PTSD and trauma

What does this actually look like day to day?

Often it does not look like the version people expect. It looks like sleeping badly for years. Sitting where you can see the door. Reacting to a sound before you have decided anything. Feeling nothing on a day you thought would be hard, and coming apart over something small a week later.

It can also look like a life that runs perfectly well on the outside, at a cost only you can see.

Do I have to tell the whole story?

Not on day one, and not on any day you have not chosen. We go at a pace you set. Plenty of useful work happens before anyone describes the worst of it, and some people find they never need to narrate it in full.

Before we go anywhere near the hard material, we build footing: sleep, a way through the moments that spike, and something steady to come back to. That is not a delay. That is the part that makes the rest survivable.

How do you work with it?

Directly and without drama. My primary method is DBT, so much of what we build is practical: riding out a bad hour without making it worse, noticing a reaction early enough to have a choice about it, and staying present when your attention wants to be somewhere else.

Two things are true. What you did to survive made sense at the time, and it does not have to be how you live now.

Why does it help that you served?

I spent 27 years in the United States Army. You will not have to explain the setting, the chain of command, or why you did not raise your hand at the time. A lot of people in the military, if we need help, they do not understand us in the civilian world, so we do not go get help.

That is a barrier I can take off the table. What is left is the work, and the aim of it: a life worth living, not just a manageable one.

Reasons people come in for this

• Sleep that has not been right for a long time
• Anger or startle that arrives ahead of any thought
• Avoiding places, conversations, or dates on the calendar
• Feeling far away from people you love, without knowing when that started
• Carrying something you have never said out loud to anyone

Ready when you are.

Therapy starts with a conversation. Send a short message and tell me what is going on, in your own words. We meet in person in Omaha, and online across Nebraska and Rhode Island.