Trauma Therapy

The many shapes trauma takes

Trauma is not only what happens in war zones or acute crises. It takes many shapes, some immediately recognizable, others less so:

Single-incident trauma: a specific event that broke something open: an accident, an assault, a medical emergency, a sudden loss. Often what people picture when they hear the word trauma.

Complex trauma: the accumulated impact of repeated, chronic, or prolonged experiences of harm, overwhelm, or powerlessness. Abuse, neglect, domestic violence, community violence, systemic oppression. The nervous system shaped not by one event but by an environment.

Developmental & childhood trauma: experiences in early life that shaped the formation of self, attachment, and nervous system regulation before the capacity to make meaning of them existed. Often what people describe as just how things were.

Relational & attachment trauma: harm that happened in the context of relationship: emotional unavailability, enmeshment, inconsistency, abandonment, betrayal. Often the most invisible and the most pervasive.

Intergenerational trauma: what has been passed down through families and communities, sometimes without words, sometimes through the body itself. The weight of what previous generations survived and couldn't fully metabolize.

Collective & historical trauma: the impact of systemic racism, political violence, displacement, colonization, and other forms of structural harm on individuals and communities across time.

How trauma lives in the body

Trauma doesn't live primarily in the story. It lives in the body, in the nervous system's ongoing attempt to complete what was interrupted. In the tightening, the bracing, the shutting down. In the way certain situations activate a response that belongs to the past. In the chronic states of hyperarousal or collapse that become a person's baseline without their quite knowing how it happened.

This is why trauma therapy that works at the level of the body and nervous system reaches places that talk therapy alone cannot. Understanding is part of healing. Feeling it shift in the body is another thing entirely.

A trauma-informed, integrative approach

I am trained in a range of trauma-specific modalities, brought together in an integrative approach shaped by what each person needs:

Attachment-Focused EMDR: processing traumatic memories and the beliefs formed around them, held within a deeply relational and attuned frame. Particularly effective for both single-incident and complex trauma.

Somatic Experiencing (SE): working directly with the nervous system's held activation, gently and at a pace that can be integrated. Developed by Dr. Peter Levine, SE reaches what lives in the body beneath the story.

Internal Family Systems (IFS): understanding and healing the parts of the self formed in response to trauma: the ones that protect, the ones that carry the pain, and the ones that have been waiting to be met with compassion.

AEDP: a relationally-grounded experiential approach that works with emotion as transformation, creating conditions for healing that is felt rather than only understood.

Brainspotting:: accessing and processing trauma held in the deep brain and body through eye position and focused attention.

Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR): working at the neurological level with the earliest layers of shock and traumatic activation, reaching what formed before memory or language.

Psychodynamic & attachment-based work: understanding the relational patterns, internal working models, and intergenerational material that trauma has generated.

No single approach works for every person or every kind of trauma. I follow what your nervous system is ready for, drawing on whichever combination of approaches serves the work at any given moment.

What trauma therapy here looks like

This is not exposure therapy. You will not be asked to repeatedly retell what happened in detail. The goal is not desensitization through repetition, it is integration through genuine processing.

We move at a pace that feels workable. For people with complex or developmental trauma histories, significant time is spent building the internal resources, nervous system stability, and relational safety that make deeper processing possible. This is not delay, it is the foundation that makes the work real rather than retraumatizing.

Throughout, I remain genuinely present, attuned to what is happening in your body and your nervous system, tracking what is emerging, staying with what is alive rather than moving past it. The therapeutic relationship itself is part of what heals — particularly for those whose trauma happened in relationship and who have never experienced being truly held and responded to without cost.

What becomes possible

Trauma therapy does not erase what happened. It changes the relationship between what happened and who you are now.

The memory remains, but it loses its grip. The body stops bracing for something that is no longer coming. The nervous system finds its way back to a baseline that feels inhabitable. The parts that formed to protect you from pain discover they no longer have to work quite so hard.

What opens up, over time, is a different quality of presence, in your own life, in your body, in relationship. A sense of being here now rather than perpetually pulled back to then. A capacity for joy, for rest, for genuine connection, that trauma had quietly foreclosed.

Who this work is for

Trauma therapy here is particularly suited to people carrying:

• Complex or developmental trauma histories

• Childhood abuse, neglect, or emotional invalidation

• Relational and attachment wounds

• Intergenerational and cultural trauma

• Trauma that has not responded fully to previous therapy

• A sense that something is wrong without a clear name for what it is

• Physical symptoms, chronic dysregulation, or dissociation rooted in early experience

• The impact of systemic oppression, displacement, or political violence

A word on what this asks

Trauma therapy asks something real. It requires a willingness to slow down, to turn toward rather than away from what has been difficult to approach, to trust a process that doesn't always move in straight lines.

What I bring to that is genuine care, clinical depth, cultural and political attunement, and a commitment to a pace and process that serves you. The work is collaborative, honest, and oriented always toward your capacity to heal rather than toward the wound alone.

Format & availability

Trauma therapy is offered online across New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Sessions are 50–90 minutes depending on the modality and phase of work. I work with adults carrying a wide range of trauma histories, with particular depth in complex trauma, developmental and attachment wounds, and intergenerational and collective trauma.