Trauma Recovery
You Know Exactly What You Want in a Partner
Ask what matters most to you and the answer comes fast: someone you can trust, honesty with each other, a shared commitment to building a family, good character.
Then look at who keeps arriving.
The same type of person, the same relational dynamic, and the same response to a familiar trigger.
Something is wrong, but you’re not sure what.
Every Boundary You Set Feels Like a Risk
Asking for what you need feels like it could cost you the relationship, because too many people have left or ignored the boundaries you tried to set.
Your sense of self has become tied to what others think, and you’ve compromised parts of yourself over and over again for others.
You can talk for an hour about them and barely mention yourself.
Why Your Choices Keep Contradicting What You Value
The reason you keep ending up in the same type of relationship almost never lives in the present.
Look back far enough and you’ll find templates set early in your family or culture, the ones running quietly ever since.
A template is your earliest answer to unspoken questions: what love costs, how much you’re allowed to need, what happens when you say no.
Your values are what you’d choose on paper, while the template pulls first when a real person stands in front of you.
Hear Your Pattern Named Before You Find the Words
You need more than a worksheet or a diagram.
When I see the underlying pattern, the relational dynamic, or the driver behind a behavior, I name it clearly, but gently.
My intuition is usually spot on, and I hold what I see with curiosity rather than certainty, inviting you into that knowing.
We start with your current relationship, then go back, gently but directly, to your parents, siblings, and family.
One Scene Reaches What Your Summary Can’t
Templates get written in real moments: a rigid home where parents controlled through fear, sexual abuse, religious trauma, or purity culture and its damaging messages about your sexuality and worth.
My training in Narrative Focused Trauma Care, also called Story Work, returns to those moments one at a time.
A summary of your childhood, the kind you’ve likely given a therapist before, keeps it all at arm’s length.
One particular moment, entered slowly and in detail, brings you back into it: the room, the words, the look on someone’s face, what your body did next.
Go Toward the Hard Moment at a Pace You Can Hold
Throughout the work, I watch your body for overwhelm or shutdown and back off when something is too much.
We ground together whenever you need it.
I’ll also explain in plain terms what your nervous system is doing.
Let What You Value Do the Choosing
As the old template loosens, your values get a real say in who you let close.
Setting boundaries and putting your own needs first become possible without losing your sense of self.
Trust in your own body has room to grow.
Slowly, you begin to feel alive again in places that were once hardened, cut off, or withered.
Bring the Story You’ve Only Ever Summarized
It’s time to get curious about the relational experiences that formed you, in person in Traverse City or online anywhere in Michigan.
Schedule a free 20-minute consultation.
We’ll talk about breaking free from patterns that fall short of what you want.
Your sense of self is yours to recover, along with the life your values have been pointing toward.
It’s Time to Heal Your Heartache
You’ve kept company with this pain long enough.
I’ll accompany you into the painful places, where you can feel truly seen, and together we’ll clear a way through, one step at a time.
Ready to begin restoring your relationships and finding your full self again? Schedule your free consultation today.