Healing from what overwhelmed you
Trauma therapy is a specialized form of therapy focused on helping you process and heal from the effects of distressing or overwhelming life experiences. It aims to reduce the impact of traumatic memories and emotional reactions such as flashbacks, avoidance and feeling on edge, in a safe, collaborative space where you can challenge painful beliefs, build coping skills, and weave what happened into your life story.
Written Exposure Therapy (WET)
A brief, five-session, evidence-based treatment for PTSD. You write about the traumatic experience in session, then talk it through with Lori.
DBT Prolonged Exposure (DBT-PE)
An integrated, staged treatment that builds emotion-regulation skills first, then moves into trauma processing through exposure.
DBT for traumatic invalidation and Complex PTSD
Not all trauma is a single event. Living for years where your feelings were dismissed, punished, or treated as "too much" (what DBT calls traumatic invalidation) can leave lasting marks. Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) describes what often follows prolonged or repeated trauma: the familiar PTSD symptoms, plus emotions that are hard to steady, strain in relationships, and a harsh view of yourself.
DBT was built with invalidation in mind. It sees intense emotions as growing from a sensitive nervous system meeting an environment that didn't validate it, so the work starts from "your reactions make sense," not "something is wrong with you." Together we might practice:
- Self-validation: recognizing that your feelings make sense, even when others didn't treat them that way.
- Mindfulness and grounding: noticing the early signs of being triggered or "checking out" (dissociation) and coming back to the present before it takes over.
- Self-soothing: calming your body through the five senses when old pain is stirred up.
- Check the facts and opposite action: separating then from now, so old protective reactions don't run today's life.
- Radical acceptance: acknowledging what happened without approving of it, so your energy can go toward healing.
When you're ready, these skills can lead into trauma processing with DBT-PE (above). In a study of DBT-PTSD, a related skills-first program for adults with childhood-trauma-related PTSD, people improved in PTSD symptoms, dissociation, and negative beliefs about themselves after trauma.
Further reading: How DBT skills help manage triggers and dissociation (Palo Alto University) · 3 skills for responding to invalidating environments (Behavioral Psych Studio) · Oppenauer et al., 2023, DBT-PTSD in everyday clinical care (European Journal of Psychotraumatology)
Helping you choose
PTSD Treatment Decision Aid (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs)