Experiencing physical and/or emotional wounds in your in your formative years poses 2 challenges: it will impact your ability to form healthy attachments to other people and it will likely leave you without ways to cope with feeling as if the world is unsafe.

Addiction can be a way of regulating difficult emotions that can arise from trauma and mental health.

As helpful as it is to engage in talk therapy, when it comes to trauma, the more you talk doesn't make it better.

Trauma is remembered both in memory as well as the body. Difficult memories need to be integrated instead of existing in compartments that get opened and make someone feel as if they are under immediate threat all over again.

There are many modalities of treating trauma. I use EMDR as a modality to help resolve trauma.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapeutic approach that helps to treat troubling issues including:

Trauma

Addictions

Anxiety

Depression

Guilt

Anger

Panic Attacks

Phobias

Most people can identify with internal conflict. Have you ever had the experience of saying “part of me wants this” and “the other part of me wants that?”

As humans, we have inherent multiplicity. Ego State Therapy works with your various ‘self-states’ to find more cooperation and cohesion within.

Founded by John and Helen Watkins,Ego State Therapy (EST) is a psychodynamic approach.

For many people, their early years didn't go as they would have liked. For example, they might have had caregivers who neglected meeting their needs or they received messages from those closest to them that they were somehow defective or wrong.

Dissociation is a protective coping mechanism that can occur in response to trauma.

When you experience dissociation, you may notice feeling like you are:

-in a fog

-not connected to your body

-lose track of time

-feel like you are “here but not here”

-have no memory of things you have done or said

If any of these experiences feel familiar to you, we invite you to reach out. You are not alone. You are not defective. You are likely in a trauma response.

We can work together to find more understanding and cohesion in your self system.