Trauma Therapy

Building resilience through connection

Do you find yourself wondering if you are broken? Maybe your mind won’t switch off at night no matter how fatigued your body feels. Maybe you “lose” time or feel disconnected from yourself and those around you. Maybe you’re always on high alert, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or maybe you just wish you could respond “differently” to things than you do.

Trauma doesn’t just live in the past — it echoes in your present. It can show up as sudden spikes of anxiety or depression, irritability over small things, deep feelings of shame and low self-worth, or the instinct to withdraw from the people and activities you love. You might wonder why it’s so hard to “just move on,” even when you logically know you are safe right now.

If you are looking for an experienced trauma therapist in Utah who understands that healing requires more than just talking, you are in the right place. Together, we can help your nervous system remember what safety actually feels like.

An integrative approach to trauma recovery

Because every individual's story is unique, my Utah trauma therapy practice integrates multiple modalities to meet you exactly where you are:

1. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

When a traumatic event occurs, the brain can get overwhelmed, causing the memory of the experience to get "stuck.” EMDR uses bilateral stimulation (such as side-to-side eye movements or gentle taps) to help your brain reprocess and shift these memories from distressing emotional triggers in the present into more neutral past events—without requiring you to talk through every painful detail.

2. Parts Work (IFS-Informed)

Have you ever felt like part of you wants to move forward, but another part of you is terrified and holding you back? Trauma often fragments our internal world. Parts work helps us gently identify and communicate with these different inner voices — such as the critic, the protector, or the wounded child. By understanding their adaptive responses, we can untangle internal conflict and cultivate self-compassion.

3. Somatic Therapy

Trauma affects our physiology — it is shows up in our muscles, posture, breath, and nervous system responses (like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn). Somatic therapy brings gentle awareness to these experiences. By learning to track and work with these sensations, we can shift arousal, support better sleep, and help your body finally understand that the danger has passed.

4. Nature-Based Therapy

Nature offers a supportive space for emotion regulation and secure attachment. By weaving the natural world into our therapeutic process — utilizing local outdoor spaces around Salt Lake City or incorporating natural elements and grounding practices into our work — we can lean on the more-than-human world to support healing.

What our work together looks like

  • Stabilize and Build Skills: We begin by building relational safety and a practical toolkit for immediate relief — focusing on grounding and stabilizing your nervous system to build capacity for processing and the demands of your day-to-day life.

  • Process Safely: We gently untangle stuck memories and old emotional loops at a measured pace and within the safe container of therapy.

  • Shift Perspective: We work to transform core beliefs rooted in the past (like "I am unsafe" or "It was my fault") into an adaptive sense of self in the present.

  • Reconnect: We restore your capacity for joy, presence, healthy boundaries, and authentic connection with yourself and your community.

Through this process, clients are able to find relief from the responses they’ve felt controlled by for so long, allowing them to repair relational patterns, cultivate self-compassion, and reclaim their agency.

  • No—trauma isn’t defined by the objective scale of an event, but by how your nervous system responded to the experience. Trauma responses may stem from feeling stuck or trapped, experiencing too much too soon (or for too long) or too little too late.

    Whether you are dealing with a single overwhelming event (Big 'T' trauma) or the cumulative weight of chronic stress, relational wounds, or systemic neglect (small 't' trauma), your experience is valid and deserving of healing.

  • You do not need to share specifics of your trauma with me. Modalities like EMDR, somatic therapy, and parts work focus on how trauma is showing up and impacting your mind and body in the present. You retain full control over your story, and we can effectively process these experiences without verbalizing the details.

  • Because everyone's nervous systems and lived experiences are different, there is no single timeline for healing. Some clients experience significant relief from specific symptoms within a few months of targeted EMDR work, while others find the greatest impact with a longer-term, collaborative approach that allows for deeper relational healing and parts integration.