Complex PTSD Therapy

Healing from childhood trauma and its lasting impact.

Complex PTSD

The Emotional World: Living with Complex PTSD

Growing up with emotional neglect, abuse, or other forms of childhood trauma can leave deep and lasting effects. For many people living with complex PTSD, life can feel confusing. You might struggle with feelings of loneliness, anxiety, or depression, and wonder why emotions can feel so overwhelming.

It can be especially confusing and painful when those you grew up with won’t acknowledge your experience of what happened, or when they can’t offer the emotional support you need. Healing from childhood trauma often means facing truths that are both liberating and unsettling, yet it can also bring heartbreak when others minimize your experience or take advantage of your vulnerability.

Therapy for complex PTSD offers a space where your story can be heard, with your feelings validated, and your healing supported, without judgment, dismissal, or avoidance. Understanding the impact of your past, and being heard, can bring relief.

Our Childhoods Matter

For some, it’s easy to say “just get over it.” But childhood trauma isn’t that simple.

Maybe you’re just beginning to understand what you experienced growing up. Maybe you’re worn down by stress, health concerns, or emotional flashbacks. Maybe you’re tired of feeling dismissed or denied by family members who don’t acknowledge your reality, and can’t seem to understand. You want to be taken seriously.

How Childhood Trauma Shapes Our Lives

Childhood trauma creates its own bubble, and makes it extremely hard to know what’s best for ourselves. It impacts how we relate to others, our sense of who we are, and changes how our nervous system responds to everyday life.

Trauma can confuse our relationships. It can cause us to stay in unhealthy situations, seek love from unavailable people, or experience anxiety and hurt in connections that should feel safe.

Trauma and Identity

Do you find it difficult to make decisions, and spend inordinate amounts of time mulling them over? Do you often defer to other people to make choices? Maybe you find it hard to even have an opinion or preference over things, and instead find it easier to go with whatever is happening in the moment.

Do you often feel powerless or without a sense of purpose? Do depression and anxiety dominate daily life? Trauma can make even the most mundane and simple aspects of our lives feel like mountains to climb over.

Trauma can impact our sense of who we are, and how we want to present ourselves to the outside world. If you feel numb, or confused as to who you want to be as you explore your life, therapy can help.

Understanding Complex PTSD

Complex PTSD develops from chronic, repeated experiences of childhood trauma, and causes long-term changes in the brain and nervous system. It starts from growing up in an environment that was repeatedly perceived as dangerous, neglectful, or harmful. This can lead to:

  • Overactive fight-or-flight responses (hyperarousal)

  • Underactive or numb responses (hypoarousal)

  • Confusing what is safe and what is dangerous in everyday life

When our minds and bodies were wired to feel our home environments or loved ones as threats, it can cause adult life to feel disorienting or unsafe.

Symptoms of Complex PTSD I Work With

  • Dissociation (feeling disconnected from yourself or your life)

  • Shame and an inner critic

  • Hypervigilance and chronic stress

  • Memory loss related to trauma

  • Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn survival responses

  • Codependency and relationship struggles

If you find yourself going above and beyond in relationships, therapy can help create a new context around independence, healing shame, and restoring self-worth.

My Trauma-Focused Approach to Healing

Healing complex trauma requires more than talk therapy. It requires a multi-faceted, nuanced process. My approach is:

  • Trauma-informed and relational: Honoring your pace and lived experience.

  • Somatic and nervous system oriented: Addressing mind-body connections.

  • Attachment-based: Rebuilding safety and trust in relationship.

  • EMDR-informed: Utilizing evidence-based trauma processing techniques.

I’m here to listen to your story with intention and commitment, supporting your healing journey with compassion and respect for your strengths and coping skills.

What Healing Looks Like

Healing starts with building a sense of trust in session. At its core, this is a relational process. I advocate for safety and consistency, and understand the sensitivities around complex PTSD and how it affects you. If relationships don’t typically feel safe, this is where we will start.

What are the emotions you feel in session? What experiences you are having? There is inherent value in finding space to discuss how you experience therapy and what comes up for you.

Healing Is Possible

You don’t have to navigate this alone.

I offer online and in-person therapy for Complex PTSD with a focus on safety, regulation, and building trust.

If you’re ready to take the next step, reach out to schedule a free consultation call.

Start Healing Today — Book a Free Consultation

FAQs

  • Therapy geared towards complex trauma starts with a relational and collaborative approach. Initial sessions are built on fostering trust, where following sessions may take a more focused approach on alleviating symptoms that you are experiencing. The conversations around your therapy are ongoing, and this is a process that is organic.

  • Childhood trauma often involves complex aspects that impact multiple points of a person’s experience. While we work on symptoms you may be experiencing, broader discussions may gradually take place from relational and body-based approaches. While there is no quick fix to childhood trauma, there is healing that gradually takes place over time with developing feelings of safety and trust.

  • As therapy progresses, symptoms and experiences from the past may come up. I encourage discussions around your experiences in therapy, and the process may not always feel straightforward or easy. If you ever feel worse during therapy, I encourage discussions around this to promote trust.

  • I will always check in with you, to understand how you feel during session as well as outside of session. I understand the impacts of suggestions on the therapeutic process, which is why I believe that you are the expert to your own lived experience. While I may invite you into trying therapies or processes, they will always be invitations, never demanded.