Trauma Recovery
Your Body Reacts Before You Can Explain Why
You’re at a table full of people you love.
The conversation is easy.
You’re laughing.
Then a glass slips and shatters against the floor.
Your whole body is gone before the thought arrives, heart slamming, eyes already sweeping the room for the exit.
Everyone else has moved on to the next joke.
You stay behind, somewhere the rest of the table can’t see.
You Smile And Say You’re Fine
But you spend the rest of the evening in a place that has nothing to do with this room, this food, these people.
And later, when the house finally quiets, it catches up with you.
The memory arrives uninvited. In the middle of the night. In a smell on the street. In a tone of voice that isn’t even aimed at you.
You’ve started avoiding the places and the people that set it off.
You carry a quiet, private shame, as if what happened were somehow your fault.
Your Body Isn’t Overreacting
Somewhere back there, it learned that staying ready kept you alive.
It has run that same program ever since, long after the danger passed.
I’ve spent fourteen years doing this work on a state-hospital unit, alongside people carrying the heaviest trauma there is.
Nothing you bring to me will be too much.
I won’t flinch, I won’t redirect you toward something easier, and I won’t perform a calm I don’t feel.
How We’ll Untangle What Happened to You
This work takes time. And it asks more of you than talking about what happened. Your body gives you all kinds of clues about what you’re feeling. Together we’ll start by learning to read them.
When emotion climbs too high, your ability to think it through drops away. So we’ll build skills that bring the intensity back down, until your thinking mind can come online again. This is DBT. It’s the work I know best.
From there, we take that cluster of memory that hits all at once and begin to loosen it. Think of a knot of tangled yarn, worked apart with patience into separate strands you can actually hold.
I won’t tell you what to believe about any of it. Instead I’ll ask, gently, whether there’s another way to see it. We move at the speed your body can tolerate, not a step faster. And piece by piece, we teach your body what it hasn’t yet let itself believe.
The danger is over. You made it out.
Come Back to the Table
One day you’re back at that same table.
A glass drops and shatters again, because life keeps dropping glasses.
Your body still jumps, because that’s what bodies do.
But this time the wave crests.
And then it passes.
Your heart slows.
Your eyes come back to the room.
And you’re still here, at the table, with the people you love.
Therapy won’t change what happened to you.
It clears the window you’ve been looking through.
So the same life starts to look different from the inside.
Start with One Conversation
When you’re ready to talk, I’m here.
Nothing you’ve carried will scare me off.
The first step is a free 15-minute conversation, no commitment, just the two of us seeing whether I’m the right person to walk into this with you.
Reach out today.
Let's Take the Hard First Step Together
Asking for help can feel difficult. It's also where everything starts to change.
I’ll give you a place to speak openly, without fear of being judged, and we’ll work toward what matters most to you. If you’re ready to begin, I’d be honored to walk alongside you.