Specialties · Trauma and PTSD
Trauma and PTSD Therapy
Trauma changes how a nervous system reads the present, not just how it remembers the past. This work is paced deliberately, built on safety before it asks anything of you.
60-Minute Sessions · $200 · In Person or Telehealth in Utah
What It Looks Like
Intrusion, Avoidance, Hyperarousal, Numbing
Trauma responses cluster in fairly predictable ways, even though the events behind them vary enormously. Intrusion looks like memories, images or nightmares that arrive uninvited, sometimes triggered by something as small as a smell or a tone of voice. Avoidance is the mind and body’s attempt to prevent that from happening again: steering clear of places, people, conversations or even feelings that might set it off. Hyperarousal shows up as a body that will not stand down: a startle reflex that is always cocked, sleep that will not deepen, irritability that seems disproportionate to whatever just happened. And numbing is the quieter cousin of all three, a kind of emotional flattening that can look like disinterest but is really the nervous system’s way of turning the volume down on everything at once, the good along with the bad.
A single frightening incident (a crash, an assault, a medical emergency) tends to produce a fairly contained version of this: symptoms clustered around a specific memory and specific triggers. Prolonged relational trauma, the kind that accumulates across years of an unsafe or unpredictable childhood or relationship, tends to be more diffuse. It shapes how a person expects to be treated by anyone close to them, long before it announces itself as a memory of any one event. Both are treated here, but they are not treated identically, because they are not the same injury.
Safety First
Stabilization Before Processing
Before any detailed work on a traumatic memory begins, the priority is building enough stability to tolerate it: reliable sleep, some capacity to self-soothe when activated, and a felt sense that the present moment is actually safe. Processing a memory before that foundation exists tends to overwhelm rather than heal, so this stage is not a delay tactic: it is the part of the work that makes the rest of it possible.
Pacing and consent stay explicit throughout. You are told, in advance, roughly what a session involving processing will look like, and you retain the ability to slow down, stop, or return to stabilization work at any point. Trauma treatment that overrides a person’s own pace tends to recreate the very powerlessness it is trying to resolve.
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What Trauma Reshapes
Intimacy, Parenting and Trust
Trauma rarely stays contained to the memory itself; it reshapes the relationships that come after it. Intimacy can become genuinely difficult when closeness itself has been the setting for harm: a partner reaching out affectionately can trigger the same alarm as a threat, which is confusing for both people and easy to misread as rejection rather than a trauma response. Parenting is affected in its own way: a parent with unresolved trauma may over-monitor a child out of fear, or freeze at moments that call for calm authority, or find a child’s ordinary defiance landing with the intensity of the parent’s own history.
Because Athena works systemically, a partner can sometimes join for part of the work, not to relive the trauma with you, but to understand what is actually happening in moments that currently look like withdrawal or overreaction, and to respond in ways that de-escalate rather than confirm the old fear.
This practice does not treat grief, substance abuse or OCD. Where trauma and one of those are intertwined, that will be discussed openly and a referral offered for the piece that falls outside this scope, so that the whole picture gets appropriate care rather than a partial fit here.
If you are in immediate danger, call 911. For crisis support at any hour, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. This website and this practice are not a crisis service. Athena is not a prescriber; medication questions belong with your physician or a psychiatrist.
Common Questions
Trauma and PTSD Therapy Questions
- Will we start with what happened to me?
- Usually not first. Early sessions focus on safety and stabilization, what steadies your nervous system day to day, before any detailed processing begins. Going slower at the start tends to make the deeper work more tolerable, not less effective.
- What kinds of trauma does this practice work with?
- Both single-incident trauma, such as an accident or an assault, and prolonged relational trauma from childhood or a past relationship. This practice does not treat grief, substance abuse or OCD, and will refer out if one of those is the central concern.
- What if I am in crisis right now?
- This website and this practice are not a crisis service. If you are in immediate danger, call 911. For crisis support at any hour, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Start With the Contact Form
Trauma work is individual therapy here, sometimes with a partner joining for part of it. Send the contact form before anything is scheduled.