Trauma Therapy, PTSD and Complex PTSD
Specialized trauma therapy to help get you unstuck
Trauma therapy can help you get unstuck from being in fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Trauma affects us on many levels and interferes in our lives in complex ways. You may notice your trauma show up in your relationships, at work, with your behavior patterns or your sense of self worth. I’m here to guide you by using brain based trauma treatment approaches including Brainspotting and Accelerated Resolution Therapy to help you access and heal trauma that is stuck in your brain and body.
Healing from trauma can be a very sensitive and vulnerable experience. I am here with you every step of the way by creating a safe space, attuning to your specific needs, and tending to you as a whole person. It’s hard work and it’s my job to help you reach your goals as quickly as possible so that you aren’t spending years in therapy just rehashing the hard stuff. We will work together to deeply transform not only your traumatic memories, but also your sense of self, your limiting beliefs and your relational challenges. Yes it’s hard, and it’s also the kind of work that will give you a second chance at life.
Understanding Trauma: You’re wounded.
Trauma is the emotional, psychological, and physiological response to an event or series of events that overwhelm a person's ability to cope, leaving lasting effects on thinking, behavior, and bodily regulation; it can result from single incidents (like accidents or assaults), chronic stressors (such as ongoing abuse or neglect), or collective experiences (community violence, disasters), and often alters a person’s sense of safety, trust, and self-worth while triggering symptoms like intrusive memories, hypervigilance, avoidance, emotional numbness, and physical complaints.
There is nothing wrong with carrying trauma- in fact, it seems like most people carry trauma in some sort of way. Some people can easily identify, name and understand why they have trauma while others struggle to put words to their experience.
Most often, I see clients who have had prolonged trauma, either from childhood or adulthood. Prolonged trauma can have a more significant affect on sense of self, identity, confidence, and safety. It often also shows up in our relationships with us either leaning too far in (being codependent and people pleasing) or too far out (being hyper independent).
Through trauma therapy, you will find healing in areas that you didn’t even know were affected. This creates a brand new sense of freedom in life- the freedom to choose. Healing gets you out of your auto pilot and into the seat of intentional decision making that is most aligned with your values and who you want to be.
My Approach to Treating Trauma
As your mental health provider, I don't just treat symptoms – I work with you to understand the root causes of your trauma symptoms and create lasting change. My approach combines evidence-based psychological treatments with genuine understanding of what it's like to be a woman in this world and the traumas that come with.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT is a wonderful add on to trauma therapy because we are looking at what matters to you and how to best align your choices with your values. Trauma can take away our sense of self and identity- thus impeding us from living a life that is rewarding and authentic.
In our sessions, we'll identify what truly matters to you – not what you think should matter, but your actual values. Then we'll figure out how to move toward those values even when severe trauma symptoms show up.
In addition to working with values, ACT also teaches you that hard feelings are natural and unavoidable and that there are ways to manage those feelings when they arise in a manner that supports your mental health and your trauma healing. ACT includes mindfulness skills as well, which is helpful with rewiring the nervous system that has been traumatized.
Brainspotting for Deep Healing
Talk therapy is not enough for trauma healing. In fact, it can be harmful and retraumatizing. That's where Brainspotting comes in – a powerful technique that accesses parts of your brain where emotional experiences get stuck.
During Brainspotting sessions, we use specific eye positions to help your nervous system process and release what's been holding you back. Many clients experience significant relief from trauma symptoms and physical tension during these sessions. It's particularly effective for women because what most women are carrying in addition to specific trauma is cultural trauma- the culture we were raised in that told how to be and how to not be.
Accelerated Resolution Therapy
ART is one of the most effective treatments for trauma.
During ART sessions, you are guided to visualize trauma-provoking memories while simultaneously focusing on specific eye movements. This process helps the brain to reconsolidate these memories in a less distressing way, reducing emotional intensity and the physiological responses linked to trauma symptoms. As a result, clients often experience rapid relief from symptoms, sometimes after just one to five sessions.
Additionally, ART emphasizes the replacement of negative mental images with positive, peaceful ones, which can build emotional resilience and improve overall mental well-being. This approach makes ART a highly effective and time-efficient option for individuals struggling with any trauma related disorder.
Person-Centered Therapy: You Are the Expert
I believe you already have wisdom about what you need – you've just been taught to ignore it. My role is to help you and your brain understand and see what it already knows. The only way to do this is to remove the barriers that get in the way. Together, we will explore your conscious and subconscious barriers so we can remove them and open up space for deep healing.
This approach to treating trauma disorders recognizes that you're the expert on your own experience. Person centered therapy is collaborative and supportive. You know you best, I’m here as a guide to help you see yourself more clearly.
Intuitive Eating Therapy
For many women, trauma and food/body struggles go hand in hand. Maybe you restrict when stressed or binge eat when overwhelmed. Diet culture teaches us to distrust our bodies, but when you're constantly fighting with yourself, it feeds trauma symptoms. Many women notice that certain kinds of trauma deeply affected their relationship with their body. Incorporating intuitive eating therapy and body acceptance can be very powerful when healing trauma.
Reiki
Reiki is a holistic healing practice that can be beneficial in healing trauma. It involves the gentle laying on of hands to channel energy and promote relaxation and balance within the body.
Reiki helps by reducing stress levels, balancing energy, enhancing emotional clarity and supports sleep. Trauma is known to live in the body and reiki is a way to tend to that trauma using energy release.
Including Reiki in sessions is a way to offer a more holistic approach to trauma therapy so that we are going beyond thoughts and feelings and tending to the body’s energy, identifying where it’s stuck, releasing it and creating space for your body to heal in the way that it knows how to do.
Combining Intensives with Other Services
Group Therapy Integration
After individual intensive work, many clients benefit from joining my Women's Group Therapy or Binge Eating Group Therapy. Group work provides ongoing support and opportunities to practice new relationship skills.
Intuitive Eating Therapy
If you struggle with food and body image, we can combine intensive therapy with Intuitive Eating Therapy. Many food-related patterns connect to deeper issues around control, safety, and self-worth that intensive work addresses beautifully.
Ongoing Individual Support
Some clients use intensives as a jumpstart to regular therapy, while others participate in periodic intensives throughout their ongoing healing journey to address specific challenges or create breakthroughs.
Why Choose Intensive Therapy?
Faster, Deeper Results
Make significant progress in days rather than months. The concentrated format allows us to follow insights wherever they lead without having to stop and restart next week. This is ideal for sensitive women because it can take longer for you to feel safe and relaxed enough to be able to get to the deep stuff- so having hours gives you the opportunity to do months of deep work in just 1-2 days.
Break Through Resistance
Work with protective parts in real-time as they emerge, rather than losing momentum between sessions. By having more time, we will be able to ride the wave of all the parts of you that may show up, allowing you space to explore, reflect and truly heal.
Immersive Healing Environment
Dedicating significant time exclusively to your healing sends a powerful message that this work – and you – matter.
Real-world Integration
Extended timeframes allow us to practice new ways of being and troubleshoot how changes translate into your daily life.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Intrusive Memories, avoiding talking about the trauma or avoiding anything that reminds you of the trauma (like location, people, etc), negative changes in thinking and mood, changes in physical and emotional reactions called arousal symptoms such as being jumpy, having nightmares, self destructive behaviors and problems with concentration and memory.
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It’s normal for people to doubt they have trauma if they haven’t been through what we call a Big T Trauma (such as being a combat veteran). Little T Traumas are traumas that override our ability to cope and affect our emotional functioning. Little T Traumas are everyday traumas that impact us such as
Interpersonal conflict
Infidelity
Divorce
Abrupt or extended relocation
Legal trouble
Financial worries or difficulty
Loss of a Pet
Emotional abuse, harassment or neglect
Ongoing criticism or feeling unworthy
Chronic Stress
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I often work with clients who have had childhood traumas without necessarily even labeling them as such. It’s common for people to minimize painful events in their childhood, so I always do an assessment looking for the 7 most common childhood traumas:
Physical, sexual, or emotional abuse
Physical or emotional neglect
Witnessing domestic violence
Living with someone with a mental illness
Substance use/abuse
A relative being incarcerated
Parental separation/divorce
We do a thorough intake assessing traumas. This assessment is one part of a comprehensive review.
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Great Question! In combination with my general intake form and diagnostic assessment form, we will sit down and work through 5 pages together:
Setting goals: it’s very important in trauma therapy, or therapy in general, to come up with goals together. This helps keep us on track and also is very rewarding and motivating when you start to see and experience meeting each goal
ACES questionnaire: also called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey. This is a short assessment of childhood traumas listed in the question above.
Listing all traumas from both childhood and adulthood. This can be challenging for people, so we can take our time on this so that you feel supported and safe. This is not only valuable for me as the therapist, but for you the client as well because it shows you a timeline of the adverse events in your life and can increase awareness into the impact they have had on you.
Limiting thoughts and beliefs: this is by far one of the most impactful tools that I use with clients where we go through a list of limiting beliefs and you share which are true to you and how true they feel. Examples include: I’m not good enough, I have to be perfect, I don’t trust myself, and I am weak.
We end on a positive page with listing all the positive influences you had in childhood and now. Who or what makes you feel safe, loved, or seen? It can be people, places, pets, etc.
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Acute Trauma: results from a single incident like a car crash or other injury. This results in what most people commonly refer to as PTSD.
Chronic Trauma: repeated and prolonged trauma such as trauma from being in an abusive relationship or being at war. Chronic trauma affects people more deeply than acute because it can create shame, distrust in others, emotional dysregulation and identity issues in addition to common PTSD symptoms.
Complex Trauma: prolonged, repeated and invasive traumatic events that are often interpersonal in nature. This form of trauma affects core aspects of self, emotions, body and relationships. It’s important to note that children and adults can be affected by complex trauma.
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I use two different modalities primarily when helping clients heal from trauma.
Brainspotting: similar to EMDR but with more ability to be intuitive and creative, is a brain based trauma approach that lives in the principle of “where you look affects how you feel.” This is called a Brainspot. With trauma and other adverse events and beliefs, our midbrain has “housed” them into capsules (Brainspots), and by using brainspotting, we access those capsules and process them out so that your brain can integrate them in a healing way rather than keeping them trapped. You can learn more about brainspotting on my Brainspotting page: https://ebbandflowseattle.com/brainspotting
Accelerated Resolution Therapy: a unique approach to trauma treatment where I use hand movements to help you erase painful memories and feelings associated with the trauma. In ART we say “keep the knowledge, lose the pain.” People can feel relief from a traumatic memory in 1-5 sessions! Learn more here: https://ebbandflowseattle.com/accelerated-resolution-therapy
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Research shows that talk therapy is not suitable for trauma because trauma does not live in the part of our brains where language and reasoning live (the prefrontal cortex). Instead, trauma lives in the midbrain and body. The midbrain houses our amygdala, limbic system, neurotransmitters, superior colliculi and Periaqueductal Gray (PAG). Simply put, the midbrain is where emotions, memories, threat, and visual orientation and eye movements live.
The midbrain is older than the frontal lobe/prefrontal cortex and is most interested in avoiding harm, pain, or death. When we perceive threat, our bodies tell our brainstems and our midbrains to react in order to survive. This process does not make it to the frontal lobe where we have executive functioning abilities like problem solving, reasoning, and abstract thought. This is why traumatic memories live in the midbrain and body. Talk therapy focuses on the frontal lobe and can’t access the midbrain.
My analogy is this:
Trauma lives in the kitchen and your trauma is making pancakes. We have to be IN the kitchen to make the pancakes so the pancakes get made (processing trauma). We can spend months and years in a bedroom TALKING about the pancakes, the but they can’t get made because we are in the wrong room of the house.
Talk therapy can actually end up doing harm for clients with trauma because you are circling the drain and not getting better, but instead can be getting re-traumatized instead.
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I believe in treating the whole person, not just the brain. My holistic model of treating trauma includes brain based modalities like brainspotting and accelerated resolution therapy (ART) in addition to:
Reiki for energy healing
Spirituality for healing the Soul and Higher Self
Body focused behaviors such as nutrition, supplements, sleep
Values work to help bring yourself back into living alignment with what matters to you
And “Expansion work,” which is apart of brainspotting where we access your limitless potential, the highest and greatest good and possibility, and your creativity
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I offer both regular sessions and Therapy Intensives. Please set up a consultation if you want to discuss both options to see which one is right for you.
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While the normal session time is 53 minutes, which is the time that insurance companies have said is “adequate,” trauma therapy and appropriate modalities are most effective when there is more time. I offer 90 minute sessions, 2 hour sessions and therapy intensives (anywhere from 4-8 hours in 1-2 days). Brainspotting, ART, and reiki all require more than 53 peoples to really allow the brain and body the space and time they need to dig deeper and access where the trauma is stored. While we can have regular sessions, the healing time for trauma will be longer because the amount of time we are giving your brain and body to do the deep work is cut short.
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There are many ways to set up a consultation. You can use the automatic scheduling option at the bottom of the page or you can complete the Contact Form. You are also welcome to text or call me at (206) 852-3581.
I offer FREE 15 minute consultations. I also offer 30 minute consultations for $60 and 45 minute consultations for $90. If you are someone who has a lot of questions, doesn’t want to feel rushed and wants more time to feel if we are a good fit, please consider the longer consultation appointments.