Some experiences do not stay in the past. They get stored, and then something ordinary brings the whole thing back as if no time has passed. A smell. A tone of voice. A room that is too quiet.
That is not a character flaw and it is not a failure to move on. It is what a nervous system does to protect itself when something was too much to process at the time.
Safety Comes First
I do not begin with excavation. If you have been through therapy that pushed you into the hardest material before you were ready, you already know what that costs.
The early work goes to grounding and regulation, building enough felt safety that the ground will hold what comes next. Only then do we reach toward stored experience. Clients who were rushed somewhere else usually notice the difference in the first few sessions.
The Approaches I Use
I match the approach to you rather than running everyone through the same protocol.
- TF-CBT
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which works on the thoughts and beliefs that formed around what happened. - Internal Family Systems and Parts Work
An approach that treats the conflicting parts of you, the one who wants to talk and the one who wants to run, as protectors with reasons rather than problems to override. - DBT Skills
Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills for riding out intense feeling, tolerating distress, and staying steady when emotion runs high. - Somatic and Mindfulness Practices
Body-based work, because trauma is held in the body and talking about it is not always enough to reach it.
What This Looks Like Over Time
There is no set timeline and I will not invent one for you. Some weeks are steady. Some are harder, particularly when your brain keeps processing between sessions in the form of dreams or stray memories. I build coping supports into the work for exactly that reason, and I check in about how you are doing between appointments.
All of it happens by video, from wherever you are in Colorado, which means you finish a hard session in your own home rather than in a car in a parking lot.