Trauma therapy centers the sacred and unique healing needs of folks who have experienced trauma.
There are many different models of trauma therapy. However in my practice, I incorporate trauma-informed therapy as a guiding lens and foundation through all of my work. This means that I specialize in knowing how to guide and offering healing support to those who have experienced relational and systemic trauma, and integrate that practice into all of my offerings.
Different Kinds of Trauma
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Trauma can occur through many different types of experiences. You may not even realize what you have lived through was traumatic. So often folks who have lived through and with trauma have had their experiences denied, minimized, or normalized. Additionally, they may have been manipulated to believe it is somehow their fault.
It is not your fault.
Trauma, whether through interpersonal violence, childhood neglect and abuse, sexual violence and abuse, or colonization and oppression, is never your fault. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you did, or how it happened. You never deserve to be used, silenced, victimized, or harmed.
Additionally, it doesn’t matter how seemingly “significant” or “insignificant” the harm is. You will never have to defend or prove the validity of your experience to me. All trauma experiences impact your body, mind, and spirit. Everyone who has experienced trauma of any kind deserves safety and healing. Therefore there is no comparison of trauma, only recognition and healing for how it affected you.
Trauma Therapy and Highly Sensitive People (HSP)
For highly sensitive people and empaths, healing from trauma can be even more nuanced and complex. This is because highly sensitive people and empaths have greatly increased sensitivity to energy, emotions, and sensory input. It is essential to find trauma therapy that understand this and can offer a gentle, informed healing process.
In my practice I offer a variety of different modalities to explore your healing process. This allows for many different gentle and gradual paths into your healing. I also focus on how your past or ongoing experiences of trauma influence the way you experience and exist in the world now. Throughout our work I include prevention and support for triggers, and de-escalation, grounding, and centering when things start to feel overwhelming. Additionally I incorporate practices to develop understanding, awareness, and gradual embodiment to care for your body’s needs and cues. Lastly, we create an equal foundation and focus on developing experiences that nourish, protect, and uplift you so that you may increase your ability to receive love, joy, and support! All of which are deeply essential aspects of trauma healing.
The Trauma of Oppression and Colonization
The trauma of oppression and colonization is ongoing. It lives in the society of America and its founding on violent colonization and imperialism – and the ongoing, present day and historical, intergenerational trauma this creates. In the erasure and silencing of all the powerful, sacred, and deeply human leaders and ancestors of the People of the Global Majority who have dedicated their lives to acts of healing and empowered resistance. Within the invisibility and perceived separateness from global lives and histories, and the prioritizing of white, colonizing narratives in history, education, the arts, culture, etc.
It lives in the laws criminalizing and dehumanizing LGBTTSQIA communities for simply existing. In the lack of true accessibility and inclusion to the majority of public spaces, events, and experiences. Within the erasure and targeting of bodies that do not meet the “beauty”, “health”, and “size” standards of whiteness. It lives in the toxic masculinity that promotes violence and subjugation, and dehumanizes everyone – including men. In the silencing and victim blaming of survivors of childhood sexual abuse, sexual assault, and domestic violence. Within the denial of pregnant people’s healthcare options and right to choose, Trans* people’s life saving healthcare options, and financially oppressed people’s ability to even access wellness. It lives in the capitalistic society that demands we dehumanize ourselves and each other to prioritize productivity over humanity, in order to survive and be worthy of care.
And on and on. It is the very fabric of the society in which we are living. And it lives in the pathologizing, dehumanizing, and appropriative practices the mental health field was built on.
Healing from Oppression
Since many people who reach out to me exist within multiple marginalized identities, have experienced violence or abuse, and are living with the ongoing trauma of oppression and colonization – as well as experience high sensitivity – I have designed my whole practice around understanding and healing trauma.
These traumas of oppression and colonization live on in the body, hearts, and spirits of all who experience them. They are passed down intergenerationally. At the same time – they can be healed intergenerationally. Healing from the trauma of oppression and colonization is not something that can just happen in therapy. We’ll work together to explore decolonizing resources, seek relationships and community where you can engage openly in this healing work, explore spiritual and ancestral healing practices, and engage in healing somatic and expressive practices to help release the energy of oppression.
Trauma Therapy
As a white therapist in a deeply problematic field, I automatically receive privilege from colonization. And my field is built on maintaining it. Therefore, I am constantly engaging in dialogue, reading, education, and training in my life long process of decolonization, as a person and a healer. Additionally, I practice sacred, embodied, empowered advocacy and activism – with respect to the gifts I have to offer, the limits and access needs I embody, and the call that is being asked. I cannot help create spaces of healing for my clients in therapy, if I do not also help to create change within the systems that caused the trauma in the first place.
It is deeply important to me to create a space where clients can feel able to unlearn internalized whiteness and to heal from colonization. Additionally, it is deeply important to me to create a space where clients heal from the trauma of abuse and violence. Through healing you can begin to embrace your own inherent sacredness, worthiness, gifts, and needs. I am always open to questions about this process and my stance as a politicized, liberation focused trauma therapist. I am also always available for feedback and growth invitations from clients. It is my intention to create experiences of accountability and repair when I have acted from unknowing or unlearned privilege.
We are using a creative, gentle, and embodied blend of therapies to address your healing on every level. We will work together to understand and heal from the impact of trauma on your whole self throughout your life. And we will work together to create affirming and uplifting communities of care for you now. There is no right way to heal. Only the best way for you.
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I offer a variety of services that can support you on your journey:
For solo journeyers, we will work together to build a sense of safety, connection, and embodiment so you may reclaim your joy, self-love, aliveness, and community.
For partners, I offer couples therapy. We will create a path of more clear and aligned communication. You’ll learn practices to deepen intimacy with each other and your own selves.
For groups, I offer Soul Sanctuary: LGBTQ Empaths. We will come together to explore how to incorporate creativity, spirituality, and healing on the path of activism.
I specialize in supporting LGBQA and TGNC folx. I also offer a variety of therapy modalities, including: spiritual therapy, somatic therapy, expressive arts therapy, and ecotherapy
