EMBODIED TRAUMA THERAPY

Is the Pain Overwhelming?

You Can Take Your Life Back and Loosen Trauma's Grip

Sometimes trauma is a singular event, and more often it is experienced as a part of an ongoing set of conditions.

It could be that:

you had a car accident or witnessing someone be mugged
you experienced sexual assault or hearing about your friend’s abusive relationship
your caregivers were caught up in trying to pay the rent and put food on the table, or cope with their own experiences of trauma, and couldn’t show up how you needed
maybe they were caught in patterns of addiction or had relationship issues
you are black or brown and your’e surviving inside of white supremacy, seeing the way state violence impacts your communities
Maybe you’re trans and you’re constantly being misgendered

It makes sense that you are feeling trapped, as if on a loop. You can’t move on from the difficult things that have happened to you. The grief is too much. No matter how hard you think about how you want things to be different, they stay the same. It’s like your body isn’t your own. You’re disconnected. Maybe you feel caught in trauma’s grip, your stomach in knots, dreading your day, and feeling alone and isolated. You feel like you’re on guard all the time. The pain and anxiety won’t stop. Maybe you’re having trouble articulating what you want or standing up for yourself. You feel like it’s hard to concentrate, and you’re not sure what you care about. Maybe things even feel hopeless, and like a future isn’t possible.

It's Not Your Fault

Traumatic experiences and conditions break safety, rupture connection, and undermine dignity.

What’s read as trauma by our nervous systems is dependent on many different factors, but what we do know is that experiences of oppression and material scarcity lower our ability to be resilient in the face of trauma.

In other words, our social context creates experiences and conditions that are read as trauma to our nervous systems and otherwise impact how trauma is stored and experienced.

Trauma comes to live in our nervous systems when we experience something, that in that moment can’t be integrated.

Find Relief From PTSD

Trauma healing is fundamentally about restoring choice and agency

It could be that:

Developing a relationship to your body in the present moment
Learning how to regulate your emotions
Building tools to work with anxiety
Understanding how patterns of survival live inside your nervous system
Allowing those survival patterns to move and complete
Developing competencies that trauma and oppression didn’t let you have (boundaries, mutual connection, resilience)
Understanding the social context in which the trauma you experience(d) occurred
Making meaning out of what’s happened
Knowing what you care about and taking action toward it

You Can Win the Battle Over Trauma

Highly Effective Trauma Therapy Involves the Body

Our trauma therapists work through the body because that’s where trauma lives. We have lots of good ideas and those good ideas tend to give out under pressure. If we could think our way out of trauma, that would be amazing! And unfortunately, that’s not enough. Our story or narrative of trauma is just one piece of the puzzle.

What to Expect

In somatic or body-based therapy for trauma and PTSD, we work with your nervous system to move on from the difficult things that have happened to you.

It could be that:

Practicing ways to regulate your emotions and your mood so you don’t feel so out of control
Feeling into the way that traumatic experiences have taught you to fight, run away, freeze, numb, collapse, appease, etc.
Practice kindness and compassion for these parts that have let you survive
Practicing feeling resilience in your body and building internal resources for the hard times
Safely practice ways of moving into a new embodiment of how you want to show up in your life

Our trauma therapists want you to have an embodied sense of safety, dignity, and belonging that allows you to take action toward what you care about.

Embodiment means that something lives inside you so deeply that it's practiced and recallable under pressure. It's a part of who you are.

You can have more choice. Freedom from trauma is possible. This battle is winnable. You can be resilient, even in the face of the difficult things that have happened to you.