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.
Trauma doesn’t always announce itself as trauma. It announces itself as hypervigilance in situations that feel vaguely threatening. As guilt that stays longer than it makes sense. As a body that braces even when nothing is wrong. Even in a quiet moment at Main Street Park in DUMBO, when the environment around you is completely calm, the alertness doesn’t always switch off. Something keeps running. Whatever that is, is what we’re trying to understand.
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 rarely announces itself clearly as trauma. It shows up as patterns in daily life that feel disconnected from any obvious cause.
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.
I’m a licensed clinical psychologist in Brooklyn. I hold a certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research from the California Institute of Integral Studies. But 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.
There is often more beneath depression than hopelessness or emotional numbness.
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
Depression rarely announces itself clearly. The symptoms of depression are often subtle: a persistent low mood that doesn’t lift, loss of interest in things you used to enjoy, difficulty concentrating, changes in sleep or appetite, withdrawal from people, and a physical heaviness that rest doesn’t touch. Many of these are internal and easy to rationalize as stress or tiredness.
The warning signs of depression worth paying attention to are often quieter than people expect. A flattening of mood that persists for a few weeks, a loss of motivation that doesn’t match your circumstances, or a quiet sense that something is off. If that feeling hasn’t lifted, it’s worth talking to someone.
Depression is not one uniform experience. Major depressive disorder involves persistent low mood and loss of interest lasting two weeks or more. Persistent depressive disorder is lower-grade but long-lasting, often normalized as just being someone’s personality. Situational depression follows a specific stressor. High-functioning depression looks fine from the outside but isn’t. Seasonal affective disorder follows a seasonal pattern, typically worsening in winter.
Several things can look like depression without being it. Thyroid disorders, vitamin deficiencies, sleep disorders, and chronic pain all produce overlapping symptoms.Burnout isthe most common look-alikes. Grief shares many features as well. Getting a clear clinical picture early matters, which is part of what the first few sessions are for.
Depression is rarely one thing. Genetics and neurobiological factors can play a role, as can early experiences, attachment patterns, and how you learned to relate to yourself and others. Loss, chronic stress, societal pressures, and relational conflict can all contribute as well. Sometimes depression also emerges when people have been living in ways that feel disconnected from what actually matters to them.
A lot of people try very hard to understand or work on these struggles by themselves before reaching out for therapy. Often part of the difficulty is that depression can be hard to fully recognize or shift from inside your own perspective alone.
Isolation, reduced activity, sleep disruption, increased self-criticism, and rumination all tend to feed depression even when they feel like the only available response. Substance use as a way of managing low mood tends to deepen the cycle rather than relieve it. Part of the work in therapy is identifying which loops are running and finding a realistic way to interrupt them.
Depression can last for weeks, months, or longer, depending on the person and what may be contributing to it. For some people, it’s a single difficult period connected to a particular life experience or stressor. For others, it becomes a more recurring pattern that ebbs and returns over time.
Part of what therapy can help with is recognizing depression earlier, understanding what may be connected to it, and developing a different relationship to it instead of feeling blindsided each time it returns.
For many people, depressive episodes do lift, particularly with treatment. Some people experience one episode and don’t have another. For others, it recurs. What therapy builds toward isn’t a permanent cure so much as a different relationship with depression: recognizing it earlier, understanding what it’s connected to, and knowing what to do when it surfaces again.
There is no single best treatment. The right approach depends on the person and what’s underneath the depression. Relational, psychodynamic, and insight-oriented therapy work well when depression has significant relational or historical roots. ACT is useful when depression involves disconnection from values. Medication can help when biological factors are prominent. Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy is an option when other approaches have reached their limit.
Treatment for depression can include psychotherapy, medication, lifestyle changes, and approaches like Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP). Factors like sleep, movement, social connection, and daily structure can also meaningfully affect mood and emotional functioning.
I tend to think about depression holistically, meaning we look at the full picture rather than treating symptoms in isolation. In my work, I draw from relational, psychodynamic, and ACT-based approaches, and I collaborate with prescribers when medication is part of someone’s treatment. I also offer KAP at my Brooklyn office for people who feel emotionally stuck or have not responded fully to more traditional approaches.
Antidepressants address neurobiological aspects of depression and are most useful for moderate to severe presentations, particularly when biological factors are prominent. They tend to work better in combination with therapy than as a standalone treatment. I am a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, so I do not prescribe medication. I can make referrals to and coordinate care with a trusted prescribing provider when medications may be helpful.
Across decades of psychotherapy research, the single strongest predictor of successful therapy is considered to be the quality of the therapeutic relationship. A strong therapeutic relationship is present when the client feels that both parties are working together toward goals that they’ve agreed on, and when they trust that their therapist understands and cares about them. For this reason, I always recommend that people consult with a few therapists before beginning therapy to make sure that they feel comfortable with the therapist.
It can also be helpful to consider the treatment modality and whether it’s the right fit for you. For example, CBT and DBT are more skills-based approaches, whereas psychodynamic approaches are better suited to understanding the roots of issues like depression.
Behavioral activation, learning to observe thoughts rather than accepting them as facts, maintaining minimal social contact even when it doesn’t feel natural, protecting sleep, and getting clear on what actually matters to you. These aren’t substitutes for therapy, but they support the work and make difficult moments more navigable in between sessions.
Different people need different things from therapy, so there is no single “right” therapeutic style for everyone. In general, though, therapy tends to feel most helpful when there is both emotional safety and enough honesty to help people notice patterns, perspectives, or feelings they may not fully see on their own.
I also think it matters that therapy feels collaborative. People deserve space to talk openly about what is or is not feeling helpful, and good therapy usually involves adjusting the work together over time rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all approach.
Key takeaways and next steps: symptoms of depression include persistent low mood, loss of interest, sleep and energy changes, fatigue, and withdrawal. Treatment options range from therapy to antidepressants to KAP. High-functioning depression is real and worth treating. Recovery is possible. The next step is a free consultation with a Brooklyn depression therapist.
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