Trauma Therapy
What happens to you doesn’t have to be the end of your story.
Virtual Therapy Throughout CA
In-Person Therapy in Sherman Oaks, CA
Starting trauma therapy can be a step toward actively changing
your relationship to your past so you can create space for a new beginning.
How Trauma Can Show Up
The effects of trauma can show up in many areas of your life, and those effects don’t always look the same from one person to the next. You might notice:
Feeling constantly on guard, tense, or easily startled, even when you know you’re safe
The past can feel like it’s happening in the present, with intrusive memories, nightmares, or strong emotional reactions that can make it feel as though what happened is happening again, right now
Avoiding reminders of people, places, conversations, or situations connected to what happened
Feeling numb or disconnected, shut down, detached, or separate from your body or emotions
Intense emotional reactions like irritability, anger that feels hard to control, difficulty calming down, or feeling easily hurt or strongly affected by what others say
Physical stress reactions such as muscle tension, feeling shaky, headaches, digestive problems, a racing heart, or fatigue
Guilt, shame, or negative beliefs about yourself, including blaming yourself for what happened, feeling like something is wrong with you, or carrying deeply negative beliefs about who you are
Difficulty feeling safe with other people, including trouble trusting or feeling close to people you care about
Feeling different or disconnected from other people, or as though you don’t quite fit in
Challenges with everyday functioning, such as trouble sleeping, concentrating on things, making decisions, or managing your responsibilities
Repeating unhealthy patterns in relationships or in the ways you cope, even when you can see that those patterns aren’t good for you
What is Trauma?
Trauma can be the result of what happens within you when an experience overwhelms your ability to process what happened. Your thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and nervous system can become caught in automatic responses shaped by your past experiences, even when the experience itself is over.
This helps explain why two people can live through similar experiences and yet be affected in very different ways.
What happened matters. So does the person it happened to.
Your temperament, attachment experiences, mental health, relationships, life history, support system, and the resources available to you can all shape how a painful experience affects you.
Types of Traumatic Experiences
Trauma can take many forms. It may result from a single frightening or life-threatening event, from repeated experiences that occur over time, or from circumstances that affect your sense of safety, connection, identity, and ability to cope.
Not every experience that has a traumatic impact is catastrophic or life-threatening, and these categories can overlap. You may recognize your own experiences in more than one.
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A single, sudden, or unexpected experience can have a traumatic impact, particularly when it threatens your life, safety, or sense of control. Examples may include a serious car accident, natural disaster, assault, act of violence, medical emergency, or sudden traumatic loss.
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Complex trauma can develop through repeated traumatic experiences, especially when they occur within important relationships or over an extended period of time. This may include ongoing emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; domestic violence; coercion; betrayal; severe neglect; or other patterns of harm that affect your sense of safety, trust, identity, and connection with others.
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Traumatic and adverse experiences during childhood can shape how you experience yourself, your relationships, and the world around you. These may include abuse or neglect, abandonment, bullying, exposure to violence, repeated losses or separations, or growing up with a parent whose addiction, mental illness, narcissistic patterns, or emotional unavailability affected your sense of safety and support.
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The effects of trauma can be felt across generations within families. Experiences such as war, genocide, displacement, addiction, abuse, violence, profound loss, secrecy, or unresolved trauma can shape family relationships, beliefs, and coping patterns long after the original experiences occurred.
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Not every experience that leaves a lasting impact involves a threat to your life or physical safety. Emotional neglect, abandonment, betrayal, bullying, chronic criticism or humiliation, painful relationship experiences, significant losses, and other overwhelming circumstances can also affect how you see yourself, relate to others, and respond to the world around you.
My Approach to Trauma Therapy
Healing in therapy can begin when your deepest pain is fully seen, witnessed, and held—with compassion and understanding, and without judgment. I believe this kind of healing can happen within a relationship grounded in safety, acceptance, and genuine human connection.
My approach considers the whole person—mind, body, emotions, relationships, identity, and the ways your experiences have shaped how you move through the world—while recognizing that what happened to you does not define all of who you are.
How I Work With Trauma
There is no single way to work with trauma. I take an individualized approach, drawing from different therapeutic methods depending on your experiences, needs, and goals.
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EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) can help you process traumatic or distressing experiences that continue to feel emotionally charged in the present. By reprocessing these memories, the emotions, physical reactions, and negative beliefs connected to them can become less intense and less likely to feel as though the past is happening all over again.
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Trauma can affect the brain, body, and nervous system long after an experience is over. Somatic and body-centered approaches use the mind-body connection to help you become more aware of these responses, regulate your nervous system, and develop greater safety and choice in how you respond.
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Our earliest relationships can shape how we experience safety, trust, closeness, and connection. We may explore how earlier relational experiences continue to influence your ability to trust, set boundaries, ask for what you need, and feel secure in relationships today.
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Traumatic experiences can leave different parts of you carrying emotions, beliefs, memories, and ways of coping that developed when you were trying to adapt or protect yourself. Ego-state work may include exploring the Critical Parent, which can carry harsh or demanding messages; the Nurturing Parent, which reflects care and compassion; the Adult, which can respond from a grounded, present-day perspective; and Child states, including younger wounded parts as well as the more spontaneous and playful Free Child.
Inner child work can help you understand and care for younger parts of yourself that may still carry feelings of abandonment, neglect, misunderstanding, or lack of protection. From your Adult self, you can begin to respond to those younger parts with greater understanding, protection, and care.
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Trauma can leave your nervous system responding as though danger is still present, even when you are safe now. Mindfulness and regulation practices can help you become more grounded in the present and better able to experience difficult thoughts, emotions, and sensations without becoming overwhelmed.
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Some experiences are difficult to understand or express through words alone. When useful, creative and expressive approaches can offer another way to explore emotions, memories, imagery, meaning, and aspects of your experience that may be difficult to access through conversation alone.
What Healing from Trauma Can Look Like
Healing doesn’t mean erasing what happened or pretending it didn’t matter. It can mean developing a different relationship with the past so that what happened no longer holds the same intensity or influence over how you feel, respond, relate to others, or see yourself.
Whole-person healing recognizes that trauma can affect many parts of who you are and how you show up in the world. This can include your thoughts, emotions, body, relationships, and your sense of meaning, purpose, and identity. Healing can involve reconnecting with these parts of yourself in ways that help you feel more integrated, grounded, and fully yourself.
Over time, this may look like feeling safer and lighter in your own body, responding to difficult situations with greater choice, trusting yourself more deeply, experiencing closer and more authentic relationships, and making space for meaning, joy, and possibility alongside what you have lived through.
Healing does not require you to become someone new. It can allow you to reconnect with your deep, wise, and authentic self—the part of you that has been there all along—and to move toward a life where what happened to you no longer has the same hold on how you live.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
~ Rumi
Related Reading & Trauma Resources
When the Past Feels Present: Why Trauma Can Keep Affecting You Long After It’s Over
What Happened Matters. So Does the Person It Happened To
When It’s Hard to Feel Safe With Other People: Trauma, Attachment, and Relationships
You Don’t Have to Have It All Figured Out
Request a Consultation with a Trauma Therapist Today
You may know that something in your life needs to change without knowing exactly what that change will look like. You may have been carrying the effects of what happened for a long time, or you may have only recently begun to understand how your past continues to affect you.
You don’t need to know where therapy will lead before you begin. We can start with where you are.
If you’re interested in exploring whether working together might be a good fit, I invite you to reach out.