Frequently Asked Questions
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In traditional talk therapy you will focus on identifying the problems, understanding your thoughts/feeling about it, and learning coping skills.
Trauma therapy can include all those things, but it will also ask you to go deeper. It focuses on how past experiences may still be affecting your emotions, relationships, beliefs, and nervous system today. Rather than just understanding why you feel or react a certain way, trauma therapy helps create deeper, lasting change by getting to the root of where these patterns began.
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That’s okay! You don’t need to remember everything that happened in order for trauma therapy to be helpful. We work with what’s showing up in your life right now (in your emotions, your patterns, your relationships, your body responses) without trying to force memories or fill in the gaps.
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Nope. It is completely up to you how much you share, and when. Trauma therapy does not require you to tell every detail of what happened. We can often work with how an experiencing is affecting you right now without going into the full narrative story of it.
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Trauma isn’t defined by how “bad” an experience looks from the outside. What matters is how the experience affected you and whether it continues to impact how you feel, relate to others, or move through the world. You don’t have to prove that what happened was bad enough to deserve support.
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Therapy can bring up emotions, memories, or patterns that you may have spent a long time avoiding or pushing away. Moving toward our stuff can be really hard (hence why we spend so much time not doing it!). Sometimes this can leave us feeling more unsettled after sessions. While some discomfort can be a normal part of healing, therapy shouldn’t consistently leave you feeling overwhelmed. If this happens for you, we simply need to adjust the pace at which we’re working.
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You don’t! This is why I always offer a free consultation call for prospective clients, so we can both get a feel for how we connect and how we might work together. Even with this phone call, however, sometimes you won’t really know until we’ve met.
A good fit means feeling safe, understood, and like you can be yourself…. even when the work is really hard. You are always welcome to ask questions, share concerns, or tell me when something isn’t working for you. Therapy is a relationship, and finding the right person is really important.