In-person in Alexandria and online throughout Virginia and DC
Trauma Changes you. Healing Can Too.
Trauma isn’t always just one defining event.
Sometimes trauma comes from a single experience. Other times, it's the accumulation of years spent feeling criticized, dismissed, unsafe, or responsible for someone else's emotions. Whether your experiences involve childhood, a relationship, or another difficult period of life, we'll look at how those experiences may still be influencing your reactions today.
What happened may always be part of your story. It doesn't have to keep having the same influence over how you live it.
You might notice yourself:
Shutting down or checking out during conflict
Second-guessing yourself or apologizing when you’ve done nothing wrong
Feeling on edge, even around people you want to trust
Avoiding closeness, vulnerability, or difficult conversations
Feeling overwhelmed by things other people seem to brush off
Waiting for something to go wrong, even when life is going well
Trauma can affect more than you realize.
It can change how you respond to conflict, how easily you trust, how you see yourself, and how comfortable you feel letting your guard down. Over time, those reactions can become so familiar that you may not realize how much trauma is still influencing the way you feel, react, and relate to other people.
Trauma-focused CBT helps you question beliefs that trauma can leave behind.
Trauma doesn't just leave painful memories behind. It can also leave you believing things like “I’m not enough,” “I have to earn love,” or “People can’t be trusted.” In therapy, we’ll look at how those beliefs took hold, how they may still be affecting your choices and relationships, and help you separate what trauma taught you to believe from what’s actually true about you now.
My Approach
Internal family systems helps you understand the parts of yourself that learned to step in when you needed them.
One part of you may overthink everything. Another shuts down during conflict. Another keeps people at a distance, even when you want to feel close to them. These reactions aren’t flaws. They developed as ways of helping you handle experiences that felt overwhelming or unsafe. Instead of fighting against them, we’ll get curious about what they’re trying to do for you and help them take up less space in your life.
You can’t change the past, but you can change your relationship with it.
Trauma therapy isn't about forgetting what happened or pretending it no longer matters. It's about being able to remember without feeling pulled back into it, recognize when past experiences are influencing your reactions, and make choices based on what's happening in your life today.
Over time, you may notice that situations that once set you off don't affect you in quite the same way. Conflict doesn't automatically make you shut down. You spend less time questioning yourself or assuming something bad is about to happen. You can let people get closer without immediately putting your guard back up.
What Can Change as You Work Through Trauma
Make decisions without constantly questioning yourself
Let people get close without always expecting to get hurt
Remember difficult experiences without feeling like you’re right back in them
Recognize when a reaction belongs to an old experience rather than what’s happening now
Feel less controlled by triggers, reminders, or situations that bring the trauma back
Set boundaries and communicate your needs without feeling guilty or unsafe
What happened in the past doesn’t have to define what happens next.
Questions?
FAQS
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A lot of people question whether what they experienced was “bad enough” to be considered trauma, especially when there wasn’t one obvious event.
Trauma can come from growing up with a parent who was unpredictable, critical, controlling, or emotionally unavailable. It can develop from walking on eggshells in a relationship, being manipulated or gaslit, experiencing betrayal, having your needs repeatedly dismissed, or living through bullying, medical experiences, military service, or other situations that left you feeling powerless or unsafe.
You don’t have to prove that what happened was traumatic enough. If it continues to affect how you feel, react, trust, or relate to other people, it deserves to be taken seriously.
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I work with clients who have experienced both single-event trauma and trauma that developed through repeated or long-term experiences.
This includes childhood emotional neglect, growing up with a critical or unpredictable caregiver, emotional abuse, narcissistic relationships, betrayal or infidelity, attachment trauma, military trauma, generational trauma, complex PTSD, and relationships where you never felt emotionally safe.
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Trauma-Focused CBT looks at the connections between what you experienced and the thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and reactions that developed around it. We may work with beliefs you formed about yourself or other people, situations you now avoid, or reactions that made sense during the trauma but are causing problems for you now.
The goal isn’t to make you relive what happened or force you to talk about details before you’re ready. We work at a pace you can handle while helping you process the trauma so that reminders of it have less power over you.
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IFS starts from the idea that different parts of you can have different reactions to the same situation. Part of you may want closeness while another part wants to pull away. You may know logically that you’re safe while another part of you is still waiting for something to go wrong.
In therapy, we’ll slow those reactions down and look at what each part is responding to, why it reacts the way it does, and what it’s trying to prevent. This can help you understand your reactions without judging yourself for them and begin responding with more choice instead of feeling like those reactions take over automatically.
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As cliché as it sounds, time doesn’t heal all wounds. Simply getting farther away from a traumatic experience doesn’t necessarily change the way it affected you. You may have focused on getting through it, pushed aside what you were feeling, or done whatever you needed to do to keep functioning.
Even after the situation has changed, certain emotions, reminders, or experiences can bring those reactions right back. There’s no timeline for when you “should” be over it, and still being affected doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong. Trauma often needs more than time to heal.
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Books, podcasts, and other mental health resources can help you understand trauma and even recognize yourself in what you’re learning. But they can’t know you.
Therapy is different because the work is specific to you. I can notice what you gloss over, recognize connections between things that may seem unrelated, point out inconsistencies you may not notice yourself, and ask questions that help us go beyond what you already know. Instead of trying to figure out how general advice applies to you, we’re working directly with your experiences, reactions, and the things you want to change.