PTSD

PTSD shows up in a lot of different ways, but at its foundation, PTSD is a dissociative disorder. Anyone who has lived through trauma knows that the clinical criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are held together by a single reality: your nervous system had to fragment an intolerable experience so you could survive it. Most providers look at PTSD and see a cluster of inconvenient symptoms to manage, medicate, or extinguish. In my practice, I do not view your body as broken machinery. I recognize your hypervigilance, your panic, and your emotional shutdown as coherent, protective adaptations of a human being whose human boundary was violently breached.

The clinical definition of trauma is blatant about including exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence, whether experienced directly, witnessed in person, learned through the sudden loss of someone you love, or absorbed through repeated exposure to horror as first responders and military personnel do daily. But what makes trauma take root is not any event itself. Your body could not process the experience and threw up a wall. The body brings the experience back to present time and lets you enjoy it agian! 

Flashbacks, distressing nightmares, and sudden Emotional Overwhelm are not memories you are pulling up on purpose. 

Because PTSD is fundamentally driven by this fragmentation, my work here connects directly to Dissociative Disorders. Trauma forces the self to schism an experience out in order to endure what no human nervous system should have to endure. 

I think this work blends with Philosophical Therapy, ACT Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, ERP Experiental / Exposure and Response, Narrative Therapy, Grief, BPD, Suicide Postvention, Legal & Institutional Systems, Disability, Substance Use & Addiction, Identity, Culture & Community and so forth.

Military service, veteran status, and growing up in a military home touch every part of life. In this practice, military experiences are kept completely off-the-record - separate from VA red tape, chain of command, and civilian assumptions - with real, lived-experience support under Military.