Trauma Therapy for Adults

EMDR & Internal Family Systems

For adults with unresolved or unrecognized trauma

I specialize in working with adults carrying trauma that hasn’t resolved on its own or through previous attempts at treatment. That includes people who aren’t sure their experience “counts.” It does.

Trauma can be simple, arising from a single event, or complex, formed over years of chronic stress, neglect, and mistreatment. Both are real. Both are treatable.

Trauma is debilitating because it imposes a state of constant vigilance that never fully switches off. You find yourself overreacting to situations that other people take in stride. Trauma may not prevent you from holding down a job or maintaining a relationship. But it makes everything harder. It’s exhausting to move through a world where your body is constantly sending out danger signals.

How to Recognize Trauma

Trauma tends to organize around a few recognizable patterns:

• Hypervigilance, or the sense of always waiting for something to go wrong

• Emotional responses that feel bigger or faster than the situation calls for

• Numbness, disconnection, or difficulty feeling present

• Shame that doesn’t respond to logic or self-awareness

• Relationships where closeness feels dangerous, or distance feels like the only safe option

• A sense of dislocation between the person you were and the person trauma made you

Why Insight Isn’t Enough

Therapy can give you real insight into where your trauma comes from and how it shapes your behavior. But knowing doesn’t change how you feel. This isn’t a failure of effort or intelligence. Trauma is stored in the nervous system, not just in memory. Cognitive-based approaches help you make sense of what you remember. EMDR works on where the experience actually lives.

How I work

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is one of the most extensively researched treatments for trauma and PTSD. It helps the brain complete a processing cycle that got interrupted, reducing the emotional charge of memories without requiring you to narrate everything in detail. Most people find it less exposing than they expected.

I also draw on Internal Family Systems (IFS), which helps make sense of the internal responses that show up around trauma. The healing happens when you can reach, with compassion, the parts of you that had to shut down or take over to protect you. These two approaches work alongside cognitive therapy, not in place of it.