How I Work with Trauma and Nervous System Healing

Who I Work With

My approach to trauma and nervous system healing is based on more than twelve years of study and training, applied to hundreds of clients ranging from children to adults with complex histories, chronic stress, nervous system dysregulation, and health concerns.

My work often includes supporting:

• Adults navigating the effects of childhood neglect, relational trauma, attachment wounds, or complex PTSD—including many who do not identify with having “Big T” trauma.

• Adults who over-function in relationships, lose themselves, struggle with boundaries, or experience anxiety, depression, OCD, intrusive thoughts, or rumination.

• Adults and children living with chronic illness, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, long-COVID, or unexplained symptoms.

• Parents of children with complex chronic illness, including PANS/PANDAS, ADHD, autism, and “big baffling behaviors.”

• Adults who identify as neurodivergent, may have autism or ADHD (or both), and/or consider themselves “highly-sensitive.”

• Adopted children, adoptive families, foster parents, and caregivers navigating attachment, regulation, and relational challenges.

Many of these challenges are often born out of patterns involving nervous system development, especially during early development and through generational trauma.

The Modalities I Use

The intersection of my work and the approaches I’ve integrated into my practice include Somatic Experiencing®, Safe and Sound Protocol, and Transforming Presence.

I describe them below, in brief, along with some of the concepts I use to help folks connect the dots (e.g., between symptoms and trauma, or trauma and attachment, regulation and dysregulation).

While each modality is different, they share a common foundation: healing happens not only through insight and cognition, but through lived, embodied experiences that help the nervous system develop new pathways for safety, regulation, and connection.

Safe and Sound Protocol

The Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) is a five-hour listening therapy that can be completed over weeks or months (depending on the individual). The listener downloads an app, uses headphones, and can get started after the initial intake meeting with me.  

The SSP is often referred to as a "companion therapy" because it can help shift the nervous system from chronic states of activation (fight, flight, freeze) into the ventral vagal state thereby potentially increasing the impact and efficacy other therapies. I love SSP in combination with the other modalities below, and it does work as a stand-alone.

I have more information about it here. You can also learn more here.

Somatic Experiencing®

This is the primary modality I use and the foundation of my work.

Somatic Experiencing® (SE) is a "bottom-up" therapy for trauma resolution—focused on tracking sensation in the body, looking at SIBAM (sensation, image, behavior, affect, meaning) rather than relying only on “talk therapy” (which generally means a cognitive-behavioral approach).

Using the tools of SE, I can help clients contact emotions, complete incomplete self-protective responses, and shift the nervous system on a deep level from states of threat and protection into safety and connection.

When there is enough access to safety—either between the therapist and client, or by using tools such as orienting, resourcing, and pendulation—the system can begin to create the space it needs to connect with what may have been overridden. 

Transforming Presence (formerly Transforming Touch/TEB)

Transforming Presence (TP) is longer-term work that focuses on developmental trauma.

Early trauma—or what’s called developmental trauma—happens pre-verbally (including in utero, birth, the first years of life and even generational).

When there is develpmental trauma, we may not have been able to develop much of a "Window of Tolerance." So for clients who seem stuck even after attempting somatic work, or who are using a lot of coping strategies, etc, or who have high "allostatic load" (accumulated stress and often chronic health issues), this work—especially in combination with the Safe and Sound Protocol—is effective at unwinding early stress and increasing the Window of Tolerance.

I typically do this in three-month packages, though many people choose to continue beyond that

The Foundation of Trauma Healing

Our nervous systems can do a brilliant job at protecting us. Moving into fight, flight, and freeze are adaptive responses that can help us survive.

But often due to chronic stress (the kind where we stay activated without recovery periods), unresolved complex trauma, or developmental trauma, our adaptive states stay stuck and “on,” and we live in dysregulation.

This is not something we can think, read or understand our way out of.

What Dysregulation May Look Like

If this occurs in children, we often see behavior struggles, sometimes health issues or chronic symptoms like allergies, anxiety, PANS/PANDAS, and ADHD.

With adults, we may see poor recovery from illness (long-COVID) or long-standing ADHD symptoms, chronic fatigue, and depression.

A Time and a Place for Interventions

While interventions like diet, supplements, detox protocols, and the like can make a big difference, they may not fully address the underlying nervous system patterns.

Even to digest a supplement, a food, or to detox, requires cellular energy and for a person to be in a nervous system state of safety; otherwise, the priority is simply survival and nothing more.

So when a nervous system is chronically activated, has a small or limited Window of Tolerance, is relying on protective coping strategies, and feels too unsafe to rest, that’s where we begin—with titrating the experiencing of contact, safe presence, witness.

What Healing and Recovery Can Look Like

Actual Recovery

When we have space again—through expanding the Window of Tolerance, shifting into social engagement and rest and digest, or connecting with the stored survival stress that needs a safe place to unwind—we heal.

That healing pays dividends when it comes to our work in the world, our parenting, our relationships, and our physiology.

When long-held patterns of protection can meet safety, compassion, and understanding, they can shift. And these shifts are what I see every day in my work.

Defining Healing

One of my teachers, Stephen Terrell, an expert on developmental trauma and the developer of Transforming Touch defines healing as “when the person can experience something different.”

Trauma keeps us fixed, constricted, braced, and can leave our brains hypervigilant and inflexible.

Healing means there is enough room and space to do something different.

And for a while “different” may not look life-changing or radical. It may look like a tiny bit less pain, something unraveling, a softening, or a different response from those around us.

But once that unraveling begins, we continue cultivating something different. It gains its own momentum, the brain changes, and our system learns that being open, connected, and safe can be the new normal. And we begin experiencing greater flexibility, resilience, and the kinds of lived experiences and embodied glimmers, moments, hours, and days that we’ve been longing for.

Some further resources and definitions can be found here.