Trauma Therapy in Austin, TX

Trauma has a way of rearranging the furniture of your inner life without asking permission. Things that once felt safe now trigger a cascade of reactions. Your body responds to the present as if the past is still happening. You might feel stuck, hypervigilant, disconnected from yourself or others—or all of these at different times.

If you've tried to "just move on" and found that willpower isn't enough, you're not doing anything wrong. Trauma changes the brain and nervous system in measurable ways. Healing requires something different than simply deciding to feel better.

Understanding trauma

Trauma isn't defined by what happened to you. It's defined by how your system responded. Two people can experience the same event—one walks away shaken, but okay, the other carries it in their body for years. Neither response is right nor wrong. Our nervous systems are shaped by everything that came before: our early attachment experiences, our genetics, our accumulated stressors, and the support (or lack of it) we received afterward.

This means you don't need to compare your experience to anyone else's. If it affected you deeply, it counts.

Forms trauma can take

Some traumas are obvious: assault, accidents, combat, natural disasters, sudden loss. Others are subtler, happening over time in ways that don't leave visible scars:

• Childhood emotional neglect or criticism

• Growing up with an unpredictable or emotionally unavailable parent

• Chronic invalidation of your experience

• Living in an environment where you couldn't relax or be yourself

• Medical trauma, including difficult births or prolonged illness

• Religious trauma and spiritual abuse

• Racism, discrimination, and systemic oppression

• Betrayal by someone you trusted

What all trauma has in common: it overwhelmed your capacity to cope in the moment, and it hasn't been fully processed since.

How trauma lives in the body

When something threatening happens, your nervous system mobilizes a survival response—fight, flight, or freeze. In animals, this response completes naturally. The gazelle that escapes the lion shakes and trembles, discharging the energy, then returns to grazing.

Humans often don't complete this cycle. We interrupt it with logic, social pressure, or a simple lack of safety to fully feel what we feel. The survival energy gets stuck. Years later, a smell or a tone of voice can trigger the same cascade of sensations, even when there's no present danger.

This isn't weakness or drama. It's physiology. And it can be healed.

A gentle approach to trauma work

Effective trauma therapy doesn't mean reliving your worst moments over and over. In fact, charging headlong into traumatic material before you're ready can make things worse—it's called retraumatization, and a skilled therapist knows how to avoid it.

Instead, we build slowly. The first priority is establishing enough safety and stability that your system can begin to regulate. This might mean:

• Learning to notice the signals your body sends

• Practicing ways to calm your nervous system when it's activated

• Strengthening your internal and external resources

• Building a relationship with me where you feel genuinely safe

Only once this foundation is solid do we begin approaching the traumatic material itself—and even then, we titrate carefully. You set the pace. We go as slowly as you need.

Approaches I use

There's no single "best" therapy for trauma. What works depends on the person, the type of trauma, and where you are in your healing journey. I draw from several evidence-based modalities:

Somatic approaches: Trauma is stored in the body, so the body must be part of the healing process. Somatic work involves developing awareness of physical sensations and learning to safely process the energy that got stuck. This isn't about reliving trauma—it's about completing the responses your body never got to complete.

Internal Family Systems (IFS): This approach works with the different "parts" of you—the part that's angry, the part that protects, the part that carries the pain. Rather than fighting against these parts, we get curious about them and help them update their understanding of your current safety.

Attachment-informed therapy: For many people, especially those with early childhood or relational trauma, healing happens primarily through the therapeutic relationship itself. Experiencing a consistent, attuned connection can slowly rewire patterns that formed before you had words.

What healing looks like

Trauma recovery isn't about erasing what happened or pretending it didn't affect you. It's about integrating the experience so it becomes part of your story rather than the thing that runs your life.

People who've done this work often describe feeling more present, more connected to themselves and others, more able to handle life's inevitable difficulties. The past doesn't disappear; it just stops hijacking the present.

This takes time. There are no shortcuts. But most people who commit to the process find their way to a genuinely different way of being in the world.