What happened may be over. But it can come roaring back.
Trauma does not always remain in the past simply because the event has ended. It can continue as anxiety, hypervigilance, shutdown, shame, dissociation, difficulty trusting, relationship patterns, sexual difficulties, or a persistent sense that something is wrong even when life is objectively safe.
We help people understand what their minds and bodies learned in response to overwhelming experiences—and gradually change the patterns that are no longer protecting them.
Complex Trauma
& C-PTSD
Childhood
& Attachment
Sexual
Trauma
Depth-Oriented
Care
The past can show up in ways that don’t look like the past.
01
Childhood & Developmental Trauma
Trauma can develop through abuse or neglect, but also through chronic criticism, unpredictability, emotional absence, parentification, rejection, or growing up responsible for managing the feelings of the people around you.
02
Complex Trauma & C-PTSD
Long-term exposure to fear, instability, control, neglect, or repeated relational injury can shape identity, emotional regulation, relationships, self-worth, and the nervous system in ways that persist long after the environment has changed. For some neurodivergent people, years of bullying, sensory overwhelm, masking, punishment for natural responses, or repeatedly being misunderstood can become part of that developmental story.
03
Sexual Trauma
Sexual assault, rape, molestation, coercion, boundary violations, or unwanted sexual experiences can affect far more than sexuality. The impact may appear through shame, dissociation, anxiety, intimacy difficulties, body responses, or a loss of trust in yourself and others.
04
Emotional & Narcissistic Abuse
Manipulation, control, humiliation, chronic criticism, gaslighting, unpredictability, and coercive relationship dynamics can leave lasting confusion about boundaries, self-worth, responsibility, and whether your own perceptions are reliable.
05
Abandonment, betrayal, rejection, inconsistent caregiving, frightening relationships, or repeated relational ruptures can shape what closeness feels like—and what you begin doing automatically when connection feels threatened.
06
Medical, Illness & Other Trauma
Serious illness, medical procedures, accidents, sudden loss, violence, frightening healthcare experiences, and other overwhelming events can leave the nervous system responding long after the immediate danger has passed.
What looks like a problem now may once have been a solution.
Trauma can leave behind reactions that seem irrational in the present: hypervigilance, shutdown, dissociation, people-pleasing, perfectionism, emotional numbness, avoidance, control, difficulty trusting, or the need to stay fiercely independent.
But those responses usually developed for a reason.
If the world was unpredictable, vigilance helped you anticipate what might happen next. If expressing emotion was dangerous, shutting down may have kept you safer. If other people’s moods determined whether you were secure, becoming exceptionally good at reading and managing them could have been an intelligent adaptation.
Even beliefs about yourself can begin this way. Sometimes believing “I’m the problem” gives a child more psychological control than recognizing that the adults they depend on may be unable to protect, understand, or care for them in the way they need.
The difficulty comes when the danger changes, but the protective system does not. Your life may become safer, while some part of you continues responding according to rules learned years—or decades—earlier.
Therapy is not about fighting those adaptations or shaming you out of them. We become curious about what they were protecting, why they made sense, and whether they are still necessary now.
our approach
Trauma therapy does not require excavating every painful thing that has ever happened to you. We don’t go looking for old trauma simply because it exists.
If something from the past is not interfering with your life now, we may have no reason to disturb it. We become interested in the past when it is showing up in the present—through anxiety, relationships, shame, avoidance, emotional reactions, sexuality, the body, or patterns that keep taking you somewhere you no longer want to go.
From there, we work at the depth and pace the problem actually requires. Sometimes that means working directly with a memory or earlier experience. Sometimes it means working almost entirely with what is happening in your life today.
The goal is not to uncover everything. The goal is to change what is still affecting you.
Understand Before We Change
A response makes more sense when we understand what it learned to protect. We become curious about the fear, belief, memory, relationship, or unmet need underneath a reaction when understanding it helps us change what is happening now. We are not trying to construct a complete archaeological record of your life.
Work With the Defense, Not Against It
Protective patterns usually become more flexible when they no longer feel under attack. Rather than trying to overpower vigilance, shutdown, control, people-pleasing, avoidance, or other defenses, we help you notice when they arrive, understand what they are responding to, and create enough internal safety that they do not have to take over automatically.
Give Choice Back
Healing is not measured by whether you ever feel fear, anger, vigilance, or the urge to protect yourself again. The difference is that those responses become available to you rather than staying on auto-run. You can recognize what is happening, decide whether the protection fits the situation you are actually in, and respond from the present instead of automatically from the past.
We’re not trying to take your defenses away. We’re trying to put you back in charge of when to use them.
What happened was one part of the trauma. What happened next matters too.
Trauma is shaped not only by what happened, but by who you had to become in order to live with it.
Trauma work helps bring you back to yourself.
01 — When Protection Didn’t Come
Sometimes the second wound is what happened when you reached for help. A child or teenager may disclose abuse, assault, or something frightening and be met with blame, disbelief, minimization, silence—or adults who protect the person who caused the harm instead of protecting them.
Those responses can become much larger conclusions: It was my fault. I am not worth protecting. Telling the truth makes things worse. The world is unsafe, and no one is coming to help me.
Part of healing is separating what happened to you from what other people’s failures taught you to believe about yourself and the world.
02 — Secrecy & Silence
Sometimes surviving meant carrying what happened alone.
People may keep an assault, abuse, betrayal, or frightening experience secret for years or decades. The secrecy itself can become intertwined with shame, identity, relationships, sexuality, and the belief that certain parts of you are simply too dangerous for anyone else to know.
03 — Suppression & Avoidance
Sometimes the safest way forward was not to feel it. Pushing memories, emotions, bodily reactions, or needs out of awareness can make it possible to keep functioning through extraordinary circumstances. Eventually, that same ability can make it difficult to know what you feel, what you need, or why something suddenly affects you so intensely.
04 — Dissociation & Disconnection
Sometimes leaving was the only way to stay. Dissociation can help someone survive experiences that are too overwhelming to remain fully present for. When that response becomes familiar, disconnection can continue long after the danger is gone—affecting memory, emotion, relationships, sexuality, the body, or simply the ability to feel fully here.
Healing can mean finding your way back to yourself.
Trauma can shape more than how you respond to danger. Over time, survival strategies can become intertwined with identity:
the one who never needs anyone,
the one who keeps everyone happy,
the one who stays invisible,
the one who remains in control,
the one who learns not to feel very much.
We are not trying to strip those parts away or decide which version of you is the “real” one.
You don’t have to prove it was bad enough.
People often arrive in trauma therapy already minimizing what happened. Other people had it worse. My parents loved me. There was no physical violence. It only happened once. I should be over it by now. I had a good childhood in a lot of ways.
None of those things tell us whether an experience affected you.
Trauma is not a contest over whose story was objectively worse. Trauma is what happened inside you—what your nervous system learned, what you came to believe about yourself or other people, and what you had to do in order to adapt.
Sometimes trauma is unmistakable: assault, abuse, violence, profound loss, or years of living in fear. Sometimes it is quieter and cumulative—emotional neglect, criticism, instability, bullying, rejection, masking, humiliation, parentification, or repeatedly discovering that the people you depended on could not understand or protect you.
You also do not have to make someone a villain, in order to acknowledge that they hurt you. Parents can love their children and still be immature, overwhelmed, wounded, frightened, addicted, emotionally unavailable, or simply unable to give a child something they desperately needed.
Before we challenge a pattern, we understand why it makes sense.
Our trauma work begins by understanding the client’s world from the inside—not simply what happened, but how they learned to interpret what happened, what they came to believe. We learn what you value, what you fear, and what their system is still trying to prevent.
That matters because even patterns that are causing enormous difficulty usually have an internal logic.
A person may stay hypervigilant, because vigilance once kept them safe. They may avoid depending on anyone, because needing people once ended badly. They may organize their life around control, fairness, achievement, approval, or never appearing vulnerable, because some part of them learned that doing so reduced the risk of being hurt again.
But not every rule we live by began as a response to trauma, some were simply handed to us.
Families teach us what love looks like, what makes someone valuable, how much we should sacrifice, whether anger is acceptable, what success means, who deserves care, whether asking for help is weakness, what a “good” man or woman should be, and thousands of other assumptions about how life is supposed to work.
Most of us absorb those beliefs long before we are old enough to decide whether we agree with them.
Part of the work can be making that conditioning visible and asking a very different question: Which of these beliefs still belong to you?
Some may fit beautifully. Others may have helped your family function but no longer fit the person you have become. You do not have to reject your parents, culture, religion, or history in order to examine what you inherited from them. You simply get to decide, perhaps for the first time, what you want to keep.
The same is true of protective beliefs formed through trauma. A belief does not have to be wrong to get in your way. Fairness matters. Independence can be valuable. Control can sometimes keep you safe. The question is whether that belief is helping you choose the life you want—or quietly choosing it for you.
Once the pattern makes sense, we can ask the harder question:
We see why you became this way. Now let’s look at what it’s costing you.
meet our team
Meet the people behind the work. Two complementary approaches to trauma, with the flexibility to match the depth, perspective, and kind of support the work calls fo.
Marc Geronimo
LMFT-A, CHT
Complex Trauma • Grief • Attachment • Hypnotherapy • Parts Work • Ketamine Therapy • Existential Work
Sara Sloan
LMFT, CST, IRT
Narcissistic Abuse • Relational Trauma • Sexual Trauma • Health & Identity •Neurodivergence • Couples • Religious Trauma
common questions
No. Trauma therapy does not require telling every detail of every experience, and we do not go digging through your past simply because something painful may be there. We focus on what is affecting your life now and work with the past when doing so is useful for changing what is happening in the present.
That is not unusual, and you do not need a complete narrative for therapy to be useful. We do not try to fill in missing memories or assume that something happened simply because there are gaps. We can work with what you do know, what you experience now, and the patterns your mind and body are responding to.
Yes. Time can create distance from an experience without necessarily changing what you learned from it. Hypervigilance, shame, dissociation, relationship patterns, avoidance, difficulty trusting, or beliefs about yourself and the world can persist long after the original danger has ended.
You do not need to prove that your experience meets some threshold before we can take its impact seriously. We are less interested in ranking what happened than in understanding what it taught you, how you adapted, and whether those adaptations are still affecting the life you want now.
You do not need to know before you begin. We start by understanding what is happening, what you want to change, and how you tend to respond to different kinds of work. Some people benefit from straightforward trauma therapy; others may eventually benefit from more experiential approaches such as hypnotherapy, parts work, or Ketamine-Assisted Therapy. The method should follow the person—not the other way around.