Trauma: Working With the Deeper Parts of You

The Body and Trauma

Trauma, anxiety, grief, and chronic stress don’t just live in the mind. They also live in the body: it may be tension held in the shoulders, constriction in the chest, reflexive responses that happen faster than thought, or maybe in the part that goes quiet or freezes when things feel threatening.

What is happening in the body, the nervous system, and the felt sense of experience, is a constant layer of attention in my work. I work carefully and at your pace, following what emerges rather than pushing toward any particular destination. This orientation comes from training in Hakomi, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and Brainspotting. (When Brainspotting is a good fit, I use it as a focused processing tool.)

Your Inner World

We develop different aspects of ourselves, often in early life, as ways of managing what we encounter. For example, the inner critic learned its voice in response to early experiences. Or the part that shuts down in conflict learned that shutting down was safer than staying open. Or the one that holds everything together learned early that falling apart wasn’t an option.

These inner voices and responses are not problems to be fixed. They are protections that made sense when they developed. What changes with understanding them is that we can approach them with curiosity and compassion rather than fighting them, and something begins to loosen.

I draw on psychodynamic work, Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST), developed by Janina Fisher, as well as Hakomi and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. All of these approaches share the belief that those inner dynamics are there for a reason. And that meeting them with compassion rather than force is what allows things to shift.

Who Benefits

This somatic and parts-based approach is highly beneficial for:

• People working through trauma, including trauma that has been held for a long time.
• Those whose trauma responses show up in the body — as tension, numbness, or physical symptoms.
• Those who feel conflicted, fragmented, or at war with themselves.
• Anyone with a harsh inner critic that won’t quiet down.
• Those who feel disconnected from their bodies or emotions.
• Anyone curious about what lies beneath the surface of their own story
• People who want a compassionate, non-pathologizing framework for their inner world.

If you sense there’s more to explore beneath the surface, I’d love to talk.