Trauma
We've Earned Our Dysfunction Honestly.
therapy for Former latchkey kids who raised themselves and are finally ready to unpack that baggage (it's heavy)
Your nervous system is stuck in permanent overdrive from decades of crisis management, leaving you tense at unexpected phone calls and unable to enjoy quiet moments without waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It's the moment your teenage daughter looks at you with the same disappointment you once felt toward your own mother, and you realize you've become everything you swore you wouldn't be. It's that gut-punch moment when your son asks why you're always angry, and you realize your children are experiencing the same walking-on-eggshells childhood you had.
You've been carrying heavy stuff for decades, telling yourself "it wasn't that bad' or that you should just 'get over it' because that's what Gen Xers were taught - to be tough, independent, and never admit when something actually rocked us. You've spent years perfecting the art of dark humor and emotional distance to cope with things that should never have happened to you.
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Growing up as a Generation Xer, therapy was stigmatized, and "just suck it up and walk it off" was considered sound mental health advice. We will challenge the belief that you have to earn the right to heal, because our generation was raised to think seeking help was weakness rather than wisdom. Together, we'll explore your fight-or-flight responses and your inability to relax even when things are going well, which aren't character flaws; they were necessary survival responses.
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Gen Xers deserve to heal and feel safe in their own skin. Together, we'll unpack how your hypervigilance and people-pleasing aren't personality quirks—they're brilliant adaptations your nervous system developed to keep you safe in an unpredictable world. I won't ask you to drop those defenses until you're ready because I know they kept you alive. I get that trusting someone with your deepest pain feels terrifying when you've learned that the people who were supposed to protect you sometimes didn't - or worse, were the ones who hurt you.
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The breakthrough will come when you finally understand that healing doesn't mean forgetting or forgiving everything, but learning to trust your own perceptions. It's walking into social situations without immediately scanning faces for signs of judgment, your authentic self emerging from decades of protective camouflage. It’s about isolating present-day disagreements rather than defaulting to reflexes rooted in past experiences. It's the revelation that you can experience conflict without your nervous system launching into full-scale war mode. Liberation from trauma feels like finally peeling off that invisible armor you've been wearing since the '80s—suddenly hugs don't require mental preparation and compliments land without triggering your internal fraud alert system.
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We'll work through your trauma using approaches that honor your strength and resilience. Our sessions will be like finally having someone witness your story without trying to fix you, minimize your experience, or tell you how you should feel - just real, honest work to help you transform from enduring each day to actually creating a life you don't need to escape from.