Trauma Therapy for Adults - PTSD, Complex Trauma & Healing
You don't have to tell me the whole thing.
That's usually the fear — that therapy means narrating the worst of it in detail, to a stranger, before you're ready. It doesn’t work that way here. You control the pace, and you decide what gets said out loud.
Trauma also doesn't always look the way people expect. It isn't only combat or violent crime. It's childhood neglect. A medical experience that left you frightened of your own body. Years in a high-control environment. A marriage where you learned to read a mood from the sound of a door closing. Things that don't seem like they should have left a mark, and did.
What they have in common is that something overwhelmed your nervous system's capacity to process it, and part of you has been treating it as ongoing ever since. That can look like flashbacks. It can also look like never quite relaxing, going numb when things get close, or a flat certainty that something is wrong that you can't attach to anything.
With over 21 years of clinical experience, I work with adults on PTSD, complex trauma, and the long tail of painful experience. You don't need a formal diagnosis. You only need to notice that something behind you is still shaping what's in front of you.
My Approach to Trauma Therapy
The first thing that matters here is pace, and who sets it. You do.
Trauma work done badly means being walked into the worst of it before you have anything to stand on. Done well, it means building capacity first — ways to stay present when something gets close, ways to come back when you've gone somewhere else — and only then going near the material. That order isn't caution for its own sake. Processing something you can't stay grounded through doesn't heal it; it just repeats it.
So early on we spend time on what happens in your body and what you do when the intensity climbs. That's not a warm-up before the real work. For a lot of people, it is a substantial part of the work, and some find that much of what they came in for has shifted by the time we get further.
Most of what we do is talking — but not the kind where you recount events for an audience. It's the slower work of what trauma taught you. That people leave. That vigilance is the price of safety. That your read on a situation can't be trusted. Those weren't irrational conclusions; they were accurate for the environment you were in, and they tend to outlive it by decades. Taking them apart means looking at them honestly rather than being told they're wrong, which never works and usually just teaches people to stop saying them out loud.
EMDR is one of the tools available, and it suits some people and some kinds of memory well. It works with how traumatic memory is stored and doesn't require you to narrate what happened in detail — there's a fuller explanation further down this page. It's not where we'd start, it's not something everyone needs, and it isn't a substitute for the rest of the work. If it fits, we'll use it. If it doesn't, there's plenty that doesn't depend on it.
Religious trauma is a particular focus of mine. Harm inside a faith context is disorienting in its own way, because it damages not only what happened to you but the framework you were using to make sense of what happens. If that's what brought you here, there's a full page on it: Religious Trauma Therapy
I've been doing this work for over 21 years. Sessions are online, through a secure platform, for adults in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Vermont, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Minnesota.
What Was “Bad Enough”?
A lot of people spend the first session explaining why their experience probably doesn't count. It wasn't violent. Other people had it worse. They were old enough to know better, or young enough not to remember properly.
There's no threshold you have to clear. Trauma isn't measured by what happened; it's measured by what it did to you. If it's still affecting how you sleep, who you trust, or what you expect from people, that's the answer.
Trauma in Relationships
Some of the most lasting harm comes from people who were supposed to be safe. A marriage where you learned to read a mood before you walked in a room. A partner whose anger you organized your life around. Years of being told your memory was wrong, your reaction was too much, your version of events didn't happen.
Emotional abuse, coercive control, and intimate partner violence leave real trauma, and they leave a particular kind: you may find you can't trust your own read on a situation anymore, because someone spent a long time teaching you not to.
I work with adults recovering from abusive relationships — during separation, after divorce, or years later when it surfaces in a new relationship that's perfectly fine and still sets something off. There's the slower work of learning that your instincts are worth listening to again.
One important limit. If you are currently in an unsafe situation, therapy is not the first step — safety is. I'm a solo outpatient practice, not a crisis service or a shelter, and I'm not equipped to manage an active danger situation. If you're in immediate danger, call 911. For safety planning, shelter, and local advocacy, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233, by texting START to 88788, or at thehotline.org. Once you're safe, the recovery work is something I'd be glad to do with you.
What I Treat
Religious trauma, spiritual abuse, and faith deconstruction
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) from prolonged or repeated trauma
Childhood trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)
Emotional and psychological abuse recovery
Grief and traumatic loss
Medical trauma
Trauma related to addiction and dual diagnosis
Life transition trauma and sudden loss of identity or community
Intimate partner and relational trauma, including emotional abuse and coercive control
Recovery after leaving an abusive relationship
What is EMDR Therapy?
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a structured, evidence-based therapy designed specifically for trauma. Rather than requiring you to talk through every detail of a painful memory, EMDR uses bilateral stimulation — typically guided eye movements — to help the brain process and integrate traumatic experiences in a way that reduces their emotional impact.
EMDR does not erase memories. It changes how those memories are stored so they no longer feel like an open wound. Many clients begin to notice meaningful shifts within a focused course of treatment, even for experiences that have felt stuck for years.
What happened to you matters. So does what comes next.
Healing from trauma is possible — not just managing symptoms, but genuine, lasting recovery. I offer a free consultation where we can talk briefly about your experience and whether working together is the right fit. Reach out when you are ready. There is no pressure and no obligation.