Trauma

What Trauma Can Feel Like


Trauma doesn’t just live in your memories — it often shows up in your body, emotions, and relationships in ways that are confusing, exhausting, and sometimes invisible to others. You might notice yourself:

  • Experiencing flashbacks or intrusive thoughts

  • Feeling hypervigilant or constantly on edge

  • Shutting down emotionally or feeling numb

  • Struggling to trust others

  • Battling feelings of shame, guilt, or deep loneliness

  • Feeling isolated or disconnected — from people you love, or even from yourself

  • Having trouble sleeping, relaxing, or feeling settled

  • Dealing with physical symptoms like headaches, stomach pain, or tension

These responses are often what your systems used to keep you going when it needed to. In therapy, the work isn’t about "fixing" you — it’s about helping your body and mind relearn what it feels like to be safe.

What is Trauma?

Trauma happens when something overwhelms your ability to cope, and your system has to adapt in order to survive. Trauma might come from a single event (like a car accident or an assault), or from ongoing experiences like neglect, systemic oppression, or being in an environment where your needs were constantly dismissed. As a result, the brain and body make adjustments to survive. Sometimes people know exactly where, where and how this all started, and other times, that part feels vague and overwhelming.

Trauma can affect an entire person and can show up almost anywhere. This list certainly isn’t comprehensive, but many folks who have experienced trauma often find themselves having difficulties with:

  • Work or school performance

  • Relationships and intimacy

  • Self-esteem and self-trust

  • Emotional regulation

  • Decision-making

  • Sense of safety

How Therapy Can Help

My work in therapy is trauma-informed, which means I start from the assumption that trauma is part of many people’s stories, whether or not it’s a specific goal of our work. Most of us have experienced something overwhelming, painful, or destabilizing that leaves a lasting impact.

Being trauma-informed means I center emotional, psychological, and physical safety in the therapy space. We will work at your pace, but I’ll make sure we don’t avoid the hard stuff once you feel like you have the trust and support that you need. I will offer both encouragement and challenge when it’s needed, so you don’t have to face it alone.

Working through trauma in therapy doesn’t always look like you sharing a start to finish story of everything that happened. In fact, it rarely does in the type of therapy that I do. More often, the “processing” unfolds over time. I believe that aside from directly talking about the hard stuff, there are other parts of therapy- stuff like practicing coping skills, relating to another human, and becoming aware of your emotions are also huge parts of the trauma work. We can work to build tools for staying present, feeling grounded, and reconnecting with yourself.

A Note about ✨Feelings✨

Often, people try to rationalize or intellectualize their way out of hard emotions. This can be another trauma survival mechanism — a brilliant way the mind tries to protect itself. But unfortunately, thinking your way around trauma symptoms doesn’t make the emotional and physiological struggles disappear (sorry!).

Part of my work with people who have experienced trauma is helping them reconnect to feelings and sensations that may have been "shut down" as a way to survive. This is hard! I’m serious! But as hard as it is, it is a process where folks are often able to reconnect with themselves in a rewarding and meaningful way.