Therapy for Childhood Wounds, Attachment & Complex Trauma

When the Past Lives in the Present

Complex trauma — and C-PTSD — rarely look the way people expect. They look like you: capable, self-aware, and quietly exhausted.

Complex trauma — the kind that develops over time, in relationship, in childhood — doesn’t tend to announce itself. It rarely arrives as vivid flashbacks or dramatic symptoms. More often, it shows up quietly: in the way you brace yourself for disappointment, in the difficulty trusting that good things will stay, in the part of you that has always felt somehow different or fundamentally hard to love.

It shows up in your relationships — in the push and pull between wanting closeness and fearing what closeness has sometimes meant. In the patterns you find yourself in despite your best intentions. In the exhaustion of having been, for as long as you can remember, the capable one.

And sometimes it shows up in the body: a tightness that doesn’t quite leave, a sense of bracing that has become so familiar you’ve stopped noticing it, an emotional landscape that can feel unpredictable even to you.

None of this means something is wrong with you. It means your nervous system learned what it needed to learn to keep you safe. That learning made sense then. The work we do together is about gently, over time, helping your whole self understand that things are different now.

What This Work Involves

There is no protocol here, no checklist. Just two people, moving carefully toward what has been carried alone for too long.

I work with childhood wounds and complex trauma through a relational, depth-oriented approach. That means we move slowly and with care. There is no protocol, no script, no pressure to arrive at a particular place by a particular time. What matters most is that you feel safe enough to stay.

At the heart of this work is the relationship between us. Healing from early relational wounds doesn’t happen through insight alone — it happens through the experience of a relationship that is safe, consistent, and genuinely present. I take that seriously. The way we are together in the room matters as much as anything we discuss.

Through IFS, we’ll get curious about the parts of you that adapted to your early experiences — the part that learned to be capable, the part that learned to disappear, the part that still holds what was never safe to feel. We’ll approach each with respect and care, not as problems to solve, but as aspects of you that have been carrying something heavy for a very long time and deserve to be understood before they’re asked to change. I also work with adult adoptees navigating the particular losses and identity questions that adoption carries — including the early, implicit wounds that the body holds even when conscious memory isn't available.

Somatic work invites us to attend to what lives in the body — the bracing, the vigilance, the places where the past has left its imprint. Expressive arts offers a different way in entirely: through writing, imagery, and creative process, we can sometimes reach what words alone circle around without quite touching.

Most women who come to this work already carry considerable understanding of their history. They know where things came from. And still, the patterns persist, the feelings don’t shift, the body doesn’t settle. The missing piece is rarely more insight — it’s the embodied, relational experience of actually moving through what has only ever been held at arm’s length. A deepening trust in your own experience, built slowly, in a relationship that can hold it. You lead the pace, and we go only where you’re ready to go.

What Becomes Possible

You have been carrying this for a long time. It doesn't have to stay this heavy.

The women I work with often arrive carrying a private sense that they are somehow too much, or not quite enough — a feeling so old and familiar that it can be hard to imagine life without it. Part of what becomes possible in this work is discovering that that feeling is not the truth of who you are. It is something you learned. And what was learned can, with time and care, be unlearned.

Over time, the past begins to feel more like the past. The nervous system settles. The relationships in your life start to feel less like terrain to be navigated and more like ground you can actually stand on. You find that you can be with yourself — your whole self, including the parts you’ve long kept hidden — with something closer to compassion than judgment.

This is not about erasing what happened. It’s about no longer being defined by it.