Trauma Therapy in Portland, Oregon

If you feel trauma has negatively impacted your life, know that change is possible. You deserve relief, and we’re here to help.

If you have experienced trauma, you might struggle with…
• Avoidance of close personal relationships or letting people in
• Persistent guilt, shame, and self-blame
• Confusion about your identity and difficulty viewing yourself in positive ways
• Recurring nightmares, intrusive thoughts, or flashbacks
• Challenges concentrating, remembering things, or staying present
• Irregular sleep or insomnia
For everything trauma has robbed you of, we want to help you rediscover yourself and reclaim your empowerment.

This transformation may look like…
• Renewed trust in yourself and others
• Relief from shame, guilt, numbness, detachment, hypervigilance, hopelessness, and feelings of worthlessness
• Feeling more at ease and holding less tension in your body
• Fostering authentic, open, and more rewarding relationships with others
• Greater emotional stability

What is trauma therapy like with a trauma-informed therapist?

The first step of working through trauma is building a relationship with your therapist that feels supportive and as safe as possible. Your therapist will get to know you, your story, and your therapy goals. Promoting your voice and ensuring you have an active and collaborative role in your therapy is essential. As trust and respect are established, your therapist will also begin assessing how trauma is impacting your life.

Next, your therapist will help you build tools for coping with trauma triggers. This is important because processing trauma can be triggering and re-traumatizing if you don’t know how to identify when you’re triggered or ways to cope and soothe. With trauma-informed therapy, your well-being takes precedence, and your therapist will draw on the relationship and understanding you’ve built to be in tune to you and what you’re experiencing.

Then, if you feel ready, you may begin to process the trauma you’ve experienced. Processing your trauma happens at your own pace, when/if you feel ready, and only once a supportive space and soothing/coping strategies have been developed. Your therapist will approach this process with intentionality and with the goal of helping you find new ways to relate to your trauma experience(s), better understand yourself, cultivate your self-compassion, and find pathways toward healing.

Finally, your therapist will help you re-engage in missed aspects of your life, reclaim enjoyment in valued activities, feel empowered through greater emotional stability and a deeper sense of self, and strengthen your relationships with others. This is when you’ll be integrating all you’ve discovered about yourself to work toward your personal goals and hopes for the future.

Kinds of trauma we support clients with:

Sexual trauma
Complex trauma (C-PTSD)
Relationship or attachment trauma
Birth trauma
Traumatic invalidation
Trauma related to oppression