¡Hola!

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Welcome to learning my about me, but more importantly, my handcrafted approach during your therapy experience, in order for you to trust the process and achieve your goals. 

If you’re wondering if a trauma-informed approach would be appropriate for you, I will first encourage you to understand that trauma is actually fairly subjective to an individual’s perception of their experiences and their capacity to navigate them. Many of my clients might enter therapy, intentionally seeking counseling to address specific events; however, other clients come in with the belief that they "haven't experienced any 'big trauma'"and don't even perceive themselves to be survivors of trauma. A trauma-informed approach essentially means that as your therapist, I will take an account the events across your life span to understand more deeply about the motivation and function of challenges or symptoms we are addressing in therapy.

One way to identify trauma, may be to acknowledge any experience that overloaded the central nervous system, and subsequent dysregulation in the body, which often translates to emotional and behavioral “reactions” aka "symptoms". Sometimes we categorize these reactions as adrenal responses, referring to the automatic way in which the body will fight, flight, freeze or fawn during an event or subsequent trigger. Another way to consider if a trauma-informed approach may be a good fit is when you recall memories in your life that still elicit an emotional response or if you intentionally avoid thinking about it because the disturbance is too overwhelming. It is also important to note that sometimes big life events happen and there may be ambivlance to them; however, that may also speak to emotional supression to survive.  Lastly, often times I explain to my clients that trauma is not just what happened to us but shouldn't have, sometimes is what didn't happen, but should have.

Research supports the philosophy that our histories influence our current reality, and that these memories are not only stored in our brains, but are also stored in our body, alternating our genetic makeup, which influence the way we experience & navigate life. It is with this understanding, that I believe any memory that you identify as traumatic, deserves to be noticed with therapeutic curiosity. In the trauma world, we may refer to negative life experiences as “big T” or “little t” traumas, but I am not the person who qualifies these for you, you do. 

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Surviving traumatic experiences can include but are not limited to:

• Sexual abuse or trafficking

• Physical abuse 

• Racial trauma 

• Emotional or narcissistic abuse 

• Neglect

• Abandonment

• Involvement with the foster care system

• Poverty & homelessness

• Substance use exposure

• Codependency 

• Intimate partner violence

• Death, grief & loss

• Divorce & Parent Alienation

• Incarceration of loved one

Trauma work is not reserved for major life events, but everyday stressors can also be equally distressing.  Other issues that may be worth addressing through a trauma informed lens may be:

• Feeling defective & low self-esteem

• Feeling powerless & out of control

• Feeling unsafe/unprotected

• and a myriad of other challenges