Therapy for Childhood & Family of Origin Trauma
The dynamics of the family you grew up in don't stay there. It shows up in your relationships, your reactions, and the patterns you keep finding yourself in—long after you've left home.
When the Past Keeps Showing Up in the Present
You might not think of your childhood as traumatic. Maybe things weren't obviously bad—no dramatic single event, no clear villain. But something was off. The emotional temperature at home was unpredictable. You grew up feeling responsible for things children shouldn't be responsible for. You learned to be small, or useful, or invisible. You knew how to read a room before you could drive a car.
Now you're an adult, and some of the things you learned back then are creating problems. Not because you're broken, but because the coping strategies that protected you then are getting in the way now.
You might notice it in how you respond to conflict—the way you immediately shut down or brace for impact. In your relationships, you keep ending up in the same dynamics, no matter how different the people are. In the way you manage emotions—either cutting them off entirely or getting flooded by them when you least expect it. Feeling that you're too much, not enough, or fundamentally different from other people in ways you can't fully explain.
These aren't character flaws. They're adaptations, and they can change.
This might sound familiar:
You grew up in a home that felt emotionally unpredictable, chaotic, or quietly tense—even if nothing obviously terrible happened.
You learned early to manage other people's moods or be the stable one in the family.
Conflict feels threatening in a way that's disproportionate to the situation.
You're drawn to people who need a lot from you, or you repeatedly find yourself in the same kinds of relationships.
You're very good at managing outwardly but find it difficult to identify or express what you're actually feeling.
Closeness in relationships feels as threatening as distance.
You've experienced betrayal—in adult relationships, partnerships, or friendships—and you're starting to wonder if the pattern goes further back than the most recent person who let you down.
You feel a persistent low-level sense that something is wrong with you, even when things are objectively fine.
Family gatherings, certain people's names on your phone, or specific emotional tones still activate something in you that you can't fully explain.
What Therapy Actually Looks Like
This work is paced carefully. We don't dig into difficult early experiences before you have the tools to manage what comes up. The process tends to move through a few areas, in an order that makes sense for where you are:
Making sense of your early environment.
Not to relitigate your childhood, but to understand what you learned there—about relationships, about yourself, about what to expect from other people. A lot of what drives current patterns becomes much clearer in this context.Understanding how those patterns show up now.
We look at what's happening in your current relationships, your reactions to conflict, the way you manage closeness and distance. The goal is to see the pattern clearly, without judgment.Working with the nervous system.
Early experiences shape how your body responds to stress, threat, and connection. Somatic work—paying attention to physical experience as well as thoughts and emotions—is part of how we address what happened at a level that talking alone doesn't always reach.Building a different relationship with yourself.
Chronic self-criticism, shame, and the sense that your needs are a problem often have roots in early experience. This work addresses those beliefs directly—not with reassurance, but with genuine examination.Changing patterns in current relationships.
As things shift internally, you'll have more options in how you relate to others. We work on what that actually looks like—in your marriage, your family of origin, your friendships, and your relationship with yourself.
My Approach
I use an integrative, trauma-informed approach combining psychodynamic therapy, somatic work, narrative therapy, ACT, and Gestalt. This type of work benefits from an approach that addresses multiple levels—how you think about your experiences, how your body holds them, and what meaning you've made of them over time.
Early experience work doesn't mean spending every session talking about your parents. It means using an understanding of where your patterns came from to change how they show up in your life now. We work at your pace.