Blog - Trauma

When I recently read this line on an Instagram post, I quickly jotted it down, eager to share it with my clients as a succinct way to explain something we often discuss in sessions at my practice Center for Shared Insight in Denver, Colorado. As a therapist, I regularly see how clients are reacting to old ...

We learn nearly everything we know through experiences. That might be the experience of reading about something, doing a certain activity, or being immersed in a situation. These can be positive experiences, like learning how to cook growing up with your mother, chopping vegetables in the kitchen together, or negative experiences such as “learning love” through the relationship ...

During this time of global crisis, you don’t have to put therapy on hold. In fact, it’s more important than ever to get the support you need when life is more stressful and challenging than normal. With the impact of the news resulting in high anxiety and fear about everything from the health of loved ones to ...

When you’ve lived through a painful and paralyzing experience such as trauma, it’s easy and common to feel like a victim. The APA defines “Trauma as an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster." While each person’s experience is different, there is often a myriad of emotional, physiological, spiritual, physical, and even ...

In a recent interview on the Oprah show with Wade Robson and James Safechuck related to the film, Leaving Neverland, Safechuck told Oprah, "Forgiveness is not a line that you cross—it's a road that you take." This profound statement has applications far beyond this film and suggests that forgiveness and healing are a choice, and possible for everyone.

Dating can be exhausting. It’s not only time-consuming and expensive, it can also be difficult to meet someone you really connect with and trust. And, when you do, you may struggle with truly accepting a potentially fulfilling relationship. Instead, you might find yourself, repeatedly, in partnerships that are unhealthy or even dramatic. This is a common behavior in ...

Perhaps watching the nightly news is a long-standing family ritual, or you start your day by skimming the local and national headlines. If so, you have probably noticed that in the last several years, the weight of those headlines has led to feelings of paranoia, anxiety, and even depression. Especially with gun violence on the rise and ...

A painful past has a gravity all its own, and it can pull us down if we’re not careful. It sometimes seems old memories and old patterns

Do you ever feel like you are attracted to, date, or even marry the same type of people over and over again? Do all of your relationships fall into a similar pattern and end due to the same dynamics? Does it feel like you attract or invite this relational pattern into your life, perhaps without consciously being aware ...

The Relationship Roller Coaster, as I like to call it, is filled with emotional, exciting, and at times, frustrating ups and downs, twists and turns, and thrills. The drama and unpredictability of roller coasters is what gives you the excitement and surge of neurochemicals in your brain, and the very thing that gets you hooked and getting back ...

Intimacy is a necessary part of any healthy relationship. While it’s most common to think of intimacy as physical closeness, intimacy takes many important forms in a healthy relationship such as emotional closeness, friendship, intellectual alignment, and attachment. A close cousin to intimacy is vulnerability, which is a willingness to put yourself at risk for heartache, rejection, or ...