Sometimes life changes us in ways we didn’t choose.

The death of someone you love. A frightening diagnosis. The end of a relationship. A betrayal. An accident. A childhood in which you didn’t feel safe, protected, or understood.

Some experiences create a clear dividing line between before and after. Others happen slowly, over years, and we may not fully understand their impact until much later.

Trauma and loss can change the way you experience yourself, your relationships, and the world around you. You may feel anxious or on alert much of the time. You may find yourself anticipating what could go wrong, struggling to relax, or reacting strongly to things that other people seem able to brush off.

Or you may have become very good at functioning.

You go to work. You take care of people. You get things done. From the outside, your life may look perfectly fine. But inside, you may feel overwhelmed, lonely, angry, frightened, numb, or simply exhausted from holding everything together.

You don’t have to “get over it.”

Our culture isn’t particularly comfortable with grief or pain. There can be enormous pressure to recover, move on, stay positive, or return to the person you were before something difficult happened.

But some experiences aren’t things we simply get over.

Loss can include the death of someone we love, but it can also include the loss of a relationship, a pet, our health, a sense of safety, a hoped-for future, or even a version of ourselves we thought we would always be.

And trauma doesn’t always come from one catastrophic event. Sometimes it develops through experiences that happened repeatedly, particularly early in life. Growing up feeling unsafe, unseen, criticized, rejected, or responsible for other people’s emotions can leave lasting marks.

You may have learned ways of protecting yourself that made perfect sense then but aren’t serving you as well now.

Therapy can help you understand those patterns with compassion rather than judgment.

When the past is still present

One of the difficult things about trauma is that something can be over and still feel very much alive.

A current relationship, conflict, loss, or period of uncertainty can awaken feelings connected to much earlier experiences. You may know intellectually that the present is different, while your body and emotions respond as though an old danger is happening all over again.

This is one reason I believe therapy needs to include curiosity about both your present life and your history.

Together, we can begin to understand not simply what is wrong? but something much more useful:

What happened to you? What did you learn from it? How did you adapt? And what do you need now?

Grief needs somewhere to go.

When we’re grieving, the people around us often want to make us feel better. Usually this comes from love. But sometimes what we need isn’t to be cheered up, given advice, or reminded to look on the bright side.

Sometimes we need someone who can sit with us in the pain.

Therapy can provide a place where you don’t have to protect anyone else from how you really feel. You can talk about the person you lost for as long as you need to. You can be angry. You can be scared. You can miss the life you had before something changed. You can even laugh and feel joy without it meaning that your loss no longer matters.

Healing doesn’t require forgetting what happened or leaving someone you loved behind.

Over time, we can work toward making room for what you’ve experienced while also making room for the life that is still here.

Trauma-informed therapy with me

My approach to therapy is strengths-based, trauma-informed, relational, and grounded in attachment and Modern Psychoanalytic theories.

That means I’m interested not only in your symptoms but in you—your history, relationships, identity, strengths, defenses, fears, and the ways you’ve learned to survive difficult experiences.

We’ll pay attention to what happens in your mind, your body, your relationships, and between the two of us in therapy.

I won’t expect you to tell me everything before you’re ready. And I don’t believe healing comes from forcing yourself to revisit painful experiences over and over again.

Instead, we’ll work toward creating enough safety and trust that difficult things can gradually be thought about, felt, understood, and integrated.

Therapy with me can be supportive, but it can also be challenging. I may help you notice patterns that are difficult to see on your own. We’ll get curious about the ways your past may be showing up in your present—and about the possibilities you have now that you may not have had then.

You are more than what has happened to you.

Trauma and loss become part of our stories. But they don’t have to become the entirety of them.

The goal isn’t to return to exactly who you were before. Sometimes that isn’t possible—and sometimes it isn’t even what we ultimately want.

Instead, therapy can help you develop a deeper understanding of yourself, greater compassion for the ways you’ve learned to cope, and more freedom to decide how you want to live now.

There can still be love. There can still be connection. There can still be pleasure, laughter, meaning, and moments of feeling completely alive.

Not because what happened didn’t matter.

Because it did.

And because your life still matters, too.

Interested in working together?

If you’ve experienced trauma or a significant loss and what I’ve written here resonates with you, I encourage you to reach out.

I offer in-person therapy in Austin and online therapy throughout Texas.

Call me at 512.669.0395 or contact me to learn more about working together.