Complex Trauma Therapy
What is complex trauma?
Complex trauma builds up when harm happens repeatedly, often in places that were supposed to be safe. A childhood with a caregiver who couldn't stay regulated. A long relationship that wore down your sense of self. A family, community, or church where making yourself smaller was the only way to get through. It's cumulative, frequently invisible from the outside, and the single-event "big-T" model of trauma misses most of it.
If you've been in therapy before and felt like talking about it wasn't getting you anywhere, that often isn't a failure of effort. Complex trauma lives in the body and the nervous system, not just in the story you can tell about it.
How I work with it
My training is specialized in complex trauma and dissociation. The core framework is Trauma Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST), developed by Janina Fisher, PhD, which treats your protective patterns (the parts of you that learned to numb, please, fight, or disappear) as intelligent adaptations rather than pathology. TIST itself integrates Internal Family Systems (parts work) and sensorimotor psychotherapy; in practice, I often pair TIST with Brainspotting for trauma processing.
The combination matters. Talk therapy alone often can't reach what's stored beneath language; body-based work alone can leave you without a frame for what's surfacing. Working across parts, body, and brain together lets us meet what's actually happening at the level it lives.
What sessions look like
Pacing comes first. Early sessions are about building what your nervous system needs to do this work without getting overwhelmed: orientation, grounding, learning to recognize the protective parts that show up when something hard gets close. From there, we move toward what's been carrying the weight, on a timeline you set.
Some weeks the work is processing. Other weeks it's practical — sleep, boundaries, a hard conversation you're trying to have. Some sessions are paced down on purpose to let the body settle. None of it is on a fixed schedule, and none of it requires you to relive anything you're not resourced for.
Reasons people come to this work
- You've been in therapy before and felt stuck or unseen.
- The shame spiral is familiar territory.
- Your relationships keep replaying patterns from your family of origin.
- You experience dissociation, freeze, or disconnection from your body.
- You suspect what happened to you was bigger than you were told.
- You're a survivor of long-term abuse, neglect, or systemic harm.
- You're tired of managing symptoms and want to address what's underneath.