PTSD & C-PTSD Therapy
Whether it was one event or a thousand small ones, your body remembers. And we can help you heal.
You know the feeling. Someone's tone shifts slightly and your whole body goes on alert before your mind even catches up. You've learned to read a room the way other people read a book: instantly, automatically, and you were never taught this, you just had to.
Maybe you're the one who apologizes first, even when you're not sure what you did. The one who stays quiet because speaking up used to cost too much. The one who can sit in a room full of people who love you and still feel completely alone, because somewhere along the way you learned that needing anyone was dangerous.
You give so much of yourself to everyone else. You hold it together at work, in your friendships, for your family. And then you get home, or you're alone for just a moment, and it hits you how tired you are of managing everything and everyone, including your own feelings, all the time.
If this is you, you're not too much. You're not broken. You're not dramatic for feeling this deeply. This is what trauma does. It rewires you to survive something your system couldn't fully process at the time. And it can be healed.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Isolated events- when there's a clear before and after
Maybe there's a moment you can point to. A car accident. An assault. A night that changed everything. Before it, you were one version of yourself. After it, you were someone who flinches at loud noises, who can't watch certain scenes on TV, who feels their heart rate spike out of nowhere because something, a smell, a song, a stranger's voice, just took you right back there.
You might be replaying it without meaning to. Nightmares. Flashbacks that feel less like memories and more like it's happening again, right now, in your body. You might be avoiding anything that reminds you of it, even indirectly, even if that means your world has gotten smaller. You might feel keyed up all the time, like your nervous system never got the message that it's over.
This is PTSD. It's your mind and body's response to something that overwhelmed your ability to cope in the moment, and it's still trying to protect you from something that already happened.
Common PTSD examples (single-incident):
Car accidents or other serious accidents
Physical or sexual assault
Combat or military deployment
Witnessing violence or a sudden death
Natural disasters (hurricanes, fires, floods)
A medical trauma (a frightening diagnosis, a traumatic birth, a near-death experience)
Sudden, violent loss of a loved one
A single incident of abuse
Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD)
When it's not one moment, but a long stretch of time
Maybe there's no "before and after" for you. There's just... how things were. Years of it. A childhood where you never knew which parent would show up. A relationship where love and fear got tangled together until you couldn't tell them apart. An environment where you had to grow up fast, watch your words, manage someone else's moods just to keep the peace.
It wasn't one event. It was the water you grew up swimming in. And because there's no single moment to point to, you might have spent years wondering if you even have the right to call it trauma at all. You might minimize it. You might say "it wasn't that bad" while your body tells a different story: the chronic tension, the trouble trusting, the way you either lose yourself in relationships or can't let anyone close, the inner critic that never lets up, the numbness that shows up when things get too real.
This is complex PTSD, or CPTSD. It doesn't just leave you afraid of a trigger. It shapes how you see yourself, how you relate to other people, and how safe your own body feels to live in. It's not "PTSD, but worse." It's trauma that had time to become part of your architecture.
Common CPTSD examples (prolonged/repeated):
Childhood emotional, physical, or sexual abuse
Growing up with an addicted, mentally ill, or unpredictable parent
Chronic neglect, being left to raise yourself or your siblings
Domestic violence or an abusive long-term relationship
Being a caregiver for an abusive or dying parent
Bullying that went on for years
Living in an unstable or unsafe environment for an extended period
Ongoing emotional invalidation ("that didn't happen," "you're too sensitive")
Coercive control, whether from a parent, partner, or authority figure
