Many of the people I work with don’t think of themselves as traumatized. They think of themselves as anxious. Overly responsible. Hyper-independent. Exhausted. They often understand where those patterns came from. The harder question is why those patterns still feel necessary long after the original situation has passed. That’s why I think of trauma therapy a little differently. It’s less about revisiting the past and more about understanding how it’s still shaping the present. I’m Dr. Sherry, a licensed clinical psychologist, and that’s the work I’m interested in doing.
You may notice hypervigilance in situations that feel only vaguely threatening, guilt that lasts longer than makes sense, or a body that braces even when nothing is wrong. Even in a quiet moment at Main Street Park in DUMBO, when everything around you is calm, the alertness doesn’t always switch off. Your body can stay tense as if it’s waiting for something you can’t quite name. That is what we try to understand together.
The danger may be over. The adaptation isn’t.
What I find most useful about trauma therapy is that it doesn’t start by asking what happened to you. It starts by noticing what’s still happening now, in your body, in your relationships, in the patterns that seem to run on their own. The past matters because it organized those responses. But the way into understanding them is usually through the present.
Trauma therapy may be a good fit if you:
Trauma is broader than most people realize and subtler than most descriptions suggest. A few things worth understanding:
Trauma isn’t defined by the event. It’s defined by the impact. Two people can experience the same situation and have very different responses depending on their history, their nervous system and temperament, the support available to them at the time, and what meaning they made of it. What matters clinically isn’t the severity of what happened. It’s whether the experience left the nervous system stuck in a response pattern that hasn’t resolved.
Often, the body registers trauma before we have words for it. The body keeps a record of what happened in the nervous system, in muscle tension, in patterns of activation and shutdown. Physical symptoms of trauma include chronic fatigue, unexplained pain, digestive disruption, and difficulty sleeping. The body’s stress response, the system designed to protect you in moments of danger, can become chronically activated even when the original danger is long past.
Trauma is not limited to extreme events or specific populations. It develops across a wide range of experiences and affects people across all demographics, though certain circumstances increase vulnerability.
Unhealed trauma often looks like ordinary difficulty, which makes the connection easy to miss. These are some of the patterns that can point back to it:
Trauma frequently underlies or significantly contributes to other mental health concerns. Understanding the connection between trauma and these presentations can change how treatment is approached.
Trauma therapy doesn’t require you to relive what happened in detail. Most of the useful work happens in the present, paying attention to what keeps showing up in your body, your reactions, and your relationships.
Here’s what the work actually involves:
I’m a licensed clinical psychologist in Brooklyn. What I find most useful to bring to trauma work isn’t a specific protocol. It’s a sustained interest in how people came to develop the adaptations they have, and a willingness to pay close attention to what’s happening in the room between us.
I don’t think people are broken. I think most responses that look like problems were originally very intelligent solutions. Trauma therapy, as I practice it, is about understanding that intelligence and figuring out what’s still useful and what’s getting in the way.
For people who have done serious trauma work and find that something still hasn’t shifted at the level where it needs to, I also offer ketamine-assisted psychotherapy as an adjunct to the relational and psychodynamic work.
What helped you survive may not be what helps you live now.
Reach out to schedule a free consultation.
My primary orientation is relational and psychodynamic, which means I approach trauma as something that lives in patterns and relationships, not just in memories. Everything else I draw from is integrated into that foundation. The approach that serves someone best depends on what they’re carrying and how they’ve learned to carry it.
Trauma shapes more than memories. It shapes expectations. The expectation that closeness is dangerous, that need will go unmet, that the next difficult thing is always around the corner. Relational psychodynamic therapy works with those expectations directly, using what happens between us in session as real-time material. If a pattern from your history shows up in the room, we look at it together. That’s often where the most useful work happens.
What this looks like in sessions:
Sometimes the body notices something long before words do. The tightening in the chest when something feels threatening. The flatness that descends before you’ve consciously understood why. The bracing that happens even in safe situations. Somatic awareness in session means paying attention to those signals rather than talking past them. For many people, that body-level attention is what allows insight to become something felt rather than just something known.
What this looks like in sessions:
Trauma often narrows the picture of what feels possible. The avoidance that started as protection can quietly shrink our lives. ACT is useful when someone needs a way back to what actually matters while the deeper processing is happening. For people whose depression and anxiety are entangled with trauma responses, ACT offers a practical bridge between understanding and moving.
What this looks like in sessions:
All of us carry different parts that sometimes want different things. There is often a part that knows you’re safe and a part that doesn’t believe it. A part that wants connection and a part that stays braced against it. IFS offers language for those internal conflicts and a way of approaching them with curiosity rather than fighting them. In my work, I borrow IFS concepts as a way of helping people understand the internal system that trauma organized, and build a less adversarial relationship with the parts that are still trying to protect them.
What this looks like in sessions:
For some people, talk therapy reaches a ceiling. The understanding is there, but something hasn’t moved at the level where it needs to. KAP can create enough distance from entrenched patterns that something new becomes possible. I offer it in collaboration with a medical prescriber as a supervised, legal adjunct to the ongoing therapeutic work, not as a standalone treatment. The experience opens something. The therapy is what we do with what opens.
What this looks like in sessions:
Trauma doesn’t organize itself neatly into categories. It shows up in how you relate to yourself, other people, and your own experience. The presentations I work with most often:
Hypervigilance is the nervous system doing what it learned to do: scan for threat before threat arrives.It’s not about worrying about a specific thing. It’s a baseline state of readiness that doesn’t switch off even when the environment is genuinely safe. In session, we pay attention to when the body is bracing, what it’s anticipating, and what it would need to feel safe enough to put that alertness down.
Trauma-related shame often feels like a verdict rather than a feeling. Not that you did something wrong, but that something is fundamentally wrong with you. It tends to be disproportionate to what the current situation actually calls for, and it resists rational correction. In trauma therapy, we get curious about where that verdict came from, what it was protecting, and whether it still needs to be carrying that weight.
Trust is one of the things trauma damages most reliably, and not just trust in other people. Often the deeper disruption is in trusting your own perceptions, your own reactions, your own sense of what’s real. When early experiences taught you that your read of a situation couldn’t be relied on, or that the people who were supposed to be safe weren’t, the nervous system learns to keep checking. Trauma therapy works with that mistrust directly, building the kind of relational experience that allows the nervous system to update what it expects.
Post-traumatic stress disorder involves traumatic memories that don’t behave like regular memories. They surface without warning, bringing the emotional and physical intensity of the original event with them. Intrusive thoughts, nightmares, flashbacks, and emotional numbness are all ways the nervous system is trying to process something it wasn’t able to process at the time. In trauma therapy, we work directly with the way those memories are stored, building enough safety and internal resource that processing can happen at a pace the nervous system can tolerate.
Trauma organizes attachment. The ways you learned to stay safe in early relationships, whether by becoming invisible, becoming indispensable, staying on alert, or keeping people at a careful distance, tend to repeat in adult relationships even when the circumstances are completely different. The pattern isn’t random. It was learned. Trauma therapy works with both the history that organized the pattern and the relational experience in the room, which often mirrors what happens outside it. Over time, the therapeutic relationship itself can become a new and corrective experience, one that gets internalized and begins to change what feels possible in relationships outside the room.
Most people wonder whether they’ll have to tell me everything that happened in our first session. This is not necessary. We start with what’s bringing you in now, and let the process naturally unfold as we build safety together. Here’s what tends to happen in the first few sessions:
There’s no expectation that you arrive organized or with a clear sense of what to say. Part of what the first few sessions are for is figuring out what’s actually going on. As we do that, I’ll tell you what I’m noticing and check with you to see if I got it right.
If your past still feels closer than you’d like, let’s talk.
A free consultation is where we start. You can tell me what’s been going on, what you’ve already tried, and what’s bringing you to this kind of work now. I’ll answer questions, explain how I work, and we’ll figure out together whether this feels like the right fit. You can also reach me through my contact page if you’d prefer to start there.
Frequently Asked Questions About Trauma Therapy
A trauma therapist is a licensed mental health professional who specializes in helping people understand and process the effects of traumatic experiences. The work isn’t primarily about revisiting what happened. It’s about understanding how what happened continues to shape present-day responses, relationships, and sense of self.
Trauma therapy provides a space to process traumatic experiences at a pace that feels workable, with a therapist who is paying close attention to what’s happening in the room. A trauma therapist brings specific training in understanding trauma responses, including how the nervous system encodes and holds traumatic material, and how to work with that safely over time.
Trauma doesn’t always produce dramatic, recognizable symptoms. PTSD symptoms include flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilance, emotional numbness, avoidance, irritability, and difficulty concentrating. But trauma responses also show up more quietly: as a chronic low-level alertness, as mood swings that don’t match the situation, as intrusive thoughts that surface without warning, as a persistent sense of disconnection from your own life.
If you find yourself reacting to present situations as though a threat from the past is still active, or if certain people, places, or experiences trigger a response that feels out of proportion, those are signs worth paying attention to.
You don’t need to have a clear narrative of what happened before starting trauma therapy. The work itself often helps clarify what’s actually going on. If patterns keep repeating in your relationships or emotional life without an obvious cause, if your body responds in ways that feel confusing, or if you find yourself avoiding things you can’t fully explain, those are meaningful starting points.
Unhealed trauma shows up as patterns in daily life that feel disconnected from any obvious cause. Here are some of the most common ways it appears:
Trauma affects the body because the nervous system encodes the experience before the mind can process it. When something overwhelming happens, the autonomic nervous system activates a stress response designed to protect you. If that response isn’t completed, the system can get stuck in a state of ongoing activation or shutdown because the nervous system hasn’t fully recognized that it’s over.
This produces physical symptoms of trauma, including chronic fatigue, unexplained pain, muscle tension, digestive disruption, and sleep problems. In therapy, we pay attention to what’s happening in the body directly, rather than waiting for the body to catch up to what the mind already understands.
Releasing trauma from the body is a gradual process that involves working with the nervous system rather than against it. Paying attention to bodily sensations, building tolerance for difficult feelings, and completing responses that were interrupted all support that process. There isn’t a quick release. There is a gradual shift in how much the body is braced against something that is no longer there.
Complex trauma, sometimes called C-PTSD, refers to repeated or prolonged traumatic exposure, often in early relationships where escape wasn’t possible. Childhood trauma, relational trauma, and abuse tend to produce the most far-reaching effects because they occur during formative periods and often involve the very people who were supposed to provide safety. That said, the severity of impact is individual rather than categorical.
A single acute traumatic event can be profoundly disruptive for one person, while a longer exposure is processed with more resilience by another. What matters isn’t the ranking of traumas. It’s whether the nervous system was overwhelmed and whether it had the support to process what happened.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is the most formally recognized trauma-related condition, defined by persistent distress following exposure to traumatic events, including flashbacks, hypervigilance, avoidance, and negative changes in mood and beliefs. Acute stress disorder is similar but shorter in duration. Adjustment disorders involve significant difficulty adapting to a major stressor.
Trauma frequently underlies or significantly contributes to depression, anxiety, eating disorders, mood disorders, and complex presentations like borderline personality disorder. Addressing the trauma component often changes how those presentations respond to treatment. Mental health concerns that haven’t responded to standard approaches sometimes shift once the trauma underneath them is being worked with directly.
If trauma symptoms are disrupting daily functioning, relationships, or your sense of safety, that’s a clear indicator. If patterns in your emotional life or relationships keep repeating in ways you can’t explain or move through on your own, that’s worth bringing to therapy. If avoiding situations that bring up difficult feelings has made your life feel smaller and more impoverished than it used to, that’s worth paying attention to too.
You don’t need to be in crisis to begin trauma work. Many people come in not because things are acutely bad but because something has been running in the background for years that they’d like to understand and change. If something from your past still feels present in a way that costs you something, that’s reason enough to reach out.
Trauma therapy doesn’t aim to erase what happened or make the past feel like it didn’t matter. The more honest description of what changes is that traumatic experiences gradually become something you can hold rather than something that keeps happening to you. The nervous system learns that the threat is over. The memory stays, but loses its emotional charge. The patterns become more visible and therefore more like choices. For many people, what shifts is the relationship to the experience rather than the experience itself. That shift can be profound even if the memory remains.
Trauma therapy involves specific attention to the nervous system and how traumatic material is held in the body, not just the mind. A trauma-informed therapist understands how trauma affects behavior, emotion, and relationships, and shapes the work accordingly rather than treating trauma symptoms as separate from everything else that’s going on. The focus isn’t only on what happened. It’s on how what happened is still organizing the present, and on building enough safety that something can shift.
The approaches I use depend on the person, what they are carrying, and what they have already tried. My foundation is relational psychodynamic therapy, and I integrate Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Internal Family Systems (IFS), and attention to the body into that work.
This looks at how earlier experiences shaped the way you relate to yourself and to other people. We use what happens between us in session to understand what happens outside it.
ACT helps you move toward what matters to you, even when trauma has made avoidance feel safer. IFS gives us a way to understand the different parts of you that formed around the trauma and to relate to them with curiosity instead of criticism.
I pay attention to what happens in your body during session, such as tension, breath, or bracing, and we treat it as information about what you’re feeling and what you need.
In collaboration with a medical prescriber, I also offer KAP as an addition to ongoing therapy, for people who have done serious work and still feel something hasn’t moved.
A well-paced trauma therapy doesn’t require you to dive into the most difficult material immediately. Building safety and stabilization come first. When difficult memories or emotions surface, they’re worked with at a pace the nervous system can manage. The goal isn’t to avoid what’s painful but to approach it with enough internal resources that processing can actually happen rather than becoming overwhelming. If something is too much, we slow down. That pacing is an important part of the work, not a detour from it.
It’s possible for some material to feel more present initially when it starts being attended to. This is generally temporary and a sign that the work is reaching something real rather than a reason to stop. A skilled trauma therapist monitors for this and adjusts the pace accordingly. If symptoms feel significantly worse, that’s important information to bring into the session directly rather than tolerate. Trauma therapy is collaborative, and feedback about how the work is landing is part of how we figure out what the right approach is.
Trauma therapy changes the relationship to the experience rather than permanently sealing it off. Life events can sometimes activate old patterns or bring up material that feels connected to earlier trauma. What tends to be different after therapy is the capacity to recognize what’s happening, understand what it’s connected to, and find a way through it more quickly than before. The work doesn’t produce a permanent immunity. It produces a different set of resources for when things surface.
Duration varies considerably depending on the nature and extent of the trauma, how long it’s been present, and what else is going on in someone’s life. Complex trauma with longstanding relational roots tends to involve longer-term work because it’s embedded in patterns that developed over years. There is no universal timeline. We figure out the right pace together, and I’ll be clear with you about how I think things are moving.
Yes. Physical symptoms of trauma, including chronic pain, fatigue, sleep disruption, and tension, often respond to trauma treatment. Addressing trauma doesn’t guarantee the physical symptoms will resolve completely, but for many people there is meaningful improvement once the nervous system is no longer working so hard to manage an unresolved threat response.
Yes. I offer in-person individual trauma therapy at two Brooklyn offices: Park Slope and DUMBO. In-person sessions are strongly preferred for trauma work because the somatic and relational material available in a shared physical space is part of what the work draws on. Virtual sessions are available in select circumstances.
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