You survived the unthinkable. 


Kept yourself breathing to some extent.  Did what you had to get through to the next day and the day after.  You got out.
 

And now your context is different.  You have different people around you and grew up to be a somewhat functional adult. You do adult kinds of things. Kinda.


Presumably you have more choices.  Presumably there should be more joy.  And relaxation.  And possibility.
 

And yet, often, things still feel impossibly stuck.

 
Now that you're mostly outside of the Big Bad Things, you are realizing that all that surviving completely monopolized your schedule. 


There wasn’t time to learn about boundaries. 


There wasn’t the opportunity to pay attention what you cared about or what you wanted in life. 


In fact, boundaries and desires were dangerous and to be avoided at all costs. 

 
And now that there’s space for them, you can’t seem to figure out how to get out of that avoidance. 


You want intimacy but you can’t figure out how to build it.  You want boundaries that take better care of yourself and others but you don’t how to set them or even to figure out what they are.  You want to build yourself a life of living but all you seem to be practiced is surviving.
 

You have a master’s degree in scanning other people and figuring out what they wanted and what would make them happy, but when folks ask you what you want or what would make you happy, you consistently draw a blank. 

​
The idea that you would have wants or desires that are not in direct relationship to other people blows your mind.


You can't even imagine another way to live but you want to try.

​Somewhere very deep inside, you believe that you get to have a different kind of life.

Somatic Counseling for Embedded Trauma

and I said to my body. softly. 'i want to be your friend.' it took a long breath and replied 'i have been waiting my whole life for this.'"  — Nayyirah Waheed

Imagine there was more than just survival.

I like to remind my clients frequently that talking to an amygdala never works. The repeated mainstream attempts to reason with a traumatized nervous system is a setup and often results in failure.
 

Embedded trauma both happened within and lives on in the nervous system. And to unwind it and heal it, we need solutions that work on the
level of the nervous system.

 
I want to give you the tools to actually heal so that you can make
the impact on this world that you were meant to make. 


I want to give you the tools to actually heal so that you can have buoyancy when faced with adversity and also capacity to dive in when you encounter joy. 


I want to give you the tools to actually heal so that you can create a life that is beyond survival.
 

Often times when your nervous system is on constant blast and survival mode, it can be difficult to discern who you are and what is even possible beyond your trauma. I am here to help with that visioning.


Centered boundaries, balanced intimacy, bold extension towards your longings, recovery from triggers--these are tools that you deserve to have in your toolbox.


You are not what happened to you.  And as brilliant as your survival strategies were, you are also not just that survival.

 
Comfort and transformation do not live on the same block.  Often with trauma, we start to equate discomfort with danger.  This makes our lives and our worlds smaller and smaller as we risk less and less. 


What if you had tools so that your discomfort was not the worse thing ever? 


What if, with help, you were able to feel into the discomfort
and create a life of boldness and bigness and possibility?

 
You can have this.  You deserve this.  It's time to heal.

How does it work?

I start individual sessions with an assessment about where you’re at: what’s working, what’s not?  What do you long for?  How would we know if you got it?
 
This assessment is an active accountability document for both of us.  I use them to make sure that we are developing the tools to get you what you want.

We will refer back to your assessment both to check in about how we’re doing and also to better understand how far you’ve come. And this document can and will likely change as you heal and have attainable visions of your life that you could have never imagined before.
 
From there, our time is spent in a variety of ways. 

Often we will start the session with a practice that helps you develop your ability to identify and notice the nuances of your bodily sensations. 

We might work some boundary setting skills and delve into how your individual nervous system responds to triggers and how you can use your sensations to recover before you act after that trigger. 

There are often many of my ridiculous, occasionally brilliant metaphors.  We might have a larger verbal check-in about a relationship and what you want to practice differently in it and make a plan for sessions to develop that muscle memory. 

We might break down how ableism is impacting your self-worth and develop a kinesthetic forgiveness practice. 

We might practice identifying the loudest sensations that are accompanying your anxiety and learning how to titrate in and out so we don’t overwhelm your nervous system and you can still learn to feel into the sensations of anxiety in order to move & change them.
 
My sessions are generally emergent and largely guided by you. 

If you're into it, I love giving homework because it gives you scaffolding to develop the muscle memory that new patterns require and also the ability to take what you are learning directly into your life.

schedule my free 20-minute phone consultation now