Trauma Therapy
Trauma Therapy
Trauma therapy can help you heal from the past and reclaim your life. Trauma is more common than many people realize — approximately 70% of adults have experienced some form of traumatic event. Whether you experienced a single overwhelming incident or chronic, ongoing stress, trauma can fundamentally alter how you experience safety, relationships, and yourself. The aftermath of trauma isn’t weakness — it’s your nervous system’s natural response to overwhelming experiences. The good news is that trauma therapy works, and healing is possible.
At Center of Balance Counseling, I specialize in helping adults heal from trauma using evidence-based, trauma-informed therapy. Whether your trauma happened years ago or recently, whether it was a single event or ongoing stress, I’m here to help you move from survival mode into genuine freedom and connection
Understanding Trauma: It's Stored in Your Nervous System
Many people think trauma is just a psychological or emotional problem. But trauma lives in your body and nervous system. When you experience something overwhelming, your brain can’t process it in the normal way. Instead, it gets fragmented—stored as:
- Sensations (racing heartbeat, tension, numbness)
- Emotions (fear, shame, anger, numbness)
- Images and flashbacks (intrusive memories you can’t control)
- Thoughts and beliefs (“I’m not safe,” “I can’t trust,” “It’s my fault”)
- Nervous system patterns (hypervigilance, freeze, shutdown)
This is why talking about trauma alone often isn’t enough. Real healing requires working at the level where trauma is actually stored: your nervous system and body.
Types of Trauma: You're Not Alone
Acute Trauma: Single-Incident Trauma
• Car accidents or motor vehicle crashes
• Physical or sexual assault
• Serious medical emergencies or medical trauma
• Sudden unexpected loss or death
• Life-threatening experiences
• Natural disasters
• Violent crimes or mugging
With acute trauma, symptoms often appear immediately after the event but can sometimes emerge weeks or months later. Many people with acute trauma experience:
• Intrusive memories or flashbacks
• Nightmares
• Avoidance of reminders
• Hypervigilance and startle responses
• Anxiety and panic
• Sleep disturbances
The good news: Single-incident trauma often responds remarkably well to specialized therapy like EMDR, which helps your brain reprocess the traumatic memory so it loses its emotional charge.
Chronic Trauma: Prolonged & Repeated Exposure
• Domestic violence or intimate partner abuse
• Childhood abuse or neglect
• Bullying (childhood or adult)
• Workplace harassment or toxic environments
• Chronic medical illness or pain
• Long-term caregiving stress
• Living in unsafe communities
• Addiction or substance abuse environments
• Ongoing discrimination or trauma related to identity
With chronic trauma, your nervous system stays in a constant state of alertness. Over time, this can lead to:
• Chronic anxiety and hypervigilance
• Emotional dysregulation (intense anger, tearfulness, numbness)
• Difficulty trusting others
• Shame and self-blame
• Dissociation or emotional numbness
• Relationship difficulties
• Physical health problems
Healing from chronic trauma requires patience, safety, and often a deeper, more layered approach using modalities like IFS (Internal Family Systems) and somatic therapy.
Complex Trauma (C-PTSD): Multiple Different Traumatic Experiences
• Childhood abuse combined with adult trauma
• Multiple assaults or violations
• War or combat exposure plus civilian trauma
• Repeated losses combined with other traumas
• Growing up in unsafe environments with later traumatic events
Complex trauma affects your core identity, how you see yourself and others, and your fundamental sense of safety in the world. Healing complex trauma requires comprehensive, trauma-informed therapy that addresses the cumulative impact of multiple experiences.
Vicarious Trauma: The Hidden Impact of Witnessing Others' Pain
Who experiences vicarious trauma:
• Healthcare workers (nurses, doctors, EMTs)
• Mental health professionals and therapists
• First responders (police, firefighters)
• Social workers and counselors
• Domestic violence advocates
• Journalists covering traumatic events
• Parents or family members of trauma survivors
• Anyone in helping professions
• People scrolling through social media and news constantly
How vicarious trauma shows up:
• Emotional exhaustion and burnout
• Hypervigilance about danger
• Difficulty setting boundaries
• Nightmares or intrusive thoughts about others' trauma
• Emotional numbness or detachment
• Difficulty trusting others
• Loss of meaning or hope
• Physical symptoms (headaches, fatigue, body aches)
• Difficulty "turning off" concerns about others' wellbeing
The important truth: Vicarious trauma is real, valid, and treatable. If you spend your work or personal life holding space for others' pain, your own nervous system can become dysregulated. You deserve support and healing too.
How Trauma-Informed Therapy Works
Our Approach
I use trauma-informed, neuroscience-based therapy tailored to your specific needs. Depending on what you’re experiencing, this might include:
- Somatic therapy – Reconnecting with your body, releasing held tension, learning to recognize and trust your body’s signals
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) – Reprocessing traumatic memories so they lose their emotional charge (particularly effective for single-incident trauma)
- IFS (Internal Family Systems) – Understanding and healing the protective parts of yourself that developed in response to trauma
- Nervous system regulation techniques – Calming your nervous system and building resilience
- Relational therapy – Healing attachment and trust wounds created by trauma
Each approach is evidence-based and research-backed. More importantly, each can be tailored to your unique experience and pace.
The Process
- Assessment & Safety Building – We start by understanding your experience and creating genuine safety
- Stabilization – You develop tools and resources to regulate your nervous system
- Processing – We work with the trauma itself, using the approaches that will help you most
- Integration & Reclamation – You rebuild your life with newfound freedom and confidence
Common Symptoms of Trauma
Are you experiencing any of the following?
- Shock, denial, or disbelief
- Having trouble functioning at home or work
- Suffering from severe fear, anxiety, or depression
- Unable to form close, satisfying relationships
- Experiencing terrifying memories, nightmares, or flashbacks
- Avoiding more and more anything that reminds you of the trauma
- Emotionally numb and disconnected from others
- Using alcohol or drugs to feel better
- Confusion, difficulty concentrating
- Anger, irritability, mood swings
- Anxiety and fear
- Guilt, shame, self-blame
- Withdrawing from others
- Feeling sad or hopeless
- Feeling disconnected or numb
- Insomnia or nightmares
- Fatigue
- Being startled easily
- Difficulty concentrating
- Racing heartbeat
- Edginess and agitation
- Aches and pains
- Muscle tension
Our Trauma Therapy Process
Trauma symptoms are treatable. Recovering from a traumatic experience requires that the painful emotions be processed. If these emotions are not dealt with, the distressing feelings and troubling events replay over and over during a lifetime with emotional, behavioral, and body patterns. Sometimes situations are too disturbing or distressing for our brain and body to process without outside help.
Coping with the trauma of a natural or manmade disaster can present unique challenges—even if you weren’t directly involved in the event. You may not have experienced an event directly, however, we’re all regularly bombarded by horrific images on social media and news sources of those people who have been. Viewing these images over and over can overwhelm your nervous system and create traumatic stress. Whatever the cause of your trauma, and whether it happened years ago or yesterday, you can make healing changes and move on with your life.
Why This Approach Works
Addresses the Root: Instead of managing symptoms forever, we help your nervous system and body learn that you’re safe. This creates lasting change.
Honors Your Resilience: The ways you’ve survived and adapted have been brilliant. Therapy honors that while helping you evolve.
Works With Your Whole System: Trauma lives in your body, emotions, thoughts, and nervous system. We address all of it.
Tailored to You: Your therapy is designed for your specific trauma, your pace, and your goals.
Research-Backed: Everything I do is grounded in neuroscience and evidence-based trauma therapy.
The Benefits of Treating Trauma
- Freedom from the past
- Increased or new ability to feel joy
- Increased ability to plan and follow through
- Eliminate or reduce symptoms
- Feel a sense of safety & stability
- Improved relationships
- Improved daily functioning
- Increased health and sense of wellbeing
While I’m located in Ashland, OR, I offer online therapy for trauma and PTSD to residents of Oregon, Washington, Georgia , Florida and New Jersey.
Return to your
Center of Balance
541-499-7338
Insurance Coverage for Trauma Therapy:
Aetna, First Choice Health, Providence, and Pacific Source. If you have a different insurance provider, I can work with you as an out-of-network provider.
I offer a FREE 15-minute consultation.
Find out how Trauma Therapy can help you.
Articles Related to Trauma & PTSD Therapy
Why am I so Emotional?
What Is (IFS) Internal Family Systems Therapy?
The Effects of Trauma: What Does Trauma Do to The Brain?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Trauma Therapy?
Trauma therapy focuses on how a past event, or multiple events have impacted you currently. There are three common types of trauma therapy:
- Acute Trauma occurs shortly after a single traumatic experience, such as an accident, natural disaster or sexual assault.
- Chronic Trauma occurs when a person experiences multiple, long-term or prolonged traumatic events. Some examples include domestic violence, bullying, addiction, sexual abuse and long-term illness.
- Complex Trauma is the result of multiple different traumatic experiences. Potential causes can include childhood abuse, domestic violence or civil unrest.
Trauma can impact your overall functioning and trauma therapy helps you to both understand and then deal with or effectively manage the resulting impacts or symptoms of trauma.
How does Trauma Therapy work?
We will work with you to better understand trauma and the way it affects your quality of life. After an evaluation to make sure we are a good fit, we will put together a treatment plan to determine the most supportive way to proceed to meet your needs. Depending on your needs and how you respond, we offer a variety of modalities or techniques along with individual talk therapy. These techniques can help you unpack memories, feelings, and thoughts in ways that are beyond talk therapy and get to where trauma is stuck, in your nervous system.
Modalities can include:
- Somatic Therapy
- EMDR
- Anxiety Therapy
- Mindfulness techniques to train your mind
- Imagery to work with neural pathways
- Internal Family Systems
Trauma therapy can support you in effectively treating how trauma impacts your body, mind and emotions or your nervous system. This video can help you understand more about traumas impacts.
When is Trauma Therapy needed?
Trauma and PTSD symptoms are treatable. Recovering from a traumatic experience requires that the painful emotions be processed. Any traumatic event can adversely affect a person’s mental health and quality of life. Often, the brain becomes overwhelmed and does not properly process or “store” these traumatic memories, which leads them to experience stress and symptoms of mental health disorders. Some of the most common mental health disorders associated with trauma are anxiety and PTSD. If these emotions are not dealt with, the distressing feelings and troubling events replay over and over during a lifetime with emotional, behavioral, and body patterns. Sometimes situations are too disturbing or distressing for our brain and body to process without outside help.
If you have experienced any of the following trauma therapy can help you heal:
- Loss, grief, unresolved situations
- Attacks, rape or disaster
- Events during or after active addiction
- Car accidents – symptoms may not appear until months later
- Medical trauma or illness or fear of procedures
- Critical, unpredictable or alcoholic home
- Verbal, physical or sexual abuse by parent, caretaker or sibling
- Neglect or abandonment
- Birth trauma – either giving birth or being born
- Divorce – either parents divorced or as an adult going through divorce or breakup
How much does Trauma Therapy cost?
Trauma therapy rates are the same as rates for other therapy.
**Insurance Coverage:** I accept Aetna, First Choice Health, Providence, and Pacific Source insurance in Oregon, Washington, Georgia, New Jersey, and Florida. If you have insurance from another provider, I can work with you as an out-of-network provider and provide a superbill for reimbursement.
**Private Pay Options:** For clients without insurance or preferring to pay privately, I offer flexible rates, HSA/FSA acceptance, and several sliding scale spots for those with financial need.
How long does the Trauma Therapy process take?
The short answer is that it depends on the kind of trauma and the length of time that you have been experiencing trauma. Our goal is to help you heal as soon as possible.
How long you will need therapy depends on your personal goals for treatment. If you have a symptom that you want to improve it may be a short treatment, say one to three months. If your trauma is more complex it can take much longer if you have complex symptoms, and your quality of life has been impacted for years. Our work will be tailored to your needs at a pace that feels comfortable and safe for you. We will work with you to design a plan that helps you meet your goals in a time frame that will work for you.
How do I know if Trauma Therapy is right for me?
According to the National Council for Behavioral Health 70% of Americans have experienced some sort of traumatic event. If you are feeling limited by your past or have behaviors you are having difficulty changing and are repeating them even though you don’t want to, trauma therapy can help.
When trauma goes unattended and unhealed, it leaks out and causes distress and destruction in both our own lives and in our relationships. The good news is that trauma recovery is possible. There is hope and relief if we’re willing to address it. We can support you in that process Contact Us today to schedule a consultation.
Center of Balance Counseling offers specialized online trauma therapy throughout Oregon, Washington, Georgia, New Jersey, and Florida. Services include treatment for acute trauma, chronic trauma, complex trauma (C-PTSD), vicarious trauma, and trauma-related anxiety. We specialize in trauma-informed therapy using EMDR, IFS (Internal Family Systems), and somatic therapy approaches.