Sometimes Healing Happens One Layer at a Time
Trauma isn’t always one catastrophic event. Sometimes it’s obvious: sexual assault, abuse, violence, a serious accident, sudden loss, or another frightening experience. Other times, it develops through years of family conflict, neglect, instability, rejection, or experiences that left you feeling unsafe.
And sometimes you don’t think of what happened as trauma at all.
You simply know that something from the past keeps showing up in the present.
What Is Trauma—and What Isn’t It?
Not every painful or difficult experience is necessarily trauma. Disappointment, loss, conflict, and rejection are all part of being human.
Trauma becomes important in therapy when experiences from the past continue to influence how you think, feel, relate to others, experience your body, or respond to the world around you.
You may understand perfectly well why you feel the way you do—and still find yourself reacting in ways you can’t simply think yourself out of.
Trauma Isn't Only an Intellectual Experience
We can sometimes intellectualize our way around trauma without actually moving through it. You may have told the story a hundred times. You may understand your childhood, your family, or what happened to you better than anyone. But understanding something intellectually isn't always the same as processing it emotionally. Traumatic experiences can continue to show up through the nervous system and body—through tension, shutting down, feeling disconnected, becoming overwhelmed, or reacting to something before you fully understand why.
Part of our work is learning to notice those experiences rather than immediately explaining them away. Sometimes that means allowing yourself to feel your way through something rather than think your way through it.
And we don't always need a specific agenda. Sometimes we follow what emerges and see where it takes us.
Peeling Back the Layers
I sometimes think of trauma therapy as peeling the layers of an onion. We don't necessarily start with the deepest or most painful experience.
We begin with what's happening now. As we explore it, another layer may appear. Underneath anxiety might be fear. Underneath anger might be hurt. Underneath perfectionism might be shame. Underneath difficulty trusting someone might be an experience that taught you it wasn't safe to trust. We don't have to peel every layer at once.
Trauma Can Take Many Forms
I work with adults who have experienced sexual assault and sexual trauma, childhood abuse or neglect, family trauma, difficult or unpredictable family environments, relationship trauma, accidents, loss, bullying, and other overwhelming experiences.
Family trauma can be especially complicated because there may not be one event you can point to. Instead, years of experiences may have shaped how you learned to protect yourself, connect with others, or manage emotions.
You can love your family and still recognize that parts of your experience affected you.
My Approach to Trauma Therapy
There isn't one way to process trauma.
I incorporate Internal Family Systems (IFS) to help explore the parts of you that may have learned to protect you through avoidance, anger, control, shutting down, or other strategies.
I'm also an EMDRIA Certified EMDR Therapist and use EMDR when appropriate to help work with memories and experiences that continue to feel emotionally unresolved.
Sometimes we'll use EMDR. Sometimes we'll use IFS. Sometimes we'll talk. And sometimes we'll simply slow down and pay attention to what you're experiencing emotionally and physically.
You Don't Have to Tell Me Everything at Once
Trauma therapy doesn't require walking into your first session and immediately telling me the most painful things that have ever happened to you. You control what you share and when you share it.
There is no prize for reaching the deepest layer first. We'll work at a pace that allows us to understand what happened without losing sight of the person you are today.
Ready to Start Peeling Back the Layers?
Your past may help explain parts of you, but it doesn't have to define you.
I provide trauma therapy primarily through secure telehealth to adults throughout New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Florida, and Pennsylvania, with limited in-person availability.
If experiences from your past continue to affect your life today, contact me and let's talk about what therapy might look like for you.