Does your own history keep getting in the way of the life you want?
You have tried the trauma therapies people recommend. Perhaps years of talk therapy, perhaps EMDR, perhaps a somatic therapist or a weekend that cracked something open. You may even have tried psychedelic therapy or plant medicine. You can tell the story of your history in detail and name your patterns before they surface. Then a tone of voice in a meeting, a silence from someone you love, a smell from nowhere or a date on the calendar sends your whole system into alarm anyway.
From the outside you may look steady and capable. You may lead a company, carry a caseload, raise children or care for a parent. In private you scan every room for threat and rehearse conversations in the dark. A small mistake floods you with old shame, insecurity or rage. Some of you work harder so the feeling cannot catch up. Some of you pull away from people, and some reach for a drink or a screen. Mood swings leave you feeling out of control, and perhaps you are far too competent to let anyone see it, or perhaps it is breaking through in spite of your competence.
If you are a therapist, coach or healer, you may know the maps of trauma better than almost anyone, and your own body may decline to follow them. Knowing the territory does not make you immune to it.
And if you are none of these, if you are a parent, a nurse, an attorney or a small-business owner, the same pattern lives in you: a life that looks ordinary from the outside and carries more than anyone knows.
What would it take for the work you have done to reach the part of you that keeps reacting?
Why trauma therapy can miss the part of you that gets triggered
What you survived was not your fault, and it was not a flaw in your character. Trauma, and the coping mechanisms that surround it, are a normal reaction to an abnormal event, one that overwhelmed your capacity to meet it. The body keeps its own account of that experience whether or not the mind has made peace with it.
Each kind of trauma therapy reaches a different layer. Talk therapy reaches the story, and CBT works with the thoughts that keep it running. EMDR works with the memory itself. Somatic approaches meet the nervous system, and parts work, the Internal Family Systems way of meeting the many feelings and voices in you as a family of inner parts, meets the protectors who formed to keep you safe. Any of these can bring real relief, and any of them can leave one layer untouched. Triggers tend to live in the layer that has not yet been met.
One layer is missing from most trauma therapy: the spiritual. Some of what you carry did not begin with you. Legacy burdens, sometimes called generational trauma, travel down a family line, and research in epigenetics reveals that the stress of one generation can leave marks the next inherits. Some people carry an energy that attached itself along the way and never belonged to their system. Talk, memory and nervous system work rarely reach these, and they can keep a trigger alive long after your personal history has been tended.
Many of the people who come to me carry a protector so capable that it passes through therapy intact: the part that analyzes and has already read the book. It is excellent at its work, and its work is making sure you are never surprised again.
Capability rewards the strategies trauma taught, vigilance and over-functioning chief among them. So the very strengths that carry you through your days can hide the wound from you and from everyone around you, whether you run a company, a classroom, a household or a practice. Add a culture that says get over it and toughen up, and many people, men especially, live with the aftereffects for decades without a word for what they carry.
What counts as trauma
Some trauma is a single event: a car accident, a natural disaster, an assault, a house that burned to the ground or the death of a child. People call this big T trauma.
Far more of it is small, repeated and easy to explain away: a parent whose moods ran the house, a betrayal, a divorce, a firing, a hard birth, a long season of financial fear, a spiritual community that turned out to be harmful. People call this little t trauma, and the name sells it short. Ongoing toxic stress builds, and what builds becomes the ceiling on a life.
Complex trauma comes from prolonged or repeated exposure to harm or overwhelm, in adulthood as much as in childhood. Sometimes the cause is abuse, neglect, gaslighting, intimidation, coercion or harassment. Sometimes nobody did anything wrong: years of caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s, a long illness, a marriage that wore you down, a workplace you could not leave, a home with no privacy or boundaries. What these share is no way out and no rest.
What makes an experience traumatic is less the objective facts than how frightened or powerless you felt inside it. Children are helpless by the nature of their stage of life and are frightened more easily by what surprises them, which is why childhood trauma goes so deep. Adults know this helplessness too: you cannot stop caring for a parent or a chronically ill child, and you cannot sell the company that is sucking the life out of you when there is no buyer.
No matter what you have been through or when, you are not weak. Under the trauma, the distrust or fear, you are resilient and whole. My job is to help you relocate your wholeness.
How I work with trauma
Unprocessed trauma shapes how you lead, how you love and what you believe about the world and the people in it. It is often the root underneath whatever sent you looking for help.
I am a licensed psychotherapist, trained as a somatic psychotherapist, and I have worked with the Internal Family Systems model for over twenty-five years. Before that I was a massage therapist, and my training runs through Hakomi, the Rubenfeld Synergy Method and somatic approaches to IFS, alongside a lifetime of ritual, ceremony and neoshamanic practice. You can read more on my My Story page.
Most therapy stays in the analytical mind. It names, explains and reframes, and the understanding is real, and it lives in the head while the wound lives below it. The real work is in going inward: building a relationship with the many parts of you, one at a time, and with the world around you. It begins with the felt sense, the slow practice of turning toward your body and listening. Sensation is one of the languages your parts speak: a tightness, a heat, a hollow, a held breath. Listening for it, with curiosity and with time, is how the inner world starts to answer.
Another important piece most therapy leaves out is the spiritual one: the place in you that connects to something larger and can hold all of this. When it is missing, people go to therapy for years and cannot release the trauma, because nothing in the room is big enough to hold what comes up. I call myself a spiritual doula for that reason. A doula attends a birth. She keeps the room safe, knows the territory and trusts the one in labor. I take that role with you: keeping the space safe, knowing the territory and trusting that your Self, whole and well, is already there and ready to lead. This work is offered outside my license, as coaching and spiritual guidance. I do not treat diagnosed illness, and I am opposed to the pathological framework behind it. The protective systems that build up in the wake of trauma are a sane and expected response to traumatic events, and they do not make a person ill.
Trauma lives in the body as surely as in memory. Mental health and physical health are one system, the way the circulatory and respiratory systems are, and trauma and toxic stress can show up as illness decades later. They can also teach the brain to read danger into safe rooms. A body that has braced for years changes through new experience, and insight is only one of the places that experience can begin.
The good news is that it is possible to change your brain, set down burdens a protector has carried for decades and heal at the root.
I work with what is inside you, from Self and parts into the body, and with what surrounds and exceeds you: the land, your community, your ancestors and guides. This is the work I practice and teach as Neoshamanic IFS. Sessions are often conversation and the deepening inward journey of parts work, sometimes movement or breath, sometimes ritual or ceremony, and you leave with practices of your own, which might be as simple as a back against a tree or wind on your skin. I also bring what an elder brings: practical wisdom earned over a long life of this work. Sometimes what you leave with is a plain, usable way through a hard week, and the practices are not always mystical; many are as ordinary as a walk, a breath, a better question or a phone call you have been avoiding. As a medicine weaver, I hold that medicine is anything that heals: movement, breath, deep relationship and, for some people, psychedelic medicine.
Compassion for yourself belongs to this work. You were not to blame for what happened, and you carry more resource than the survivor in you can believe.
Together we can locate the deep well of your inner resources and return you to rootedness and equilibrium, a ground that stays solid even when life gets shaky. You are wiser and more resilient than you realize, and it is possible to live from the self you were always meant to be.
Who this work is for
Anyone whose past keeps showing up in their present. You do not need a title or a diagnosis to be here. If something old shapes how you love, work, parent or rest, and the work you have done has not reached it, this page is for you.
Founders and executives. You are the person others lean on, and you have built something that depends on your steadiness. Unhealed trauma shows up in your leadership as vigilance, over-control, a conversation you cannot have or a pace you cannot slow. I work with the whole of it, the decisions on your desk and the parts of you making them. See Founders & Executives.
Therapists, coaches and healers. You hold other people’s pain for a living, and your own history is part of why you are good at it. I am a therapist for therapists, and over the years my work has grown deeper than therapy. See Therapists & Practitioners.
Working with me is a significant investment, and I dedicate myself to my clients, so I take on a limited number of people. If it is out of reach for you right now, my Trusted Colleagues page lists practitioners I trust.
Begin with a conversation
If your history keeps getting in the way of the life you want, contact me to set up a free consultation. Tell me what is happening, and we will talk about whether this work fits and what shape it might take.
Questions you may have
Do I have to relive what happened?
No. You do not need to remember what happened in order to heal from it. If a memory rises on its own, we slow down and move at a pace your system can hold, and I watch your level of distress as we go. Your safety sets the pace.
Will I need medication?
I am not a physician and I do not prescribe or manage medication. When I say medicine, I mean anything that heals, from movement and breath to deep relationship and psychedelic medicine. When I say medication, I mean what your doctor prescribes. If I think medication might support you for a time on your journey, I will tell you and ask you to speak with your physician. I also usually advise people to get a general blood panel, so you know your body has what it needs to support you.
I am almost certain I have trauma, but I am afraid of opening up.
That fear makes sense, and it is not a verdict on you. I have done this work for a long time, my own included, so I know the courage it takes to be vulnerable. If you are reading this page, a part of you wants healing, and that part gets to set the pace at which anything is shown.
You do not have to keep living with constant stress and dread. No matter what you have been through, healing is possible, and you can discover the wholeness of the authentic you beneath the trauma.
I have already done EMDR, CBT, talk therapy or somatic work. What is different here?
Nothing you have done is wasted, and none of it needs repeating. Many people bring me the work they have already done and we build from it, exploring the layers it has not yet reached. Often that layer is spiritual: a connection to something larger than you, whether you call it Source, the divine, the land or your ancestors, that can hold what the rest of the work uncovers. The protector that carried you through earlier therapy is welcome here. Often, it is the analytical mind, staying at the cognitive level to guard the tenderness that lives below it, and it has the most to tell us.
Is this psychotherapy?
No. While I am a licensed psychotherapist, this work is larger than the container even somatic psychotherapy can hold, and I offer it outside my license. I do not treat diagnoses; the protective systems that build up after trauma are a sane response to what happened. What we do together is a deep practice of locating your wholeness through an integrated method of healing. As your spiritual doula, I help release the parts that have been holding the trauma, and the coping strategies built around it, so your whole, well Self can lead your life. If you want psychotherapy or treatment for a diagnosed condition, a licensed clinician is the right choice, and you can work with one alongside me.