Trauma Therapy in Grand Rapids, MI
You understand why you do it. So why can't you just stop?
Maybe you have already spent years understanding yourself.
You know where your anxiety comes from. You can identify your triggers. You understand many of your patterns and may recognize how they developed. You may even be a therapist or healthcare professional yourself, someone who knows the coping skills, understands the terminology, and can explain exactly what is happening.
And yet, your body still reacts.
You become overwhelmed more quickly than you want to. You shut down, disconnect, overthink, overwork, or strive to get everything exactly right. A relatively ordinary stressor can create a reaction that feels much bigger than the situation in front of you.
You may know why this happens and still not know how to turn it off.
Or maybe you don't know exactly why it happens. You just know that understanding it, thinking differently, or trying another coping skill hasn't been enough.
This is often where the trauma therapy I provide begins.
Trauma Doesn't Always Look Like One Terrible Event
When people hear the word trauma, they often think of a single catastrophic event followed by PTSD.
Trauma can look like that. But it doesn't have to.
I primarily work with adults whose experiences were more complex, chronic, developmental, or difficult to name. Sometimes there are identifiable traumatic events. Other times, there were years of smaller experiences that accumulated: emotional neglect, instability, criticism, chronic stress, having to grow up too quickly, feeling unsafe being yourself, or repeatedly learning that your needs came second.
Sometimes it is both.
You also do not need clear memories of your childhood or a complete explanation of what happened for us to work with how those experiences may still be affecting you.
Some people remember very little. Others remember events but have difficulty understanding why they affected them. You may even look back at your childhood and think, Nothing was that bad, while recognizing patterns in adulthood that seem to have been with you for as long as you can remember.
Trauma therapy does not require us to reconstruct your past or find the event that explains everything.
Rather than defining trauma only by what happened, I am interested in what your mind and body learned to do in response.
Your nervous system is constantly learning from experience. Patterns that seem frustrating or dysfunctional now may have developed because, at some point, they helped you cope, stay connected, anticipate danger, or protect yourself.
The problem is that your nervous system doesn't automatically discard those patterns when circumstances change.
You may no longer need the same protection, but your body hasn't necessarily gotten that message.
Childhood Trauma Can Look Different in Adulthood
Many of the adults I work with don't initially describe themselves as struggling with trauma.
Instead, they may describe:
Chronic anxiety or a nervous system that seems easily activated
Perfectionism and feeling like nothing they do is quite good enough
Overfunctioning, overworking, or taking responsibility for everyone around them
Difficulty resting without guilt
Intense emotional reactions that seem disproportionate to the situation
Shutting down, going blank, feeling disconnected, or dissociating
Low self-worth despite being highly capable
Intellectualizing emotions rather than actually feeling or regulating them
Chronic stress and difficulty returning to baseline
Relationship patterns they understand intellectually but continue repeating
Feeling constantly "on," even when nothing is obviously wrong
Knowing a long list of coping skills but struggling to access them when they are actually needed
You do not need a detailed childhood narrative for these patterns to be worth exploring.
Sometimes what stands out most isn't a specific memory. It is the way your system responds now.
Some clients also experience OCD symptoms, neurodivergence, chronic illness, or other concerns that interact with their trauma history. Therapy should make room for that complexity rather than trying to force every experience into a single explanation.
What If You've Already Tried Therapy?
Many of my clients have.
In fact, many of the people I work with already understand therapy pretty well.
You may know how to identify a cognitive distortion, challenge an anxious thought, use coping skills, recognize a trigger, practice grounding, or explain exactly why you respond the way you do.
You might be very good at changing your thoughts.
And changing your thoughts might not be the problem.
Maybe you can tell yourself that you are safe, but your body is already activated. You can recognize that a reaction is bigger than the situation, but that recognition doesn't make the reaction stop. You can understand that you don't need to be perfect, yet your system continues to respond to mistakes as though something important is at stake.
Some of my clients have spent years in traditional talk therapy and found it genuinely helpful. It gave them insight, language, coping strategies, and a much better understanding of themselves.
That work isn't wasted. We can build on it.
Other clients found that previous therapy didn't work well for them or had experiences in therapy where they felt misunderstood, pushed too quickly, pathologized, or harmed.
Either way, I don't assume that what you need is another explanation or another lesson in how to change your thoughts.
Sometimes the problem isn't that you don't know enough.
You can understand exactly why your nervous system reacts the way it does while still experiencing the reaction.
That gap between what you know and what your nervous system does is an important part of the work I do.
Trauma Therapy That Includes Your Nervous System
My approach integrates conversation and cognitive work with Somatic Experiencing informed interventions, nervous system regulation, neuropsychotherapy, grounding, psychoeducation, and other trauma informed approaches.
That doesn't mean every session involves a formal exercise or that we stop talking about your life.
Sometimes therapy looks surprisingly ordinary. We might talk. We might notice what is happening in your body while we talk. We might experiment with grounding, movement, humor, orientation, or another seemingly simple activity. We may slow something down rather than trying to immediately solve it.
Underneath that work, I am paying attention not only to what you are telling me, but also to what seems to be happening within your nervous system as we work together.
Therapy is also relational. My nervous system is in the room too. Regulation does not always happen by thinking our way into calm. Humans also regulate through safety, connection, and interaction with other people.
The goal isn't to force your nervous system to behave.
It is to help it develop more options.
You Don't Have to Tell Me Everything
Trauma therapy does not require sitting down and immediately recounting the worst things that have ever happened to you.
In fact, I generally don't begin there.
You don't need to remember everything. We do not need to recover memories, reconstruct your childhood, or identify exactly when a particular response began in order to work with what your nervous system is doing today.
We can work with what is happening now: what you notice, how your nervous system responds, what feels manageable, what doesn't, and what happens as we gently experiment with doing something differently.
There may eventually be times when talking about past experiences is useful. But you remain in control of what you share and what we do with it.
Consent matters to me.
If you don't want to do an exercise, we don't do it. If something I suggest feels ridiculous, uncomfortable, irritating, confusing, or simply unhelpful, I want to know that too.
You do not need to protect your therapist from your feedback.
Therapy Doesn't Always Have to Look Like Therapy
I am direct, collaborative, educational, and sometimes challenging. I also use humor when it fits.
I don't view myself as the expert on you.
You have spent your entire life in your mind and body. You bring that expertise into the room. I bring clinical knowledge, another nervous system, an outside perspective, and a collection of tools that may help us understand and change patterns that have become difficult to shift alone.
Sometimes our work will be structured. Sometimes it won't.
Sometimes an intervention may look more like a strange or silly experiment than what you imagined trauma therapy would be.
That's okay.
If traditional therapy has taught you everything about why you are the way you are, our work may be less about finding one more explanation and more about helping your system experience something different.
Trauma Therapy for Therapists and Healthcare Professionals
A significant part of my practice includes other therapists, mental health professionals, and healthcare workers.
Being clinically knowledgeable doesn't make you immune to trauma, anxiety, chronic stress, dissociation, perfectionism, or nervous system dysregulation.
Sometimes it makes being a client more complicated.
You may recognize every intervention. You may analyze your own therapist while they're doing it. You may already know the psychoeducation. You may know how to reframe a thought, identify a trigger, practice a coping skill, or explain the function of your own behavior.
You may be excellent at identifying what you "should" do while finding that your own nervous system remains completely unimpressed by your professional credentials.
You don't need Therapy 101.
Our work can start from what you already know.
Neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ Affirming Trauma Therapy
Trauma doesn't occur separately from identity.
Many of the people I work with are neurodivergent, LGBTQ+, or both. Some have previously encountered therapists who did not understand how their identities, nervous systems, relationships, sensory experiences, or ways of processing the world affected therapy.
I aim to provide affirming care that makes room for those intersections rather than assuming there is one "normal" way a person should think, communicate, regulate, relate, or heal.
Chronic Illness and Trauma
Trauma doesn't occur separately from identity.
Many people I work with are also navigating chronic health conditions.
Living with chronic illness can create its own ongoing stress, particularly when symptoms are difficult to explain, treatment is uncertain, or you have repeatedly felt dismissed or misunderstood within healthcare systems.
Therapy is not a substitute for appropriate medical care, and I don't assume physical symptoms are psychological simply because you have a trauma history.
Instead, we can make room for both.
Your physical health is real. Your nervous system is also part of your body. Therapy can address chronic stress, emotional responses, medical system experiences, and nervous system patterns without reducing your health concerns to "just anxiety" or "just trauma."
Is This the Kind of Trauma Therapy You're Looking For?
We may be a particularly good fit if you:
Experienced childhood, developmental, relational, or complex trauma
Aren't entirely sure what happened in childhood, but recognize patterns that have followed you into adulthood
Have lived with chronic stress for a long time
Understand your patterns intellectually but still feel stuck in them
Know how to challenge your thoughts or use coping skills, but find that those tools don't always change what your nervous system does
Tend toward perfectionism, overfunctioning, anxiety, shutdown, or dissociation
Have already done substantial talk therapy and want to build on that work
Are a therapist, mental health professional, or healthcare professional yourself
Want therapy that includes the body and nervous system without abandoning conversation and insight
Are looking for neurodivergent or LGBTQ+ affirming care
Want a therapist who will collaborate with and challenge you rather than position herself as the authority on your experience
My practice is generally less focused on treating a recent, isolated traumatic event in adulthood. My clinical interests are primarily in complex and developmental trauma, childhood experiences, recurring trauma, and chronic stress that continue to shape life in adulthood.
Related Therapy Services
Trauma rarely fits neatly into one category. Depending on what brings you to therapy, you may also want to learn more about Somatic Counseling, Neurodivergent Affirming Therapy, LGBTQIA+ Affirming Counseling or Counseling for OCD and how these concerns can overlap with trauma and chronic stress.
Starting Trauma Therapy
It makes sense if part of you wants help and another part is apprehensive about actually starting.
You don't need to know exactly what happened to you. You don't need to have the right diagnosis. You don't need to remember your entire childhood. And you don't need another person telling you to use coping skills you already know.
You also don't need to decide whether I'm the right therapist based on a webpage.
A consultation gives us a chance to talk briefly about what you're looking for, answer questions, and get an initial sense of whether working together might be a good fit.
Therapy can be in person in Grand Rapids, Michigan, or online for clients located in Michigan.
You don't need another person telling you what you should already know.
Sometimes the next step is helping your nervous system experience something different from what your mind has understood for years.
Schedule a consultation to see if working together feels like a good fit.