If you’ve had a traumatic experience or have been diagnosed with PTSD, you might find yourself avoiding reminders of the experience, not sleeping or having nightmares, or reliving moments you wish you could just forget.

These experiences have a way of getting locked into our nervous system and encoded with all the raw data from the moment the incident occurred. Trauma therapy is learning to remember with less pain so you can chose your responses rather than being held captive by flashbacks and body triggers.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a trauma therapy that helps connect negative memories stored in a raw, fragmentated state with positive or more adaptive bits of knowledge or memory.

It’s a unique trauma therapy because it doesn’t require you to talk your experience to death or share intimate details. Processing your painful experiences using EMDR means you can make sense of what happened to you and finally consider it a memory rather than a traumatic experience.

Anxiety is as common as it is unique to the individual. Anxiety is felt in our bodies and experienced as thoughts in our minds. Sometimes we know our triggers, often we do not. I can help you learn to sooth your nervous system so anxiety doesn’t control you life, relationships, and decisions.

I am trained and experienced in the treatment of dissociate disorders including Dissociative Identity Disorder. Healing from DID takes time and commitment but it IS possible. Derealization, depersonalization, Borderline Personality Disorder, and even PTSD are on the dissociative continuum. Odds are, if you have experience trauma, especially complex trauma, you have used dissociation as a skill to cope and survive. Now, as an adult, those same skills may have become a hinderance and you may be striving for move control. I can help you figure out where you are on the dissociative continuum and adjust down to a spot that feels more comfortable and gives you the best chance as living the life you want to live.

I am a Christian and offer counseling from a Christian perspective and worldview IF this is YOUR preference. As a licensed counselor, these beliefs and values are not something I am permitted to impose of you so you have to open the door.

I have found that many clients have been wounded by faith, Christians, or the Church and they would rather not integrate faith into counseling but rather find comfort that I know the Christian faith. Other times, clients seek me out specifically because they want counseling from a Biblical perspective and like for prayer, Scripture, and a Christian worldview woven into therapy. What’s important for you to know is that no matter where you find yourself on a faith journey, I’ll meet you where you’re at and provide professional, compassionate counseling in line with your preferences. If faith is of no importance to you, that’s okay too, I work with clients from all walks of life with a variety of belief systems.

A common belief that develops from childhood abuse is that you don’t matter, that you’re worthless. This was likely learned before you even have narrative memory. It could be encoded in your body which means when you’re triggered you may not even know why.

But it’s not true, it just what you learned to believe in order to survive. You may have learned that your needs don’t matter. I want you to know that you DO matter. Trauma therapy is not about increasing self-esteem, it about decreasing your self-hatred.

No one likes to talk about having suicidal thoughts or ideas. The reality is that many people struggle with this in silence or talk about it and are told they are attention-seeking. I see suicidal ideation as a cry of pain, one that tells me just how deeply you are wounded. My office is a space space to explore what is underlying thoughts about suicide. I have experience helping clients move from hopeless to to stability and healing.

Emotional abuse is devastating and particularly because the wounds are visible like welts or bruises yet this type of abuse leaves us scarred nonetheless. Emotional abuse can occur from parents, other caregivers, partners, spouses, and adult children towards their parents or parents towards adult children. If you feel wounded in the context of a relationship with another, I want to share in your pain and help you make sense of the messages that feel true and guide you through the process of rewriting them if you choose.