Living with Complex PTSD: The Hidden Cost of Achievement

You've built a successful career and earned respect in your field. Yet beneath your professional achievements, there's a persistent sense of disconnection and overwhelm. The same self-discipline that fuels your success leaves you feeling inadequate. Like many high-achieving professionals with complex trauma, you might find yourself switching between feeling numb and feeling overwhelmed, or between feeling hyper-independent and desperately needing connection. You might excel at crisis management at work while struggling to manage basic personal tasks at home. Your relationships probably feel unsafe. Your sleep is likely messed up. Painful mood issues persist despite your efforts to get them to stop.

As you think about it, it's been more or less this way for a long time, although the particulars of who you don't feel safe being around change from year to year. You suspect your current problems have their roots in earlier-life traumas, what is today called Complex Trauma or CPTSD. You've probably already researched and understood many aspects of your condition. You've tried traditional therapy but it was a lot of work for not enough reward; it didn't manage to resolve the emotional pain that haunts you. You're maybe not feeling all that optimistic about healing from your trauma, and you certainly aren't looking forward to revisiting painful personal memories if you don't need to.

Your Complex Trauma Understood at Last

As a licensed psychologist with 30+ years of professional experience and who has specialized in working with complex trauma as it impacts high-achieving adult professionals, I understand how your personal struggles threaten to derail your success. Through years of personal and professional experience, I've developed a deep understanding and compassion for how early painful relationship experiences can negatively influence your current behavior in both professional and personal settings.

I know the patterns of avoidance and minimization and those of overwhelm and unwanted intrusive experience. I understand how emotional flashbacks can strike at key moments, for instance during work presentations. I know how to help you develop tools to stay present and effective in these challenging situations. I know how the strange storm of shifting dissociated emotions within you hangs together and how to help you unravel and integrate these emotions so that you feel, think, and behave better, more effectively, more comfortably. I've helped many professionals work through complex trauma while maintaining their high-pressure careers. I'll be able to help you make sense of your complex trauma and start to move on from it.

Your Path to Healing Complex Trauma

Therapy for complex trauma works to build your emotional stability, inner calm and self-compassion, at first by teaching you practical tools for emotional regulation and stress management that fit seamlessly into your routine. In our first few sessions, you'll learn immediate techniques you can use to handle workplace triggers and overwhelming emotions while maintaining your professional composure.

As you build foundational skills, we'll thoughtfully explore and work to identify and resolve deeper internal conflicts using an integrative approach drawing from proven trauma-therapy frameworks including CBT, CPT, and ACT as well as "parts-work" therapies such as IFS, TIST, and Ego State Therapy and bilateral stimulation therapies like EMDR and the Flash Technique. We'll also address any skill deficits we discover. It's quite likely you'll be able to make substantial progress without needing to revisit painful traumatic memories.

We'll work systematically to:

• Comprehensively assess your needs and set appropriate therapy goals
  
  

• Create a truly safe and secure relationship within which you'll be able to do this challenging work
  
  

• Develop personalized emotion regulation strategies that work in high-pressure situations
  
  

• Identify and integrate your conflicted emotions and motivations to enhance your functioning
  
  

• Reshape dysfunctional emotional and behavioral patterns to become more functional
  
  

• Build safer and more intimate relationships while maintaining appropriate boundaries
  
  

• Transform self-criticism into sustainable motivation

Your Future Transformed: Beyond Complex PTSD

Past clients presenting with problems similar to your own have discovered how to:

• Experience genuine satisfaction rather than persistent emptiness or chaotic emotions
  
  

• Experience integrated self-leadership in place of impulsivity and poorly thought out decisions
  
  

• Maintain their professional edge while feeling more centered and present
  
  

• Navigate challenging relationships at work and at home with greater ease and authenticity
  
  

• Lead with confidence that comes from true self-understanding