How I Work with Trauma and Nervous System Healing
How I approach trauma and nervous system healing is based on twelve-plus years of study and training, applied to hundreds of clients ranging from children to adults and a variety of backgrounds including (but not limited to):
Adults with backgrounds of neglect (who often don’t think they have "big-T” trauma) who may have complex relational PTSD.
Adopted children and adoptive families—parents, foster-parents, caregivers.
Adults with complex-PTSD who may have chronic-illness, chronic pain, unexplained symptoms, who over-function in relationships, lose themselves, need help with boundaries, experience anxiety or depression (or both), experience OCD, intrusive thoughts, rumination.
Moms of kids with complex chronic illness like PANS/PANDAS or “big baffling behaviors.”
Adults who consider themselves neurodivergent, question whether they may have undiagnosed Autism or ADHD (or both), who may also have been recently diagnosed. Or who consider themselves, at the very least, “highly sensitive.”
Adults with complex chronic health issues, mystery symptoms, or are parenting chidren with these conditions.
Many of these challenges are often born, in part, out of phenomena involving nervous system development, especially during early development and by means of generational trauma.
That is the intersection of my work and the approaches I’ve integrated in my practice, which include Somatic Experiencing®, Safe and Sound Protocol, and Transforming Presence.
I describe them below, in brief, along with a link to some of the concepts I use to help folks connect the dots (e.g., between symptoms and trauma, or trauma and attachment, or regulation and dysregulation).
While each modality is different, they share a common foundation: healing happens not only through insight, but through lived 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 and 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 where other therapies can be more effective.
I have more information about it here. You can also learn more here.
Somatic Experiencing®
This is the most common modality I use and the foundation of my work.
Somatic Experiencing® (SE) is "bottom up" therapy for trauma resolution -- so tracking sensation in the body, looking at SIBAM (sensation, image, behavior, affect, meaning) versus the more traditional “talk therapy” (which generally means a cognitive-behavioral approach).
Employing the tools of SE are where we can help contact emotions, complete incomplete self-protective responses, and shift the nervous system on a deep level so the neurobiology can start to shift to one of safety and connection versus threat and protection.
When there is enough access to safety—either between the therapist and client, or by utililizing tools such as orienting, resourcing, pendulation—the system can begin to have enough space to connect with what may have been overridden.
Transforming Presence (also known as Transforming Touch or Co-Regulating Touch or even TEB)
Tranforming Presence (TP) is longer-term and works with developmental trauma.
Early trauma—what’s called “developmental,” happens pre-verbal (so in utero, birth, the first years of life and even generational).
It may mean that we have not 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, have high "allostatic load" (accumulated stress and often chronic health issues), this work—especially in combination with Safe and Sound Protocol—is very effective at unwinding early stress and increasing that WoT. I typically do this in three-month packages. And often folks want to keep going.
The Foundation of Trauma Healing
Our nervous systems can do a brilliant job at protecting us. Moving to fight, flight, and even 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 (which I explain more below), our adaptive states stay stuck and “on” and we live in dysregulation.
This is not something we can think ourselves out of.
What Dysregulation May Look Like
If this occurs in children, we often have behavior struggles, sometimes health issues or chronic symptoms like allergies, anxiety, even PANS/PANDAS and ADHD. With adults, we may see poor recovery from illness (long-covid) or symptoms of ADHD that have gone on for years, chronic fatigue, and depression.
A Time and a Place for Interventions
And while interventions like diet, supplements, detox protocols and the like can make a big difference, when a nervous system is chronically activated, has no window of tolerance, is living in a series of coping strategies, and feels too unsafe to rest—or may have never experienced a felt sense of safety—addressing these through expanding the window, shifting the system, and resolving incomplete protective responses, attachment injuries, and even primitive reflexes can go a long way in resolving chronic stress and chronic health conditions.
Actual Recovery
When we have space again—through expanding the window of tolerance, shifting into rest and digest, or connecting with the stored survival stress that needs a safe place to unwind—we heal. And 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, understanding, they can shift. And these shifts are what I see all the time in my work.
Defining Healing
One of my teachers, Stephen Terrell, an expert on developmental trauma and developer of TEB (Transforming the Experience-Based Brain), which we now call “Transforming Touch” or “Transforming Presence” defines healing as "when the person can experience something different.”
Trauma keeps us fixed, constricted, braced, our brains predictive and inflexible.
Healing means there is room, space enough to do something different. And for a while “different” may not look life-changing, or radical. It may look like a different outlook, a tiny bit less pain, something unraveling, a different response from those around us.
Once it begins, that opening takes shape and we continue cultivating something different. It gains it’s own momentum, the brain changes, our system learns that 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, days that we’ve been longing for.
Some Further Resources/Definitions can be found here. [COMING SOON]