Psychoeducation and Somatic Interventions for Sexual Trauma
Defining the Terms of Sexual Assault The first step in helping patients who are survivors of sexual trauma is allowing them to choose the words they may want to use to describe their experience. Many survivors come to sex therapy for sexual disorders like Genito-Pelvic Penetrative-Pain Disorder, Anorgasmia, or lack of desire. They may come […]
Restoring Meaning and Resiliency to Victims of Trauma
The debate around returning to work (RTW) has been heated in the years since COVID-19 lockdowns. While many of those discussions focus on workplace flexibility and employer policies, for individuals who have experienced trauma—especially displaced migrants—the ability to return to meaningful work is more than just an economic necessity; it is a critical step toward […]
What Collective Trauma Feels Like
Recent and ongoing events in the U.S. and throughout the world—unstable political leadership, natural disasters, armed conflicts, violence, and racism—have a profound impact on our collective sense of well-being. Stress levels among Americans have skyrocketed over the past 20 years. Depending on a group’s proximity to experiencing the event, the effects can range from chronic […]
High Sensitivity Is Not a Trauma Response
Last week, someone I’ve been working with for over a year – let’s call her “Liz” – entered the therapy room looking absolutely defeated. Before I could ask a single question, Liz broke down into full-body sobs, “Maybe if I’d never met him, I wouldn’t be so damn fragile.” Together, we began to explore this […]
Eating Disorders and Trauma: The Missing Link
Eating disorders are among the deadliest and fastest-growing Mental health conditions, yet they remain largely misunderstood. Popular portrayals reduce these illnesses to superficial stereotypes, obscuring their true complexity and hindering meaningful intervention. Eating disorders are complex, brain-based illnesses that affect up to one in ten people over their lifetime. They manifest through behaviors such as […]
How to Embrace Elective (not Mandatory) Forgiveness After Trauma
Do I need to forgive my abusive mother to let go of the past? This is the question I found myself grappling with when I started to recover from the pain of childhood neglect. For most of my childhood, I did not have access to a consistent adult who valued me. As a result, I […]
The Partition of 1947 and Intergenerational Trauma
Intergenerational trauma has become a buzzword over the last several years. It was first explored in the research of Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Rakoff and her colleagues in 1966. They found higher levels of distress among descendants of Holocaust survivors. This important finding helped provide a foundational understanding of this phenomenon. Studies in the 2000s examined […]
Personality vs. Trauma Coping: A Misunderstood Distinction
The difference between someone’s personality and their trauma coping and survival strategies is often misunderstood, leading to increasingly pernicious misjudgments about individuals’ character, intentions, or behavior. While personality refers to enduring, largely context-independent traits, trauma-coping and survival strategies and behaviors developed in response to (mostly unhealed) traumatic events. For the most part, trauma-coping and survival […]