Trauma Therapy
Trauma therapy in Portland, Oregon
If you’re reading this page, you already know that the effects of trauma can touch every aspect of your life.
I don’t have to tell you about the energy spent trying to fend off another intrusive memory, the cloud of shame that sits over your shoulder ready to be activated at a moment’s notice, the crushing disappointment when you find yourself repeating another dysfunctional relationship pattern you thought you’d shaken off, the intense reactions to little things, the feeling that some crucial sense of vitality or joy is missing in your life, or the fear that deep down, you’re really an awful person.
I don’t have to explain to you how trauma can make your world feel so small, and you can feel so stuck inside that smallness.
Many of my clients come to therapy having lived this way most of their lives, and with only a sliver of hope that something different is possible.
If you’re reading this, that sliver of hope is probably what brought you here - a vision, even if it’s hazy, of the lighter, freer version of yourself that you long to be.
Trauma work can be about many things.
Here, it’s about getting you free.
My treatment focus is complex interpersonal trauma (long-term, repeated instances of harm caused by another person or people, usually beginning in childhood.)
Most of the clients I work with have at least some childhood trauma, and some a whole lot. While the nature of childhood trauma is that you’re never quite sure who you’d be without it, by processing your trauma and confronting the truth of it directly, you’ll be showing up now as the adult the child version of you needed. Helping clients do this - and watching their lives open up as they get free from the burdens of a difficult childhood - is still, after many years of doing this work, one of my greatest passions. I never get tired of it.
I also have experience and interest in working with clients who are seeking therapy for:
Traumatic grief & loss
Isolated incidences of interpersonal trauma
Medical trauma
Trauma related to intimate partner violence
Trauma related to accidents & natural disasters
Trauma related to having perpetrated harm
For all forms of trauma, I use exposure-based methods of treatment. In the context of trauma therapy, “exposure” means that we will be working directly with your traumatic memories. This is the part of therapy I find clients are usually the most anxious about and the part that brings the most benefit.
If you’re worried about how this will work because your memories are fragmented or fuzzy, or because you have so many traumatic memories you don’t see how we could possibly get to processing all of them - this is true for many of my clients, and I have extensive experience tailoring the process of memory work to situations like yours.
Conversely, if you’re thinking “but I’ve talked about my trauma a million times and it hasn’t done anything” - not like this. To learn more about my approach and how MBNET (the modality I developed and use with clients) is different, click here.
