I specialize in helping individuals heal from trauma and release accumulated stress. My interest in healing occurs within a broader, emerging cultural attentiveness to trauma and stress within medicine, the social sciences, and the healing arts. We are learning about the role stress and trauma play in many aspects of mental and physical health. That understanding impacts how I hold and work with many forms of dis-ease.
How to best understand Trauma?
My work with clients reflects current neurobiological understanding of how stress and trauma symptoms relate to mammals’ instinctive capacities to respond to threat. Traumatologist and Somatic Experiencing founder Peter Levine famously observed that though mammals in the wild often experience potentially life-threatening events, they rarely suffer symptoms of trauma. Levine and other researchers saw that humans and other mammals alike respond to stress via a series of automatic self-protective responses, often differentiated as the “fight,” “flight,” or “freeze” responses guided by the autonomic nervous system. Levine observed that wild animals, much more readily than humans, successfully progress through a natural, evolutionarily derived biological sequence after escaping danger and reaching safety–a process of releasing, or “shaking off” the tremendously powerful impulses and energetic charge involved in the organism’s response to threat. This process of discharge is the completion of the threat response, which returns organ systems to a stress-free perception of safety.
Shock trauma and accumulated stress symptoms can be understood as the ongoing experience of
incomplete responses to stress, danger, and pain. For very good and interesting reasons, human beings are uniquely vulnerable to trauma. The process of socialization tends to deeply interrupt and inhibit our nervous system’s evolutionarily endowed capacity to successfully move through stress.
Incomplete responses remain “stuck” in our mindbody, resulting in living life as if dangerous events of the past were still happening. Over time, chronic and cyclic patterns of incomplete stress responses become recognizably common features of post traumatic stress, such as agitation, anxiety, destructive anger, depression, social isolation, addiction and a general inability to relax. Traumatic stress symptoms appear as physical, emotional/behavioral and mental problems and rarely appear as a single symptom. Generally speaking, traumatic stress feels like a lack of safety in one’s body, world and relationships.
What Causes Trauma and Accumulated Stress?
In short, trauma and stress symptoms occur when our psycho-biology’s instinctive ability to respond to threat is disrupted. Here I offer a list, by no means exhaustive, of relatively common experiences that often lead to stress symptomatology:
Common Forms of Traumatic Events
Abusive or unhealthy relationships
Chronic Stress
Sexual Abuse
Physical Abuse or Assault
Neglect
Developmental Trauma Traumatic Grief or Separation
Medical: surgeries, invasive medical procedures, anesthesia, burns, fetal distress and traumatic birth
Accidents: falls, high impact accidents (including auto accidents), head injuries
Race-based or Cultural Trauma
Natural and man-made disasters
Horror: Seeing an accident (especially with blood, gore and dismemberment), watching someone else being violated
Intergenerational or Epigenetic Trauma