Trauma therapy at Here & Now Psychology helps adults work through childhood trauma, relationship trauma, and PTSD. I work with adults across California via telehealth, using an approach rooted in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
What happened is real, but trauma lives in what comes after: how it keeps shaping your decisions, relationships, and sense of yourself long after the events themselves occurred. You can know, logically, that the danger has passed and still find your body and mind reacting as if it hasn't: staying braced for impact in areas that you know are reasonably safe, struggling to trust people who've given you no real reason not to, or feeling like a fundamentally different, more damaged version of yourself.
None of that means something is wrong with you, that you're just a "victim," or that you're fundamentally "broken." Your nervous system learned a lesson it hasn't unlearned yet.
Things that happened years or decades ago that still show up in how you relate to yourself and others today: chronic self-doubt, difficulty trusting, or a nervous system that stays on guard even now.
Patterns from a past relationship, romantic, family, or otherwise, that keep showing up in how you approach connection and trust now, even in relationships that are actually safe.
An accident, an assault, a medical crisis, or another specific event your mind and body haven't fully filed away as over. Hypervigilance, intrusive memories, or a persistent sense that something bad is about to happen.
This work doesn't need a detailed play-by-play of what happened. What matters is how trauma shows up for you right now: what you avoid, how you relate to difficult memories and sensations when they surface, and what a meaningful life could look like even alongside a collection of reactions your body and mind are having in response to those past events. Sometimes talking through specific details is truly helpful, but it's not a required step, and it's completely dependent on your comfort.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is one of the more well-known approaches to trauma treatment, built around recalling a traumatic memory while tracking a moving light or a therapist's fingers back and forth. Plenty of people have been helped by it, and if it's specifically what you're looking for, that's a reasonable thing to want. I'm glad to point you toward providers who specialize in it.
There's actually an interesting, ongoing debate in the research about what's doing the work in EMDR. Several controlled studies have removed the eye movements and kept only the memory-recall portion, and found similar results, which has led a number of researchers to argue that the core active ingredient isn't the eye movements themselves, but the exposure: safely bringing a difficult memory into the room and staying with it long enough for its grip to loosen. That's not a knock on EMDR. Its structure clearly helps a lot of people. It's more of an observation that trauma treatments from different schools of thought may be drawing on some of the same underlying mechanisms, just packaged in different theoretical language and technique.
ACT approaches that same core idea, contact with what's difficult, without needing to fight or avoid it, through a different philosophy: psychological flexibility instead of a structured desensitization protocol. It plays out as an ongoing, workable relationship with memories, sensations, and the urge to avoid, built session by session, rather than a specific technique performed at a specific moment.
If the language throughout this site has resonated with you so far (working with what shows up instead of fighting it, not needing a full narrative account to make progress, building a life alongside difficulty instead of waiting for it to fully resolve first), that's the same underlying philosophy, just applied specifically to trauma here. Two different paths may be aiming at some of the same target. This is meant to help you decide which style of getting there actually fits you, not to make a case for ACT over EMDR or anything else.
A lot of people come into trauma work assuming the goal is to make the memories, the images, or the physical sensations go away entirely. In my experience, that's rarely how it actually works, and chasing it can become its own trap. What I care about is helping you change your relationship to what shows up: the thought, the flashback, the tightness in your chest, so it stops dictating what rooms you'll enter, who you'll let close, or what kind of life you'll let yourself have. Avoidance makes sense as a short-term strategy. Over years, it tends to shrink a life down to almost nothing. We're not going to be able to erase what happened, but we can stop organizing our whole life around not feeling it.
People carrying something from years ago that still quietly runs the show. People who've noticed their world getting smaller: fewer places they'll go, fewer people they'll let in, fewer things they're willing to risk, because avoiding what triggers the old response has started to feel like the only option. People who want their actual life back.
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