HEALING FROM THE INSIDE OUT

Trauma Therapy

In-Person in San-Francisco & Oakland and virtual throughout California

Do you feel trapped in painful memories?

You want nothing more than to move forward with your life, but your brain keeps replaying the awful things that happened to you. You might be driving to work, sitting in a meeting, or trying to enjoy a quiet evening at home when a sudden wave of panic, anger, or deep sadness crashes over you out of nowhere. It feels like the past is a shadow you simply cannot shake, constantly pulling you backward no matter how hard you try to look ahead.

So many of us have survived incredibly difficult, overwhelming experiences. In the moment those events occurred, you did exactly what was necessary to survive, to cope, and to keep going. You pushed through. But now, months or even many years later, those experiences somehow still haunt you.

You might tell yourself that it’s “not that big of a deal,” or constantly remind yourself that it “could have been so much worse.” You might minimize your own pain because you look at other people's lives and think your struggles don't qualify as "real" trauma. Yet, despite what your logical mind tries to believe, the pain still lives vividly within you. It affects your moods, your choices, your relationships, and how you feel in your own skin.

Trauma isn't just about what happened to you; it’s about what happens inside you as a result of what you lived through.

The Hidden Mountain of Pain: What Trauma Really Looks Like

When most people hear the word "trauma," they tend to think of sudden, one-time incidents—like car accidents, natural disasters, severe medical emergencies, or threats to life and safety. These are violations of our security, and they leave a lasting mark on our lives.

But more often than not, trauma takes a quieter, ongoing form. It includes chronic, repeated instances of relational hurt, childhood neglect, betrayal, or emotional abuse. Whether you grew up in an environment where your emotional needs were ignored, or spent years walking on eggshells in a relationship that eroded your self-worth, these stressors pile up. They stack up over time until they are carried within your nervous system like a heavy mountain of pain.

All of these experiences—whether they happened in a single, terrifying flash or accumulated slowly over many years—have a profound impact on your well-being. We carry the invisible weight of that survival long after the actual events have ended.

Shifting from the Past to the Present

It does not have to feel this way forever. While carrying trauma is a heavy reality, therapy offers a compassionate space to process that pain so you can step into a life that feels lighter, calmer, and your own.

Imagine waking up without that familiar knot of anxiety in your stomach. Picture what it would look like to be genuinely present with the people you love—enjoying a conversation or a meal—without a hidden part of your brain scanning for danger or dragging you back to an old memory.

Therapy isn't about erasing your history or pretending the difficult things never happened. It is about removing the emotional charge from those memories. By helping rewire your nervous system, the past can finally feel like a story that happened to you, rather than an active storm you are still fighting to survive today.

How Trauma Shows Up in Everyday Life

When you are carrying unresolved trauma, your nervous system essentially gets stuck with the "alarm system" turned on. It is exhausting to live this way, and it changes how you interact with your world.

You might recognize some of these common ways that past trauma shapes your current reality:

  • Replaying the past on a loop: Thinking about, analyzing, or replaying past experiences in your head, wishing you could change the outcome or find answers that do not exist.

  • Living on high alert: Feeling on guard or waiting for the next bad thing to happen. You might notice a baseline sense of anxiety or dread, even when your current environment is safe.

  • Restless nights and physical exhaustion: Having difficulty falling or staying asleep, or being woken up by nightmares and body tension that leave you feeling tired before your day begins.

  • A deep-seated mistrust of others: Finding it difficult to open up, lower your guard, or trust that people won't eventually hurt, judge, or abandon you.

  • Feeling disconnected and numb: Noticing how hard it is to feel present in your own life. You might feel detached from your body, numb to joy, or like you are watching your life happen from a distance.

How Trauma Therapy Can Help

Our work together relies on a deeply holistic approach to trauma recovery. This means two fundamental things:

First, the focus is always on seeing you as a whole, resilient human being who has been impacted by difficult life experiences. There is no view of you as defective, broken, incomplete, or in need of being "fixed." Everything you are experiencing right now—the anxiety, the numbing, the hyper-vigilance—is actually proof of how well your mind and body adapted to protect you when you were in danger. You aren't broken; you're just still wearing your survival armor.

Second, trauma does not just live in logical thoughts. You cannot simply "think" your way out of trauma, because the survival brain functions much faster than the rational brain. True healing requires a "bottom-up" approach. Instead of just talking about the past over and over, we will work directly with your nervous system to restore a genuine sense of physical safety deep inside your body.

To help achieve this lasting, deep-level healing, we will intentionally weave together two powerful, evidence-based therapeutic models:

Somatic Therapy (Healing Through the Body)

When our bodies experience a traumatic event or an environment of chronic stress, our nervous system automatically triggers a survival response: fight, flight, or freeze. This happens completely outside of our conscious control. If you are in a situation where you cannot physically run away or fight back, your system enters the "freeze" state to protect you from the overwhelming shock.

The trouble is, if we aren't able to fully discharge that intense survival energy once the threat has passed, that raw fear response becomes trapped directly inside our physical tissue. Your mind knows the danger is over, but your muscles, your heart, and your gut are still acting like the threat is happening right now. This is why you might feel suddenly triggered by a specific tone of voice, a sound, or a sudden movement.

Somatic therapy works directly with this bodily memory from the bottom up. Together, we start by gently recognizing the subtle physical sensations in your body—like a tightness in your shoulders, a hollow feeling in your chest, or a change in your breathing. By creating slow, careful awareness in the present moment, we help your body safely process and release that trapped survival energy. Step by step, we lower the emotional and physical charge around the trauma, until you can finally think and talk about your past without your nervous system going into a tailspin.

Internal Family Systems (IFS / Parts Work)

All of us are naturally comprised of many different "parts" or inner selves. We all use different sides of who we are depending on the situation—we have a professional part, a playful part, a parenting part, and so on. This is a healthy, normal system. However, when we experience trauma or chronic emotional pain, certain parts of us are forced to take on massive, exhausting roles to protect us from being overwhelmed.

For example, you might have developed a harsh, loud Inner Critic part. While it feels incredibly painful, that critic actually developed to protect you; it learned to criticize you first so that you would never step out of line and provoke a harsh reaction from a parent or a partner. Or, you might have a Minimizing Part that learned to downplay your needs, telling you your pain isn't important because that was the only way to survive a family that ignored or rejected your feelings.

Using IFS, we gently explore these various parts of you. We don't judge them, and we don't try to get rid of them. Instead, we seek to understand the protective function they’ve been serving for you. As we build trust with your inner system, these extreme, loud parts learn that they no longer have to work so hard to keep you safe. They begin to soften their defense mechanisms, allowing you to step forward as your true, compassionate, integrated Self—making choices that align with who you are today, rather than who you had to be to survive the past.

A Safe, Trauma-Informed Framework

Stepping into trauma therapy takes an immense amount of vulnerability and courage. Because of that, it is vital that you know exactly what to expect when you work with me. Being a trauma-informed therapist means that your emotional safety and autonomy are the foundation of every single session.

Our collaborative work is guided by these key principles:

  • We Move at Your Pace: Everything we do will happen on your timeline, at your comfort level. I will never pressure, force, or expect you to share your full story or relive the painful details of your past at any point. You are not required to confess your worst days to receive effective healing.

  • Avoiding Retraumatization: We recognize the profound, widespread impact that trauma has on your mind, spirit, and physical health. Therapy should be a shelter, not a place where you are flooded and overwhelmed all over again. We will carefully pace our work to ensure you always leave the session feeling grounded, steady, and securely anchored in the present.

  • Rebuilding Internal Trust: Throughout our time together, I will regularly invite you to check in with your body's signals. We will use the direct feedback your nervous system sends us to determine the exact direction and speed of our sessions. You are the ultimate expert on your own life; my role is to walk alongside you as a steady, supportive guide.

You may be interested in trauma therapy, but still have some questions…

  • Standard talk therapy focuses primarily on the logical, analytical part of the brain. While understanding your story intellectually is helpful, it often doesn't change how you actually feel when you are triggered. Because somatic therapy and IFS work directly with the nervous system and the deeper, protective parts of your personality, we are targeting the roots of where trauma is stored. We are moving past just analyzing the problem and focusing on changing how your body experiences safety.

  • There is no single timeline for trauma recovery, as it depends entirely on your unique history and goals. Some clients find meaningful relief and a greater sense of grounding within a few months, while others choose to stay in therapy longer to safely unpack deeper, lifelong patterns. Our focus will always be on steady, sustainable progress at a pace that feels right to you, rather than rushing toward a deadline.

  • Yes, absolutely. This is one of the most common worries people have, especially if their trauma happened during early childhood or during a highly chaotic period of life. Trauma frequently impairs how our brains record memories, leaving us with fragments, blurry timelines, or simply a collection of intense physical sensations without a clear narrative storyline. Because Somatic Therapy and IFS work with the body’s memory and your current emotional parts, we do not need a perfect, chronological history to heal. We work directly with how the past is living inside your system right now. If your body carries the tension or your parts feel the anxiety, we have everything we need to help you find relief.

  • No. This is a very real fear, and it is exactly why many people avoid therapy for decades. Older, traditional models of therapy sometimes believed you had to recount every painful detail to move past it, but modern trauma research has shown us that this can actually re-wound your system. Our goal is the exact opposite. We work with a concept called "titration"—which means we touch upon small, manageable pieces of the difficult material at a time, always keeping one foot firmly planted in your current safety. We only explore what your system is ready to process, ensuring you stay within your window of tolerance without ever feeling pushed off an emotional cliff.

  • When you have spent years or decades living with hyper-vigilance, numbness, or a loud inner critic, it is completely understandable that these survival traits feel woven directly into your personality. You might worry that if you take off the armor, there won't be anything left underneath. But these symptoms are things that happened to your nervous system; they are not your identity. Through the science of neuroplasticity, we know that the brain and body retain an incredible capacity to heal, adapt, and build new pathways of safety at any age. As we slowly quiet the old alarm systems, you will find that your true, authentic self—the side of you that is capable of peace, curiosity, and ease—has been waiting there all along.

Take the First Step Toward Your Freedom

You have spent long enough running on empty, carrying a heavy mountain of past pain, and fighting an invisible war inside your own nervous system. You did what you had to do to survive the storm, but you don't have to keep living in the wreckage.

You deserve a warm, human, completely non-judgmental space where you can finally put down your guard, breathe a little easier, and learn what it feels like to live in a body that feels safe, steady, and secure.

Whenever you are ready to stop looking backward and start living fully in the present, I am here to walk that path with you.

Schedule a free 20-minute consultation, or send a message to learn more about how we might work together.

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