Trauma is difficult to heal from… it’s meant to be.

Trauma Therapy

Feeling activated and overwhelmed?

Sudden, distressing, and life-altering experiences get processed in the brain and body differently than our “normal” everyday experiences. As a result, we become emotionally and physically activated, often without realizing the correlation between painful memories and the anxiousness and discomfort we feel right now.

If you lived through something shocking, scary, or emotionally intense, you might feel like you’re living life on the edge. Aside from being regularly worried and hyper-aware of your surroundings, you may have noticed uncomfortable sensations in your body, including muscle tension, headaches, digestive issues, and symptoms of panic like sweating and heart palpitations. It’s likely that your sleep has been impacted, too, whether you struggle with insomnia and/or nightmares.

But your relationships are where you really notice trauma taking hold of your life. It’s possible you’ve developed unhealthy communication cycles with your loved ones, leading to conflict, avoidance, or detachment. You may have difficulty trusting others or believing that you’re worthy of healthy, secure relationships, instead getting caught up in a cycle of shame, self-criticism, and loneliness.

Hohm Psychotherapy is a trauma-focused practice, meaning that we treat a range of mental health challenges—including anxiety, depression, ADHD, and relationship issues—with trauma in mind. Working with our therapists, you can better understand your emotions and triggers to reduce stress and overcome the effects of trauma.

As we empower you to honor your wounds while learning how to move on from them, you can experience newfound peace, healing, and connection in your life.

All of us will experience trauma — likely many times — throughout the course of our lives. There is often a misconception that the label of “trauma” is reserved only for critical, dangerous, or life-threatening situations. But the fact of the matter is that trauma is defined as anything that overwhelms our ability to cope.

Traumatic responses (fight, flight, freeze, and fawn) are our body’s way of adapting to what it perceives as a life-threatening experience out of an innate, biological drive to stay alive. When we don’t take these threats seriously, we don’t survive! The deeply ingrained nature of trauma is precisely what makes it so difficult to heal from, and the symptoms of panic, emotional flooding, and hypervigilance are outward manifestations designed to keep us protected.

The good news is that just as trauma rewires the brain, so can therapeutic treatment. By targeting the memory and emotional centers of the brain with gentle body-based methods, we can change how the nervous system is regulated.

“Your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They are actually yours. They are specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You are not going in the right direction unless there is something pricking you in the side, telling you, ‘Look here! This way!’ That part of you loves you so much that it doesn’t want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures to wake you up, it will make you suffer greatly if you don’t listen. What else can it do? That is its purpose.”

— A.H. Almaas, Essence: The Diamond Approach to Inner Realization

Trauma has a sneaky way of continually bringing the past into the present moment, but counseling is a meaningful opportunity to process the pain of what happened so you can begin to move forward. The more we identify our trauma, triggers, and emotional response in therapy, the more we can understand what is needed to heal.

Our approach

Hohm stands for “Healing our hearts and minds,” which means we take an integrated, mind-body-spirit approach to psychotherapy. We aim to honor the whole person from a holistic lens, collaborating with our clients in a way that feels genuinely supportive. Your therapist will meet you wherever you are on your trauma journey, taking great care to move at a comfortable pace.

Most of our clients begin trauma treatment with a combination of conventional talk therapy and mindfulness to become more aware of what’s going on in the mind and body. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) will be used to help you reframe the thoughts, feelings, and self-beliefs that have developed from your trauma. With newfound perspectives and meditative exercises, you can develop resourcing tools to be used anytime you feel activated, even when outside of the counseling space.

Once you’re ready to dig a little deeper, we will begin to incorporate somatic—or body-based—techniques to actually change the way your trauma is stored in the brain. We draw from highly effective somatic trauma treatments, including Somatic Experiencing™ and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. Tapping into the brain’s existing healing mechanisms, EMDR uses gentle, nonverbal bilateral stimulation (side-to-side eye movements, tapping, or auditory cues) to create new neural pathways and, thus, new associations with your trauma. We are pleased to have trauma specialists on our team with advanced training in EMDR therapy, ensuring a safe, effective treatment protocol.

Most of all, though, we want to use the therapeutic relationship itself to create a new sense of trust and connection in your life. In addressing how trauma is impacting your goals and relationships with your therapist, you can break unhealthy cycles to create new possibilities.

Instead of feeling blocked from your highest potential, you can clear away adversity and feel less held back by the pain of your past. Therapy is a chance to peel back the layers of your trauma and discover a true, authentic, and healed self-energy.

Unsure if counseling is right for you?

Our counselors absolutely understand the impulse to “stuff down” emotions and avoid your trauma, but those emotions will fester sooner or later if left unprocessed. The work of therapy is challenging, and sometimes it feels like treatment gets worse before it gets better. It’s normal to experience these feelings deeply and intensely—in many cases, they’ve been stuck there since you were a kid. Yet reprocessing your trauma in a healthy way will set you free as you no longer have to hide parts of yourself away.
The poet Robert Frost said, “The best way out is through,” and in trauma counseling, you will be paired with an empathetic, collaborative therapist who will support you every step of the way.
If you have a child who is entering the same age you were when you experienced trauma, it makes a lot of sense that you’re feeling triggered and reactivated. This is completely normal and the body’s way of saying, “Look here! Listen to me!” A similar response might occur following any kind of stressor or life transition. These messages come from your inner self who wants to help you find the peace you deserve; they are mirroring very important information.
Therapy can help you better understand and interpret your body’s stress response so that you can reprocess your experiences in a healthier, more adaptable framework, paving the way to a mindset more oriented toward the future and less mired in childhood trauma.
Yes, EMDR is very different from other forms of talk therapy used in trauma treatment. As your therapist learns more about past and current stressors, they will use the highly structured EMDR protocol, including bilateral stimulation (tapping), to change the way traumatic memories are stored in your brain. This treatment method is relatively nonverbal, making it a gentler approach and less likely to retraumatize clients. It also works very quickly because it targets core memories on a neurobiological level.
To find out more, we encourage you to visit the EMDR International Association’s website.

Your trauma is talking, it’s time to listen.

At Hohm Psychotherapy, we help our clients find peace and empowerment through healing core traumas. To find out more about our treatment approach, contact us . All therapy sessions are conducted online at this time.