The thing that happened

No. Never on demand, and never before you're ready, if ever.

A lot of people arrive dreading exactly this: that "trauma therapy" means being made to narrate the worst thing that happened to you, in detail, to a stranger, on day one. That's not how this works, and honestly, that approach can do more harm than good. Healing from trauma doesn't require a full retelling. The body holds and releases a lot without a verbatim transcript.

You set the pace and decide what gets said out loud. We can work with how something lives in you now—the bracing, the shutdown, the way your system reacts—without excavating every scene. Some of the most important work happens without the story ever being told in full. You're always the one holding the map.

Then you're in excellent company. That doubt is one of the most common things I hear.

Trauma isn't a leaderboard, and there's no severity threshold you have to clear to deserve support. It's less about what happened on paper and more about what it did to your nervous system. Whether an experience overwhelmed your capacity to cope and left a mark on how you feel safe, connected, or at home in your body. That can come from a single obvious event, or from years of smaller things: chronic stress, emotional neglect, growing up othered, the steady weathering of living in systems that weren't built for you. "It wasn't that bad, other people had it worse" is practically the anthem of people who were, in fact, hurt. If it's affecting you, it counts. We can start there without you having to prove anything.

Fair question, and I'll give you a straight answer: good trauma work is specifically designed not to blow you open and leave you to cope alone. The old "just relive it until it stops hurting" model is not what we do.

We work at what's called titration—small, tolerable doses, with your window of tolerance as the actual guide, not an afterthought. That means we build safety and resourcing first, opening and closing rituals, go at a pace your system can handle, and back off whenever we need to. You might feel tender after some sessions—that can be part of things shifting—but feeling worse and worse is a signal that we've moved too fast, not a rite of passage, and we adjust. My job is to help you stay regulated enough to heal, not to overwhelm you in the name of progress. You stay in the driver's seat the whole way.

The body stuff, very much. Trauma isn't stored as a tidy narrative in your thinking brain. It lives in the nervous system, the muscles, the breath, the flinch. So talking about it, while useful, only goes so far; you can understand your trauma perfectly and still feel it hijack you.

My work is somatic at its core, drawing on somatic trauma frameworks, IFS, and gestalt. That means we pay attention to sensation, activation, and what your body does in real time; building the capacity to notice, tolerate, and move what's been stuck. We'll still talk, of course. But we also work with the part of you that keeps the receipts long after your mind has "moved on." It's not either/or; it's the whole system, included.

I'm based in Camas, Washington, and I work entirely through telehealth across both Oregon and Washington. So wherever you are in those two states, you can do this work from your own space.

For trauma work especially, that can matter a great deal: you're in an environment you control, with your own comforts, your own exits, your own dog or blanket or grounding object within reach. No unfamiliar office to brace through first. If you're an Oregon or Washington resident, you're eligible, and there's a free 20-minute consultation to see if we're a good fit before anything begins. No pressure, and no story required to book it.

If you're in crisis right now, you don't have to wait for an appointment. You can reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988), or the Trans Lifeline at 877-565-8860, any time.