Life Transitions

Changes, big and small, are a natural and expected part of our lives. Some will be planned and positive, some will be unexpected or destabilizing. Any change has the potential to leave us feeling unsteady. We can often feel paralyzed in decision making, trying to identify the “right” choice, feeling disconnected or insecure. Not all change will be straightforward, but all change will be impactful and deserving of support.

Focusing on growth of your sense of self is aimed at increasing feelings of engagement, inspiration, movement, and hope while you’re navigating life’s transitions. Through identifying and reinforcing personal values, we can work to build an internal guidance system of self-trust. By mindfully exploring and expanding the meanings and stories of your lived experiences, you can recognize stories of resilience and strength that can offer support to present feelings of worry or discomfort. Together we can work toward feeling more secure, confident, and empowered in your self and in navigating the changes and choices you are experiencing.

Areas of Focus

Emotional Regulation

Biologically, our nervous systems are in charge of all major functions within our body, including our responses to stress. It is, in part, our experiences in life that inform and fine tune how our nervous system assesses and responds to our external world.

If a person experiences enough stressors or traumas, their nervous systems can become highly sensitized to perceived threats of safety, stuck between fight or flight and shutdown, often unable to reach the safe and social states of regulation. This can feel like frequent anxiety, difficulty slowing down or resting, being easily startled, or feeling disconnected from your body.

Goals of therapy focus on strengthening emotional regulation, including identifying and incorporating tools for moving toward more cues of saftey, resiliency, flexibility, and increasing the frequency of adaptive and accurate responses to today’s life experiences. We can work to learn how to ride the waves of life, rest when appropriate, and excel when needed. Aiming to restore the nervous system’s baseline sense of calm and balanced transitions between states of rest and alert.

Complex PTSD

Complex trauma develops when the limbic system, or “emotional brain”, is consistently activated. Our brains can undergo significant changes if we are constantly, over months or years, in “survival mode”. This is why complex trauma can have deeper, longer-lasting effects on a person’s sense of self, mood, behaviors, and relationships. These impacts can present as struggles with negative beliefs about self, elevated feelings of guilt or shame, persistent feelings of physical tension, and others.

Here we can work together to identify, understand, and evaluate your personal patterns of protection. We can explore ways to recognize and incorporate experiences of safety and seek a more integrated sense of self in the present moment instead of feeling stuck in past history.