Medical Trauma & PTSD

Negative experiences in the medical system can leave lasting scars. Difficult diagnoses, terrifying symptoms, aggressive procedures, getting a blank stare of disbelief from specialists who don’t understand you, seeing hospitals or ERs as a revolving door you can’t step away from—are just a few versions of what you may have taken on in your life. Each and every one of these could lead to a medical trauma, and when placed upon other traumatic experiences you may have in your history, it can feel like you’ve fractured a mirror that’s been split into too many pieces.

For many people with medical trauma, PTSD, or chronic relational or developmental trauma, the pain continues long after the event has ended. You may find yourself feeling anxious before your next doctor’s appointment, hypervigilant about your bodily sensations, overwhelmed by this same recurring burden, or struggling with trust.

Therapy offers the chance to reclaim your experiences and to find your way back to the present moment when the past or future come calling. Using trauma-informed approaches like EMDR, Brainspotting, Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), and Somatic approaches, we’ll work to reduce the distress your carrying while strengthening and restoring trust in yourself.

Healing from medical trauma and PTSD doesn’t require forgetting what happened. It involves creating a new relationship with those experiences so they no longer hold the same level of power over your life. dampening down the emotional charge creates space your integration and reclaiming the parts you may have lost along the way.