Trauma and PTSD Therapy
Trauma is not defined only by what happened. It is also the way the past continues to organize the present.
What you brace for, avoid, replay, or believe you must manage can continue long after the circumstances have changed.
Those responses may include persistent alertness, emotional shutdown, panic, shame, irritability, difficulty trusting, chronic self-criticism, overwork, people-pleasing, disturbed sleep, physical tension, or a sense of being absent from one's own life.
They may follow a single event or years of instability, criticism, neglect, coercion, or emotional unpredictability.
Why understanding may not resolve it
A person can know that the danger has passed while continuing to respond as though it has not. The reaction may occur physically and emotionally before conscious reasoning can intervene. This is one reason reassurance and insight, although valuable, may not be sufficient.
Beginning with the present
Trauma therapy does not begin by asking you to recount every detail. It begins with what is happening in your life now—the situations that place you on alert, the reactions that arrive before you can think, and the ways you have learned to protect yourself.
Depending on what is useful, therapy may draw from somatic work, breathwork, CBT, DBT, RO-DBT, or mindfulness. These approaches can help you notice a reaction sooner, experience an emotion without immediately needing to escape it, or try something the past has taught you to avoid.
Change is usually gradual. A familiar reaction may arrive with less force. You may recover more quickly or realize that you have another choice. The aim is not to erase the past. It is to respond to the life you are living now, rather than the danger you once had to anticipate.
I work with adolescents and adults experiencing acute trauma, complex trauma, childhood trauma, relational trauma, and PTSD. Sessions are available in Cumming, Sandy Springs, and online throughout Georgia.