Childhood & Generational Trauma Therapy
What is Childhood Trauma?
All children deserve a childhood they don’t have to heal from, but most children don’t get that.
Childhood trauma can include:
Emotional neglect
Chronic criticism or high expectations
Growing up around instability, addiction, or mental illness
Parentification (being the adult too soon)
Lack of emotional attunement
Religious or cultural rigidity rooted in fear
Exposure to violence (e.g., domestic violence, trafficking, sexual or physical abuse)
Chronic stress stemming from poverty, homelessness, and/or forced migration
Child labor
Even if your caregivers did the best they could, your nervous system may still carry patterns of hypervigilance, people-pleasing, emotional shutdown, flashbacks, dissociation, or perfectionism.
Trauma lives in the body long after the experience is over. Through trauma therapy, we explore:
How your nervous system learned to stay safe
How your brain stays in fight or flight and is activated even when you are in a safe place
The beliefs you formed about love, worth, and safety
The roles you were assigned in your family
Where shame or hyper-independence began
What parts of you had to shrink to survive
Our work may include:
Nervous system regulation
Inner child and parts healing
Boundary development
Processing grief and unresolved anger
Rewriting internal narratives
Reconnecting with authenticity and agency
This is not about blaming your family. It is about understanding patterns with compassion and choosing something different.
What is Generational Trauma?
Generational trauma (also called intergenerational trauma or family cycles) occurs when unprocessed trauma, stress, grief, or survival patterns are passed through families.
This can stem from:
Family history of war, genocide, displacement, or poverty
Long-standing family conflict or secrecy
Cultural or religious expectations that don’t align with your values that you may feel are oppressive, sexist, and/or harmful
Unresolved grief or loss
Patterns of emotional avoidance
History of abuse due to colonization, incarcerations, oppression, and/or racism
You may be living a very different life than your ancestors, but you still carry that history in your body, which manifests as anxiety, guilt, hyper responsibility, or pressure that doesn’t feel in alignment with who you are and doesn’t fully belong to you.
