Hypervigilance is your brain's survival mechanism stuck in overdrive. After trauma, your nervous system learns to stay on high alert—constantly scanning for threats, overthinking interactions, and struggling to relax. This exhausting response once protected you during genuine danger, but now it prevents you from feeling safe and present in your life. Your brain doesn't understand the threat has passed, so it keeps the alarm system running, draining your energy and damaging your relationships.

If you've lived through trauma, healthy relationships can feel wrong. It's not that you're broken—your nervous system is doing what it was trained to do: keep you safe by maintaining what feels familiar. When you grow up in chaos, your body learns that chaos equals normal. Then calm arrives, and your brain doesn't know what to do with peace. So it creates problems to match old beliefs about what you deserve.

The most impactful period for trauma? Birth to age seven. Your brain during these early years is like wet cement—everything leaves an impression. After age seven, that cement starts to harden. Impressions can still be made, but they take more force.

Childhood trauma doesn't disappear when you grow up—it shows up in patterns you might not recognize. From struggling to trust your feelings to repeating painful relationship cycles, these signs reveal unhealed wounds. Your survival strategies made sense then, but now they're holding you back from the life you deserve.

Pre-verbal trauma doesn't look like trauma at first glance. It looks like personality quirks. It looks like 'just the way you are.' But look closer. Your body might react before your brain catches up. Someone reaches toward you quickly, and you flinch. These aren't choices—they're your nervous system running ancient programming.

Your brain's number one job is to keep you alive. Not happy. Not connected. Alive. When trauma happens, your brain builds walls to make sure you never get hurt like that again. Here's the problem: those walls don't just keep out danger. They keep out connection too. The walls that are keeping you safe, are keeping you lonely.

Insecure attachment develops when your basic needs for safety and emotional connection aren't met in childhood. This developmental trauma shapes how you relate to others as an adult. Whether you struggle with anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment, therapy can help you heal these wounds and create the secure relationships you deserve. Your past doesn't have to determine your future.

Trauma recovery follows six distinct stages: safety and stabilization, remembrance and mourning, reconnection, integration, post-traumatic growth, and helping others. While healing isn't linear, understanding these stages provides a roadmap for your journey. You can transform from survivor to thriver with patience, courage, and professional support.

Writing as both a trauma therapist and mother after yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting, I understand the gut-wrenching fear of sending children to school. Your daily anxiety is valid—the knot in your stomach, checking your phone constantly, memorizing what your child wore. Here's how we heal together.

Your body holds trauma in muscles, tissues, and your nervous system—but it also knows how to release it. As a therapist, I've seen how healing manifests physically through trembling, yelling, temperature shifts, and unexpected tears. These aren't signs something's wrong—they're evidence your body is finally letting go.

Dissociation is your mind's emergency exit when life becomes overwhelming. It's your brain's freeze response to being overwhelmed - a protective mechanism that disconnects you from reality. Through therapy techniques like Brainspotting, you can learn to reconnect with yourself and develop healthier coping strategies for emotional healing.

Substance abuse and mental health problems feed off each other in a dangerous cycle. Using alcohol or drugs to cope with anxiety or depression actually makes these conditions worse over time. Understanding this connection is the first step toward breaking free from guilt, shame, and reclaiming your mental health.

When trauma enters our lives, it often rewrites the rules we live by. One of the most powerful rules it creates is this: your needs don't matter as much as keeping others happy. Learning to say "no" isn't just about setting boundaries—it's about healing and reclaiming your voice

Ever wonder why you feel emotionally younger than your actual age? Trauma can literally freeze development, creating "developmental arrest" where your brain pauses emotional growth to focus on survival. The good news? Your brain can resume healthy development at any age through proper healing and support.

Trauma doesn't just live in your mind—it lives in your relationships. When your nervous system is stuck in survival mode, intimacy becomes impossible. But healing is possible. Learn how trauma disrupts connection, why shame keeps you isolated, and how therapy can restore your capacity for deep, meaningful relationships.

Your body remembers everything, even when your mind tries to forget. Trauma gets stored in your muscles, nervous system, and organs—showing up as chronic tension, unexplained pain, and breathing changes. Learning to listen to these signals without judgment is the first step toward healing and releasing what you've been carrying.

If you have a history of trauma, taking hours to calm down after being upset isn't weakness—it's your nervous system doing what it was trained to do: protect you. Trauma rewires your brain's alarm system, making it hypersensitive and flooding your body with stress chemicals long after danger passes.

Trauma doesn't just hurt us in the moment – it changes how we connect with and share our feelings. Your brain learned to protect you by shutting down emotional expression. This isn't weakness – it's survival. But what once protected you might now be holding you back from healing.

Trauma recovery isn't a straight line up—it's messy and often gets worse before it gets better. When you start somatic therapy, you're asking your body to release what it's been holding for years. That temporary discomfort leads to profound, lasting health improvements

Pre-verbal trauma happens before age three, when our attachment system—our blueprint for relationships—gets wired. Medical trauma, adoption transitions, caregiver depression, and inconsistent caregiving create wounds we can't remember but still feel in our bodies. These early experiences shape our nervous system's responses and relationship patterns. Understanding attachment trauma and pre-verbal trauma is the first step toward healing these invisible wounds through body-based therapies and secure relationships.