Trauma Therapy

For when the thing that happened is over, but your body didn't get the memo.

You're functional. That's the part nobody warns you about. You go to work, you answer texts, you keep the plants mostly alive — and underneath all of it there's a low hum of bracing, like you're waiting for a door to slam that already slammed years ago. Maybe you can name exactly what happened. Maybe it's foggier than that, a collection of moments that don't add up to a story you'd call "trauma" out loud because surely other people had it worse. Both of those are welcome here. You don't need a dramatic enough origin story to deserve care.

Trauma isn't really about the event. It's about what your nervous system had to do to survive it, and how those survival strategies kept running long after the danger passed. The hypervigilance that once kept you safe is now just exhausting. The numbness that protected you from feeling too much is now keeping you from feeling much of anything. Your body has been doing heroic, unpaid overtime on your behalf. We're here to help it finally clock out.

What this can look like in real life

Trauma rarely announces itself. More often it shows up disguised as ordinary problems. Some of the ways it shows up:

• "I'm fine until I'm suddenly not." You're calm, then a tone of voice or a smell or a particular silence drops you into a reaction that's three sizes too big for the moment — and then you spend the next hour embarrassed about it.

• Sleep that won't cooperate. Either you can't fall asleep because your brain picks 11pm to review the threat list, or you sleep and wake up just as tired, like rest can't quite land.

• The flinch and the freeze. Conflict makes you go blank, agreeable, or strangely far away. You think of what you wanted to say about four hours later.

• Hyper-independence dressed as a personality trait. "I just don't really need people" — except needing people once cost you something, and your body decided never again.

• Bracing for impact in safe rooms. Your shoulders live near your ears. You scan exits. You read faces for the weather before you read them for anything else.

• The body keeping score. Stomach issues, tension headaches, a jaw that's basically granite — the medical workups come back "normal," but you know something is carrying a load.

If a few of those made you go oh — that's worth paying attention to, not arguing yourself out of.

How we work with trauma here

Soma Roots Therapy is a somatic, trauma-specialized practice — owner, Del Knight, is a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (CCTP-II) — which is a credential-y way of saying we don't treat trauma as a story to be retold until it stops hurting. We work with the nervous system that's holding it. We go at the pace your body can actually tolerate, because re-traumatizing you faster is not healing, it's just speed.

Decolonial and anti-oppression, in practice. A lot of trauma isn't a single event — it's the long weather of living in systems that were never built for your safety. Racism, transphobia, ableism, poverty, and the ambient stress of being "other" leave real marks on a nervous system. We don't pathologize you for responding sanely to unjust conditions. Your symptoms are not evidence that something is wrong with you; often they're evidence that something was wrong around you, and you adapted. We hold the personal and the political in the same hand.

You are the expert on you. You decide what we touch and when. You can say "not today," change your mind, ask why we're doing something, or tell us we missed the mark — and we'll take accountability and recalibrate rather than double down. Healing built on more powerlessness isn't healing. (We're humans, not healing robots, and we'll prove it by occasionally being delightfully imperfect.)

Sustainable, not a boot camp. We're not interested in a dramatic breakthrough that leaves you wrecked for a week. We want change your future self can actually live inside. That means rest, laughter, and feet-on-the-floor moments count as real work — right alongside the grief.

Frequently Asked Questions