When childhood trauma follows you into adulthood
When people looked at your family when you were growing up – they saw a perfect picture. Your family is normal, after all. But there are parts of your childhood that you wonder about sometimes.
Maybe things weren’t all puppies and rainbows the way they looked on the outside. Maybe one or both of your parents weren’t as attentive or even around as much, even though it seemed that way to onlookers in public. Maybe behind closed doors, things happened at times that you knew you weren’t allowed to tell other people about. There were encounters as a child that were confusing. And as an adult, you can’t quite pinpoint if it was abuse or not.
There is a part of you that wonders if these things are impacting your life now. If somehow the things that happened in your past are influencing how you feel about yourself now.
You wonder if the problems you have with setting boundaries and maintaining long-term relationships come from how you were treated as a child.
Your anxiety about not being good enough for your partner (any partner) comes up every time you get into an intimate relationship. And sometimes you do things to screw it up.
You find your fear of abandonment gets to the point where you get really high anxiety in certain parts of relationships. Or you just avoid relationships altogether.
You find that you need to be in control. Whether it’s in your romantic relationship, the relationship with your child, or just life in general. Your anxiety and stress are at their worst when you feel out of control.
Help for Recovering from Your Trauma
As a therapist who works with trauma in women, I have seen the impact that trauma can have on a person's life. I know what you are going through. The good news is that I have a lot of tools in my toolbelt to help. I have seen many clients create a better life for themselves after receiving specialized trauma therapy.
IFS (Internal Family Systems)
With IFS or Internal Family Systems, you learn that you have various “parts” within yourself, each with its own unique characteristics, emotions, and motivations. In therapy, we become familiar with and work with all of your parts. Often you have parts of you that are from younger ages and stages that are trying to protect you. But in reality, the things that protected you as a child actually make things more challenging for you as an adult.
We dig deep into all of the parts of you. We learn about who they are and what their needs are. Then we help them get their needs met so that they see that you are safe. We recognize that the parts of you that are engaging in behaviors that sabotage or pause your goals are often trying to help. We help them do the things they need to do in a way that helps you reach your goals.
In IFS we help you to get to know all of these parts and help each part of you to get their needs met. The goal of IFS therapy is to help you to understand and harmonize these parts, leading to greater internal balance, self-awareness, and healing. With IFS, you experience emotional integration and personal growth.
With Brainspotting, we use your brain's natural methods of processing trauma. We activate these processing methods by identifying specific eye positions, or "brainspots," that correlate with your emotional or physical distress. Brainspotting helps you to utilize methods that your body already uses naturally to process trauma. Brainspotting can help you to quickly get past your past. Remarkably, Brainspotting isn’t only about processing trauma as it can also help you to build resilience and enhance creativity and athletic performance.
Brainspotting is a method of therapy where a therapist observes where a client looks to access unprocessed trauma. The theory is that feelings from trauma can get stuck in the body and cause emotional and physical ailments. Brainspotting can help reset the body’s memory of the event, allowing you to process and release the trauma. Oftentimes, this can be done without talking about the event.
Brainspotting is another tool to help me dive deeper into the underlying causes of your roadblocks.
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Brainspotting
Here is how a Brainspotting session might look:
Goals
We will identify what you would like to work on.
As we discuss the issue, I will help you notice how you feel or experience the issue in your mind or body.
Sound
We may use bilateral music, or sound that alternates from the left headphone to the right repeatedly back and forth. The music is generally calming and soothing, but is optional. There is clinical evidence that bilateral sound helps reduce anxiety and assists in the ability for trauma resolution while combined with Brainspotting.
Brainspot
We will identify the eyespot or related "brainspot' by scanning your visual field from one side to the other. Once a spot is located, you will continue to focus on what comes up for you. You may talk as much or as little as you would like, or process internally. I will check in with you periodically.
Proccessing
Toward the end of the session, we can talk about your experience and process through what came up for you during the session.
Hope for Healing from Trauma
Often when my clients come to me they don’t know that they have experienced trauma in their past. But when they graduate they understand what they experienced and they understand that it wasn’t their fault. They have rewritten the story that they have been telling themselves about who they are and what they experienced. They know that deep down they are okay and that they are able to achieve the goals they so desperately want to reach.
