My Approach
Creating Internal Safety after Chronic Stress, Illness, or Trauma
I personally know how difficult, isolating, and even debilitating it can be to live with illness while also carrying years of stress and trauma in your body.
I spent over a decade taking healing-based programs, working with different practitioners, and trying to understand what was happening with me. But I found that very few approaches were designed for people who were dealing with both physical illness and the effects of long-term stress and trauma.
That gap is a big part of why I chose to train specifically in this work.
I wanted to understand how to help people who have experienced difficult things in both their minds and bodies, and who are trying to figure out how to feel more at home in themselves after everything they've been through.
My training in Somatic Experiencing, Traumatic Stress Studies, Polyvagal Theory, Somatic Attachment Theory, Somatic Inner Child/Parts Work, Trauma-Informed Coaching, and Early and Developmental Trauma all inform the way I work with clients.
If you're curious about these approaches, I've shared more about each one below.
REGULATING YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM (WITH POLYVAGAL THEORY)
Dr. Stephen Porges developed Polyvagal Theory as a way of understanding how our autonomic nervous system responds to what's happening around us. Throughout the day, we move through different states that affect how we feel, think, behave, connect with other people, and experience our bodies.
When you've experienced chronic stress and illness, you may find yourself spending a LOT of time in certain survival states, making it difficult to feel present, connected, or able to fully enjoy your life.
IMMOBILIZATION / COLLAPSE (DORSAL VAGAL STATE)
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This is the state where you might feel shut down, disconnected, numb, exhausted, foggy, helpless, or like you just can't make yourself do anything.
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You might have difficulty thinking or speaking, feel disconnected from your body, or spend hours scrolling, lying in bed, or avoiding everything because you simply can't engage.
MOBILIZATION/FIGHT OR FLIGHT (SYMPATHETIC STATE)
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This is the state where your body is preparing to DO something.
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You might feel anxious, fearful, panicked, angry, restless, tense, or like everything needs to happen RIGHT NOW.
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You may notice racing thoughts, a rapid heart rate, heat, clenching, buzzing, difficulty focusing, or a strong urge to move, fix, solve, or get away.
SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT/SAFETY (VENTRAL VAGAL STATE)
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This is the state where you may feel more connected, present, curious, engaged, steady, capable, relaxed, content, or open to what's happening around you.
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You have more access to connection, pleasure, curiosity, and the ability to respond to what's happening instead of automatically reacting to it.
When you've experienced chronic illness, your body may move into immobilization or mobilization very quickly, sometimes even when there isn't an immediate threat. Understanding these states can help you recognize what's happening in your body instead of judging yourself for how you're responding.
From there, you can begin practicing ways of working WITH your body's responses rather than fighting them, so you can have more choice in how you respond to stress, symptoms, and what’s happening around you.
CREATING SAFETY IN YOUR BODY (WITH SOMATIC EXPERIENCING)
When we've experienced trauma, chronic illness, or difficult experiences that were too much for our bodies to fully process at the time, we can continue to carry the effects of those experiences long after they're over.
Somatic Experiencing, developed by Dr. Peter Levine, is a body-based approach that helps us work with those responses in small, manageable ways.
Instead of only talking about what happened, we pay attention to what's happening in your body right now. You might notice tension, tightness, shaking, heat, numbness, an urge to move, or a feeling that you need to get away.
By slowing down and working with these sensations gradually, you can begin to experience more safety, calm, and choice in your body without becoming overwhelmed.
One of the things I love about Somatic Experiencing is that you don't have to continually rehash or revisit everything that happened to you. Instead, we work with what's happening in the present moment, at a pace your body can handle.
Over time, this can help you respond differently when stress, difficult emotions, physical symptoms, or old patterns show up, so you can feel more present and connected in your everyday life.
CREATING SAFETY IN YOUR RELATIONSHIPS (WITH SOMATIC ATTACHMENT WORK)
Our early relationships teach us a LOT about what closeness, connection, and safety feel like. If you've experienced relational trauma, you may have learned that getting close to people isn't always safe or predictable. Those patterns can continue showing up in your adult relationships, often without you consciously choosing them.
You might start to feel unsafe when someone gets too close, pull away when a relationship starts becoming more intimate, or become very anxious when someone takes space or seems less available. You might desperately want connection but then find yourself surrounded by people who aren't really able to meet you there.
And when you're living with chronic illness or chronic pain, these patterns can become even more difficult.
Your relationships shouldn't have to be another place where you're managing stress, taking care of everyone else, worrying about how someone will react, or wondering whether it's okay to ask for what you need.
Having relationships where you can say, “I need help,” and trust that the other person will actually show up for you can make a HUGE difference when you're already managing so much physically and emotionally.
You deserve relationships where you can ask for what you need, receive care without feeling like a burden, and trust that someone's emotional presence isn't going to disappear when things get difficult.
Somatic Attachment Theory gives us a way to work with what happens in your body when you're experiencing closeness, conflict, vulnerability, distance, or connection. Instead of only trying to understand your attachment patterns intellectually, we can notice what happens in your body in those moments and practice staying connected to yourself while you're connected to someone else.
Over time, this can help you experience more safety and choice in your relationships, making it easier to communicate what you need, ask for help, receive support, stay present during difficult moments, allow yourself to be deeply seen and known, and build relationships that feel genuinely supportive rather than like another source of stress.
HEALING CHILDHOOD RELATIONAL TRAUMA (WITH SOMATIC PARTS WORK)
When we experience difficult or traumatizing relationships as children without enough emotional safety or support, the ways we learned to cope can continue showing up in our adult lives.
Sometimes it can feel like you're suddenly much younger than you actually are. You might feel small, incapable, ashamed, terrified, alone, or like you don't know what to do, even when the situation you're in doesn't seem like it should feel THAT overwhelming. And if you experienced significant trauma or difficult experiences very early on... then you may find that you feel this way most or all of the time.
These reactions can be so difficult and confusing because you may understand intellectually that you're an adult and that you're safe now, but your body can still respond as though you're right back in the same situation again from 20, 30, 40 etc. years ago.
Somatic Parts Work gives us a way to connect with these younger parts of ourselves through what's happening in the body, rather than trying to reason with them or simply understand them intellectually.
We can slow down, notice what you're experiencing, and begin creating the safety and connection that may have been missing when those younger parts first developed.
This can help you to understand why certain situations affect you so strongly, and to begin responding from who you are now, rather than automatically falling back into old patterns.
If you've tried traditional inner child or parts work before and found it difficult to connect with, this approach may feel very different. Instead of trying to imagine or think your way into a connection with your younger self, we pay attention to what's actually happening in your body currently and work from there.
DESIGNING YOUR LIFE FOR RECOVERY (WITH SOMATIC BOUNDARY SETTING)
When you grow up without enough safety to be fully yourself, you may learn to disconnect from your needs, limits, wants, preferences, and even the parts of your personality that didn't feel acceptable in your environment.
You learn to pay attention to what other people need. You learn what keeps the peace. You learn what gets you approval or connection.
And eventually, it can become really difficult to know what YOU actually want. This can show up everywhere in adult life.
You might struggle to know when you need rest, what kind of relationships actually feel good to you, how much you can realistically take on, what you want your work or purpose to look like, or how you'd actually like to spend your free time.
Somatic work gives us a way to start reconnecting with those internal signals.
Instead of immediately overriding what you need or talking yourself out of what you want, we can slow down and notice what happens in your body when you consider a boundary, a decision, a desire, or a change.
From there, you can begin practicing small ways of expressing what you need and want while staying connected to yourself.
And for someone living with chronic illness, this can be especially important because your body has real limits. Your energy changes. Your capacity changes. Your life may need to look different from what you once expected.
Learning to recognize those limits, communicate them to other people, and build your life around what actually works for you can make it possible to create a life that feels meaningful without constantly pushing yourself past what your body can handle.
TRAUMA-INFORMED CHRONIC ILLNESS / PAIN SUPPORT
Living with chronic illness or pain can be an incredibly difficult experience, especially when you're also carrying a history of trauma or long-term stress.
You're dealing with physical symptoms, uncertainty about your health, changes in what you can do, medical appointments, difficult experiences with providers, and the constant question of what your body is going to do next.
And the experience of being unwell itself can become a source of ongoing stress.
When you don't have Context for why something is happening, Choice around when you get to feel better, or Connection with other people while you're experiencing it, your body can have a much harder time feeling safe.
This is why trauma-informed support can be such an important part of chronic illness and pain work.
A huge part of my work is helping you recognize what happens in your body when a symptom appears or your pain gets worse.
You might immediately become afraid. You might start monitoring the symptom, searching for answers, checking whether it's getting worse, or trying to figure out what you should do. Or you might feel completely overwhelmed and shut down.
The goal isn't to convince yourself that your symptoms aren't real or to think your way out of being triggered by them. Instead, we work with the response that's happening in your body while the symptoms are actually present.
Over time, this can help you create more space between a physical symptom showing up and immediately being pulled into fear, panic, overwhelm, or shutdown - which then allows you to still deeply enjoy and stay present to whatever you are doing in the moment.
And because chronic illness can be so isolating, we also pay attention to what helps you stay connected to the people and parts of your life that matter to you, even when your health makes things more difficult.
It's about helping you have more support, more choice, and more connection while you're living with something that can be incredibly difficult to navigate.
