods behind this work
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a structured, evidence-based way to help your brain reprocess old experiences so they stop hijacking the present. It doesn't require you to narrate every detail.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) works with you as a whole person made up of parts: the protector who has worked overtime to keep you safe, the younger one she's protecting, and the steady self underneath both.
Somatic therapy works with what your body is actually doing right now—not just what your mind thinks about it. Trauma lives in the body. Healing has to land there too.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. One of the reasons we use EMDR and somatic work is that you don’t need to narrate every detail of your experience for the work to land. The body holds the story — we work with what is alive in you now, at a pace that stays inside your window of tolerance.
Pre-verbal trauma — early misattunement, premature birth, anything that happened before you could speak — lives in the body, not in narrative memory. We don’t need a story to work with it. We work with what your body is doing now: the freeze, the throat clamp, the bracing. That is where the memory actually lives.
Talk therapy can be insightful and necessary, but trauma often lives below the level of language. We blend EMDR (a structured way to reprocess old experiences), Internal Family Systems (working with the protective and vulnerable parts of you), and somatic work (what the body is doing in the moment). Many people who have done years of talk therapy come here because they understand the pattern and still don’t feel different. This is the work that makes the feeling shift.
It depends on what we’re working with. A discrete event sometimes resolves in 8–12 sessions. Relational and developmental trauma — the kind woven through years of childhood — unfolds more slowly. We set clear goals at the start and check in regularly so you know what’s shifting.
Yes. Research shows online EMDR and somatic therapy are as effective as in-person work for most people. I see clients across California and Washington via secure telehealth.
Where I see clients
Sessions are online via secure telehealth, available to clients anywhere in California and Washington.
Ready to stop white-knuckling it?
Schedule a free 20-minute consultation. No pressure, no script—just a chance to see whether this is the kind of work you've been looking for.
Get in Touch