Trauma Counseling
Safe & Sound Protocol
The Safe & Sound Protocol (SSP) is a trauma-informed listening therapy that calms and regulates the nervous system, helping you feel more present and connected while preparing you for trauma therapy.
By working directly with the body’s stress response, SSP supports a sense of safety and balance, creating a strong foundation for healing. When the nervous system is more regulated, people often find they are better able to benefit from other forms of therapy, such as EMDR, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Internal Family Systems (IFS), and others.
SSP is based on Polyvagal Theory and was developed by Dr. Stephen Porges. It is a research-supported approach shown to help improve emotional regulation and social engagement. Using specially designed music, SSP helps the nervous system shift out of survival mode and into a state where connection, learning, and healing feel more accessible.
For more information, please see Unyte Health’s whitepaper.
Critical Signs of Dysregulation
Feeling Unsafe/Chronic Defense/Chronic Stress
Difficulty connecting when the body stays in survival mode, which makes genuine relationships challenging.
Hypervigilance
Anxiety, constant alertness, or emotional reactivity that interferes with daily functioning.
Withdrawal
Shutdown, social avoidance, or isolation as protection mechanisms against perceived threats.
Sensory Overwhelm
Difficulty processing sensory input or staying present in overwhelming environments.
When the nervous system is in defense mode, everyday sounds — including human voices — can often be misinterpreted as threats. This auditory hypersensitivity makes communication and social engagement difficult and can lead to isolation.
The SSP is designed to gently shift this auditory processing pattern. It’s specially filtered music that emphasizes the middle frequencies of the human voice. This is precisely the range human biology recognizes as reassuring and safe. By repeatedly exposing the nervous system to these “cues of safety,” SSP helps to retrain the ear and brain to interpret sounds more accurately to foster a state of regulation.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy is a deeply respectful and non-judgmental therapeutic approach that supports increased self-acceptance, self-awareness, self-compassion, and meaningful emotional healing.
IFS is an experiential psychotherapy and is grounded in the understanding that individuals are made up of various parts—aspects of the personality expressed through thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and beliefs. At times, these parts may hold conflicting needs or perspectives, contributing to emotional confusion, frustration, or behaviors that seem contradictory.
For example, a person may have a part that longs to strengthen their relationship with a spouse, another that withdraws in moments of vulnerability, and yet another that offers harsh self-criticism. Such internal conflicts can lead to self-doubt, self-sabotage, emotional fatigue, and challenges within relationships—both with others and with oneself.
IFS therapy helps individuals understand these inner dynamics, heal wounded parts, and cultivate greater clarity, calm, and confidence.
Through IFS, individuals may:
• Gain insight into behaviors that feel confusing or contradictory
• Explore their inner world with curiosity and creativity
• Befriend and soften the inner critic
• Develop a deeper and more compassionate understanding of themselves
• Strengthen and enrich relationships
• Clarify troubling thoughts, emotions, and behavioral patterns
• Reduce internal conflict
• Rebuild trust in themselves
• Lessen or resolve patterns that interfere with daily functioning
• Heal from past wounds and painful memories, including childhood trauma
• Release burdens carried from intergenerational trauma
• Understand triggers within certain situations or relationships
• Respond to themselves and others with increased calm and compassion
• Reduce patterns such as perfectionism, people-pleasing, self-neglect, irritability, rage, dddprocrastination, and related challenges
How IFS Therapy Works
According to IFS, certain parts of an individual carry the pain and emotional burdens of difficult past experiences. For instance, someone who experienced childhood bullying may have a younger part that still holds shame, humiliation, confusion, anger, or grief from those moments. These tender, wounded parts are known as exiles. They are often pushed away or silenced in order to cope with stressful family environments, social pressures, or overwhelming emotions.
Despite being tucked away, exiles’ vulnerability—and their longing for healing—remains close to the surface. Because exiles carry intense emotional burdens, their activation can trigger powerful waves of panic, despair, rage, or shame. In the bullying example, an adult may feel an exile’s pain surface in moments of group conversation or when a friend’s comment echoes a familiar sense of inadequacy or humiliation.
To shield the individual from the overwhelming emotions of these exiles, other parts adopt protector roles.
Managers act proactively to prevent the exile’s pain from being triggered. They often drive behaviors such as perfectionism, people-pleasing, overachievement, or self-criticism—strategies intended to avoid shame, failure, or rejection.
Firefighters, also protectors, respond reactively when exile pain breaks through. They work quickly to numb or distract from overwhelming feelings through behaviors such as substance use, addictive patterns, dissociation, overeating, rage, or self-harm. Although these strategies may appear destructive, firefighters—like all parts—are attempting to protect the individual from emotional overload.
IFS therapy works by helping individuals approach their internal world with curiosity and compassion rather than judgment. Through this process, exiles can be gently unburdened from the pain they carry, and protectors can be relieved of their extreme, exhausting roles.
Central to IFS is the belief that every person has a core Self—a grounded, wise, and compassionate inner presence characterized by the “8 C’s”: clarity, creativity, courage, curiosity, compassion, confidence, connectedness, and calm. When the Self leads, it becomes possible to form healing relationships with all parts, fostering meaningful growth and lasting change.
EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is used to address trauma by working with distressing or traumatic memories. EMDR is a structured 8-phase protocol that targets intense emotions, negative core beliefs, and somatic symptoms that are generally caused by unresolved distressing life experiences. These experiences are said to be unprocessed or blocked and need some help to become processed. EMDR is one way to accomplish that.
EMDR is not talk therapy. EMDR is experiential and seeks to reprocess memories through bilateral stimulation by first setting up a learning state that will allow experiences that are causing you problems to be “reprocessed” and stored in an adaptive state in your brain.
The goal of EMDR therapy is to leave you with newfound perspectives, understanding, and emotions that will lead to healthy and useful behaviors and interactions.
EMDR is often used with Internal Family Systems (IFS), and it is paramount that clients feel safe and in control throughout the duration of EMDR treatment. One of the assessments used to facilitate the appropriateness of EMDR therapy is the DES-II, The Dissociative Experiences Scale - II.
Please visit EMDRIA for more information.
EMDR is a structured approach and may be used to treat almost any symptom or disorder, including:
· PTSD and Complex Trauma
· Panic Attacks
· Anxiety
· Depression
· Phobias
· Eating Disorders
· Obsessions and Compulsions
· Low Self Esteem & Negative Cognitions
Intensives
If you or a loved one is feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or burdened by unresolved trauma, a trauma “intensive” may provide the focused support needed for meaningful change. I offer 1–3 day intensive sessions designed to provide a safe and structured environment where clients can work through trauma in a more rapid and effective way than traditional weekly sessions often allow. Each intensive is tailored to your specific needs, offering one-on-one care in a compassionate and confidential setting.
Address your burdens once and for all.
Trauma intensives provide a highly concentrated and immersive therapeutic experience aimed at creating transformation. By dedicating focused time to address emotional and psychological challenges, clients often achieve significant progress in days rather than months or years. During your intensive, you will be guided in identifying and working through the core issues that hinder your well-being, cultivating meaningful and lasting change.
An intensive consists of extended therapeutic sessions lasting a half day to a full day, over one or several consecutive days, depending on your goals. Every intensive begins with a personal consultation to determine whether this approach is the best fit for your needs. From there, a customized treatment plan is developed, outlining several hours of dedicated therapeutic work each day to support healing and emotional freedom.
Throughout the intensive, you may engage in evidence-based and experiential therapeutic modalities such as EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Inner-Child Reparenting. These approaches are designed to help you process unresolved emotions, release limiting beliefs, and gain clarity and confidence as you move toward healing.
Individual trauma intensives are ideal for those seeking a concentrated space for breakthrough and restoration. By combining transformational modalities within an extended window of uninterrupted therapeutic time, intensives offer a depth of exploration and healing that is not always attainable in traditional weekly counseling.
Pricing:
$3,000 per daily intensive
$1,500 per half-day intensive