It’s not your fault. Most people with childhood trauma never connect it to what’s hard for them now.
Your childhood was rough, and you handled it by becoming an adult early and doing everything yourself. Compared to your siblings, you came out fine – and you have the list ready: not in prison, not a train wreck, still here.
You don’t remember much of your childhood, and that’s always felt like a mercy. You survived by being strong and moving forward, never by looking back.
And still, underneath all that competence, one sense runs constantly: something is wrong with you. Unworthy, not good enough, with no evidence you can point to and no origin you can name.
Maybe you got small and invisible, so nobody had a reason to come looking. Maybe you learned to attack first, before anyone could get to you. Or you built walls, good thick ones, and they work: safer in there, and lonely, because nobody gets in.
The strategies you learned to survive childhood worked. Are they still serving you?
You go blank in certain rooms and shut down without deciding to. Your memories of childhood are gappy, and reaching for one feels like reaching into a bucket – pulling up this piece or that one, never a story that holds together.
Emotions arrive at full volume, too big to steer. And abandonment fear turns unbearable when something triggers it.
If there have been times you didn’t want to keep going, you can say that out loud here without it becoming the whole story of you.
In therapy, I start with what’s happening now. Something holds you back at work or in a relationship, and you can’t name what it is. You undermine your own success or feel uneasy when things are going too well.
From there, we work back to the core beliefs you picked up in your youth and weigh them from the perspective of the adult you became. We’ll keep the messages that still serve you and leave the rest behind.
The fears lurking at the back of your mind get smaller the moment we name them and look at them in the clear light of day. I’ll teach you practical ways to settle your body, because what happened to you is stored there, too – breathing, grounding, bringing a nervous system down from high alert.
You’ll regulate emotions that used to carry you off. Fewer days derailed, and a way to soothe the part of you that feels like a scared child. Your wise adult self takes the lead.
You’ll find a sense of freedom as you lean into this work. Growth is change, and change is hard. You can do hard things.
I work by telehealth across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. If your faith matters to you, it belongs in this work.
Schedule a free 15-minute consultation or book a first session, and we’ll begin in the present. Nothing gets dredged up to get started.