Trauma lives in the body and shows up in your reactions, your relationships, and the quiet moments you can't explain. You deserve more than just learning to manage it.
Trauma doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it's the big, undeniable events. More often, it's the quieter things. The experiences that left a mark without anyone naming them as trauma. Either way, it shows up: in how you respond to stress, how you relate to people, and sometimes in your body long after the event has passed.
Post-traumatic stress isn't only what follows combat or catastrophe. It's a nervous system that learned, at some point, that the world wasn't safe — and kept the alarm on. That can look like flashbacks and nightmares, but just as often it looks like hypervigilance, irritability, numbness, avoiding certain people or places, or feeling permanently braced for something to go wrong.
Complex trauma — the kind built over years of childhood, a long relationship, or a chronically unsafe environment — often doesn't match the textbook picture of PTSD at all. It can read as anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or difficulty trusting anyone with the full story. You don't need a diagnosis, or an event that "counts," for this work to be for you.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is one of the most evidence-based treatments available for trauma and PTSD, and it's a central part of how I work. EMDR allows your nervous system to process and integrate memories that feel stuck, the ones that still replay or trigger outsized reactions even years later.
You don't have to narrate everything in detail. The work happens at a different level than talk therapy alone, engaging the brain's natural processing mechanisms to help the past feel more like the past.
Many people live with trauma for years before realizing things could be different. Therapy doesn't erase what happened, but it changes your relationship to it. Most people notice that old triggers lose their charge, that their nervous system starts to settle, and that the past begins to feel like something they survived rather than something still happening to them.
Online sessions for clients in New York, Florida, and Vermont.
Send a message below, or book directly online.
Thanks for reaching out.
Something went wrong. Please email me directly at tinaliulmhc@gmail.com.
Prefer to book directly? Schedule online