Specialty
Trauma & PTSD
For experiences that ended a long time ago and still arrive in the present.
Trauma is not only what happened. It is what your body learned to do afterwards, and kept doing after it stopped being necessary.
I completed my master’s in clinical counseling with a focus on trauma and I have worked with survivors since 2018 — first in domestic violence crisis work, then in ongoing therapy. I draw on EMDR as well as relational and psychodynamic work, and we decide together which of those to use and when.
What this can look like
- A memory that still lands in your body when something reminds you of it
- Sleeping badly, or sleeping fine and waking up braced
- Feeling numb, or watching yourself from slightly outside
- Being startled by things other people don’t notice
- Knowing it wasn’t your fault and still feeling that it was
- Avoiding places, people or conversations that come near it
How I work with this
We start slowly. Before working with what happened, we build a way for you to steady yourself when it comes up — inside a session and outside one. Some people are ready to begin reprocessing within a few weeks; others need longer, and that is not a setback.
You do not have to tell me everything to be helped. EMDR in particular does not require narrating an experience in detail.
Approaches I draw on
EMDR Therapy
A therapy that helps the nervous system finish processing experiences that got stuck.
Trauma-Informed Therapy
Working in a way that assumes what happened to you shaped how you are here, and doesn’t ask you to override it.
Psychodynamic Therapy
Looking at where a pattern came from, not only at how to manage it.
Questions
Do I need a PTSD diagnosis to work on trauma?
No. Plenty of people carrying the effects of what happened to them do not meet criteria for PTSD, and the effects are no less real. You do not need a diagnosis to start.
Will I have to talk through the worst of it?
Not in detail, and not before you are ready. With EMDR I need enough to identify the memory and the belief attached to it, not the full account.
Interested in working together?
Online sessions for adults in Pennsylvania and Virginia.