ABOUT

Working with childhood trauma in adults fascinates me. The "rupture" produced by traumatic experiences is deeply rooted in the person's unconscious, body and core beliefs. Switching to "automatic pilot" becomes a way to survive.

Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering. The responses to trauma are best understood as a spectrum of conditions rather than a single disorder. They range from a brief stress reaction that gets better by itself and never qualifies for a diagnosis, to classic or straightforward post-traumatic stress disorder, to the complex syndrome of prolonged, repeated trauma. The symptom picture is often far more complex in survivors of prolonged, repeated trauma. Survivors of prolonged abuse develop characteristic personality changes, including deformations of relatedness and identity. Survivors of abuse in childhood develop similar problems with relationships and identity; in addition, they are particularly vulnerable to repeated harm, both self-inflicted and at the hands of others.The healing approach involves reconnecting with the authentic self, reprocessing the trauma's meaning, healing, and becoming whole.

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