There is nothing wrong with you.

Is there something wrong with me? Why does life feel so hard? Why does everyone else seem to cope with things easier than I do? Maybe I should see a doctor — I'm constantly exhausted.

Complex trauma can leave you feeling like there is something fundamentally wrong with you. It is the experience of consistent and repeated exposure to childhood abuse, neglect, pathological parenting, and unsafe circumstances. Because we are wired for connection and survival, we adapt to the environment we are born into — and that adaptation is both good and necessary. Where complex trauma becomes destabilizing is when those survival adaptations follow us into adulthood, leaving us exhausted, confused, and carrying an aching sense that something is missing.

Complex and developmental trauma shows up in the body as much as it does in the mind. Because it originates in our family of origin, our personality, nervous system, belief systems, and neural patterns all develop alongside the trauma. The sense of who we are and what happened to us can feel completely fused, and that is exactly where the work begins.

My background in yoga therapy is immensely helpful here. Working with complex trauma is, at its core, an unraveling — of who you thought you were, so you can finally access who you actually are. We work slowly and relationally, so you can begin to experience yourself in relation to another, perhaps for the first time.