Welcome to The Awakened Heart Therapy Services

Do you experience any of the following?

Feeling nervous, worried, tense and on edge.

Living in fear of something bad happening.

Moving through life just going through the motions. 

Feeling numb or detached.

Worrying that people around you are going to find out you have no idea what you are doing.

Feeling you don't belong or there is something wrong with you. You just don't feel normal.

Having a voice inside that says everything that happens is your fault.

Feeling responsible for taking care of everyone.

Needing to keep everyone around you happy. 

If other people aren't happy, you have to fix it.

Being inauthentic, constant people-pleasing to feel safe. You're not really sure who you even are.

Feeling uncomfortable when things are going well. 

Being calm or quiet can feel uneasy, or dangerous.

Always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Emotions that feel intense, so you try to shut them down with whatever it takes. 

Self-medicating with alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, sex, porn, or spending money in order to stop feeling bad. 

Feeling out of control at times.

Feeling unable to say "No" and feel ok about it.

Feeling afraid to stand up for yourself.

Taking care of yourself feels selfish or like a waste of time.

 The latest data from 2023 shows that 50% of young adults (ages 18-24), 38% of adults (ages 25-49), and 30% of adults (ages 50-64) are currently suffering with some type of anxiety and/or depression.*

My perspective is that anxiety and/or depression are not primary problems, they are symptoms. Many therapists treat anxiety or depression as primary problems by teaching skills to calm ourselves or skills to try and logic ourselves out of the anxiety and depression we feel (CBT and DBT). 

I see that as a superficial approach that doesn't really get to the root of why we have these problems. Often, people still experience anxiety or depression despite learning these things, so they continuously have to try and manage it. That's exhausting! And it leads to many people thinking therapy is ineffective. 

Emotions and trauma live in the body, so therapy approaches that only address our thoughts or mind are helpful for beginners to therapy, but won't really heal the cause. They are not a complete treatment.

When we understand why we are experiencing anxiety, insecurities, or depression, we can take evidence-based steps to actually heal. When you understand how the symptoms you experience make sense in context, then you've got a path to healing! 

And that requires a licensed therapist with specific training and expertise to guide you there.

*KFF analyses of US Census data, 2023

After 23 years of clinical practice, I have observed that many people are living with symptoms of complex trauma. Conventional, insurance-driven, superficial therapies such as CBT or DBT often have a very limited response for people with complex trauma. 

Common features of Complex trauma include: 

Emotional Flashbacks

Toxic Shame

Self-abandonment

a Vicious Inner Critic

Social Anxiety

Complex Trauma or C-PTSD is caused by growing up with ongoing exposure to difficult, overwhelming or challenging circumstances, coupled with the absence of healthy adult support, guidance, and unconditional love. 

These difficult circumstances together with a lack of adult support causes children to miss important self-development tasks. Instead of developing health self-esteem, children develop a learned habit of self-hate and self-disgust. 

Some examples of the causes of complex trauma are: 

Growing up with a parent with an addiction

Growing up with a parent with a personality disorder

Growing up with a parent with an untreated or uncontrolled mental illness

Growing up with a parent with a scary medical illness

Growing up being bullied or feeling you don't belong

Growing up in a household with violence or rage

Growing up with love, acceptance, or affection being withheld or feeling conditional

Often feeling criticized, judged or shamed by a parent/caregiver

Growing up feeling responsible for a parent's emotional, health, medical, or safety needs

Growing up with neglect for adequate food, water, clothing, or a sense of safety

Growing up with chaos, constant moving, lack of stability

Experiencing abuse of any kind during childhood, including verbal, emotional, physical or sexual

Experiencing intense losses during childhood including divorce, fire, a death, or moving 

Many people, perhaps a very large percentage of the population, has experienced one or more of the above circumstances. The above circumstances can create Attachment wounds. Attachment wounds, unhealed, persist into adulthood and prevent normal and healthy adult functioning. 

During childhood, kids need certain good things to happen in order to develop a healthy sense of self, a sense of safety and stability, and good interpersonal boundaries. 

In a healthy family system, adults take care of children, protecting and guiding them to foster their own development as people. There are appropriate boundaries. Adults take responsibility for problems and address them.

Healthy adults take care of themselves and don't impose their own agenda or problems onto kids. Parents give kids support and guidance for the challenges they face, wherever those problems happen - school, extended family, sports, church.

When a healthy family system or adult isn't there to support them, kids blame themselves. They feel empty, alone, or like they don't matter, they are not good enough, or there is something wrong with them (because of course, kids are not powerful enough to fix grown-up problems). Often, they have PSTD symptoms like nightmares, flashbacks, inability to trust others or feel safe, and avoidance of thinking about these problems.

When the unmet needs of a parent are a dominant focus in the family, children learn that the only way they can belong is by taking care of or managing problems for other people and pushing aside their own feelings and needs. They feel guilty or "wrong" for focusing on themselves. These kids grow up to be caretakers or people-pleasers, with many of the unhealthy symptoms I mentioned above.

Rejections, mistreatment, bullying, failure, violence, adult anger, abuse or assault experiences hit us all the harder. They echo and reinforce the negative messages that the LACK of good support gave us, strengthening them. We feel more alone than ever. More lost. More vulnerable. More unwanted. More "broken." 

Working with Complex trauma requires a high level of knowledge and skills from a therapist. It takes many years to develop this expertise. Many therapists are lacking awareness of what complex trauma is, or how to treat it. 

Superficial therapies like CBT and DBT are not adequate, but they are what is taught in graduate school. They are what insurance companies will reimburse for. A therapist has to have the willingness to recognize they are not that effective, recognize it's not the client's fault, and seek out and invest in high-quality training and supervision. 

PTSD symptoms are often caused by single-incident trauma (defined as a moment when you believe you might die). 

Some examples are being in a car accident, waking up during a medical procedure, or experiencing violence or aggression. 

Single-incident trauma can cause nightmares, flashbacks, fears, or avoidance of the normal things you want to be able to do. Another effect is strong urges to avoid thinking about the traumatic event. However, despite your best efforts, PTSD symptoms won't go away on their own. It's not possible to just "leave it in the past," or to "move past it."

In fact, people often develop other types of problems in an effort to numb or avoid thoughts of their trauma. Examples include abusing alcohol or drugs, over-eating, gambling, physical fighting, sex addiction, shoplifting, or any compulsive behaviors that may cause you to temporarily feel good, but hurt you in the long run. 

There is no need to suffer with single-incident trauma! 

If you were doing well before and didn't have other mental health issues, single-incident trauma can be successfully treated in just a few sessions, in the hands of a skilled EMDR therapist. 

EMDR is well-known to be the most effective and fastest treatment for single-incident trauma. From the American Psychiatric Association, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (USVA) and Department of Defense (USDOD), the United Kingdom’s National Institute for Health Care and Excellence (NICE), and the World Health Organization (WHO), multiple global organizations now recognize the effectiveness of EMDR.

If you haven't felt much relief from talk therapy, CBT, DBT, or other popular (but superficial) forms of therapy, EMDR Therapy is a complete game changer. Rather than adding something like skills to manage your anxiety or other symptoms, that you have to work to remember and practice to master and use every time you feel anxious, EMDR therapy takes something away... the uncomfortable, unpleasant emotions and reactions that cause you to get emotionally activated and need those skills in the first place. 

Why work so hard to manage your symptoms, when you can actually be guided to resolve them? 

The majority of therapists trained in EMDR never go beyond the basic training. Basic EMDR is a 40 hour training, and gives beginner info to treat single-incident trauma. Basic EMDR requires therapists to stick rigidly to the standard protocol, and doesn't teach the adaptations needed for people with complex trauma.

I first experienced EMDR as a therapy client. My therapist at the time didn't really explain what she was doing (So I am careful to explain EMDR in detail). I thought it was all very strange! I had never experienced therapy like this. 

However, I noticed that I actually felt different after an EMDR session. Although it was scary to face my emotions, the relief I felt began to motivate me. I could feel myself changing and growing inside, without having to do therapy homework or try to remember what to do all the time when I was triggered. 

Since I was already a therapist, I decided to get trained in basic EMDR. I excitedly began using it with every client that was willing. I noticed during this early experimentation that a lot of clients were kind of overwhelmed by basic EMDR (as I had been). After further thought, feedback from clients, and professional consultation, I realized that these were people with complex trauma. 

I began to study and learn everything I could about complex trauma. Even though I had complex trauma myself, and had a decade of therapy under my belt, no therapist I worked with had ever mentioned it to me. I didn't know what was wrong with me other than symptom labels like "anxiety" or "OCD." I didn't understand the underlying, core problems that I had in context.

Basic EMDR, skillfully used, can erase the effects of single-incident trauma and take you back to how you were before the trauma happened. But what if you are a person with complex trauma, and your "before" was not so good? Again, due to overwhelming circumstances coupled with a lack of healthy adult support.

I realized I needed to learn more in order to be truly helpful to people. I embarked on a mission to train to use EMDR with people with complex trauma. I found a group of expert EMDR clinicians who had worked to address this, and offered adaptations, interventions and strategies to successfully address deficits and strengthen clients with complex trauma. 

Then, I excitedly grabbed up another 150+ hours of training to learn all these different ways of using EMDR to do so much more than erase the effects of a trauma. Advanced EMDR helps you to re-build yourself into the best version of you!  

The result of all this advanced training is that I understand the theories of complex trauma, and what is needed to heal so well, that I can use all these techniques creatively and on-the-spot to treat just about any issue. I am very comfortable in using EMDR, and it works!