Restorative Counseling Center

If you've been carrying the weight of the past longer than you can remember, you know what I'm talking about. The hypervigilance. The emotional flashbacks. The relationships that feel just out of reach. Trauma therapy is a structured, evidence-based path toward lasting relief, and it addresses the experiences that have shaped how you feel, think, and connect at a neurological level.

Trauma does not require a dramatic single event. Many of the women I work with carry what is often called "small t" trauma. The accumulated weight of being unseen, dismissed, or unsupported in ways that shaped the nervous system just as powerfully as more recognized traumatic events. I work with women navigating developmental trauma from childhood, PTSD, complex trauma, mother-daughter relational wounds, and trauma layered beneath anxiety, depression, or chronic pain. Using Polyvagal-enhanced EMDR alongside psychodynamic therapy, we work at the level of the nervous system and the level of meaning simultaneously.

Trauma lives in the body long after the events that caused it are over. You might know intellectually that you're safe now, but your nervous system hasn't gotten that message. A sound, a tone of voice, a date on the calendar, and suddenly you're back there, flooded, frozen, or numb. That's not weakness. That's an unprocessed memory that your brain never finished filing away. EMDR therapy is designed to change that.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It's recognized by the American Psychological Association, the World Health Organization, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. During EMDR, we use bilateral stimulation, typically guided eye movements, while you briefly hold a target memory in mind. What sets it apart from traditional talk therapy is that you don't need to narrate your trauma in detail for healing to occur. My approach is also Polyvagal-informed, meaning I assess your nervous system's baseline first and build the safety and resourcing needed before any processing begins.

Grief counseling is not about moving on, forgetting what you lost, or reaching some pre-set endpoint of being over it. It's about learning how to carry your loss in a way that doesn't collapse your ability to live, connect, and find meaning again. Loss takes many forms. The death of a parent, spouse, child, or close friend. The end of a marriage. A miscarriage. A chronic illness diagnosis. The loss of a career or identity. Each of these can produce the same disorienting mix of sadness, anger, numbness, and longing.

When you begin grief counseling with me, I don't follow a rigid script. Grief isn't linear, and neither is the therapy designed to address it. We work on processing the pain without being consumed by it, untangling complicated feelings that don't fit the "right" way to grieve, and rebuilding a sense of connection to your own life. I also use EMDR for grief that has become traumatic, when intrusive memories, avoidance, or physical symptoms have developed alongside the loss.

A cancer diagnosis changes everything. What it treats is everything a cancer diagnosis does to a person's inner world: the fear, the grief, the disorientation, the loss of control, and the profound uncertainty that can settle in long after treatment ends. You do not need a current diagnosis to benefit from cancer counseling. Survivors, people in long-term remission, and caregivers are all candidates for this work.

One of the most distinctly effective tools I use in cancer counseling is EMDR. Scanxiety, the intense anxiety many survivors experience before and after follow-up scans, can trigger symptoms that resemble acute trauma responses: intrusive thoughts, sleep disruption, physical tension. EMDR targets the fear response at its neurological root rather than teaching you to manage the symptoms. I provide therapy for women at every stage, and I also work with caregivers, because a cancer diagnosis does not happen to one person.

The mother-daughter bond is one of the most influential relationships a woman will ever have. It carries the full archive of a daughter's early emotional life, and a mother's hopes, fears, and unresolved experiences projected across decades. When it's strained, what often looks like conflict on the surface, the same arguments resurfacing, the cycles of closeness and withdrawal, is frequently something deeper: unprocessed grief, inherited trauma patterns, attachment wounds from childhood, or simply two people who have never had language for what they feel toward each other.

Mother-daughter therapy at Restorative Counseling Center is grounded in a trauma-informed, psychodynamic approach designed to help both of you feel heard, understood, and able to move forward together. It's not reserved for relationships in crisis. It's for any pairing that wants more clarity, more closeness, and more understanding. Sometimes the work involves both of you in session. Sometimes one of you comes individually to work on your own side of the dynamic first.