Trauma Consulting

Navigating work with trauma survivors or in a traumatized environment can be overwhelming and complex. The need for training, support, and guidance is essential to staying vital and relevant in the lives of those you are working with and being able to take care of yourself so that you can continue to show up for your clients.

Watch Hill Therapy works with clients who have experienced ongoing complex trauma and who may have been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Complex PTSD, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specific (DDNOS), or other dissociative or trauma disorders.

This might include having had experiences such as :

  • Childhood Trauma

  • Sexual Abuse & Sexual Assault

  • Physical Abuse & Physical Assault

  • Emotional & Physical Neglect

  • Witnessing Violence

  • Complicated Grief

  • Shame, Self-Blame, Self-Injury

  • Chronic Relationship Problems

  • Emotional Distress

  • Dissociation

If you are working with a client or a caseload that exhibits these experiences or symptoms, you may want to consider seeking out consultation to ensure that you’re operating from a trauma-informed lens and getting the support that you need to be supportive for your clients. Working with trauma necessitates remaining connected to the work and also to yourself, and that can be difficult to do on your own.

Treating trauma takes a village.

Working as a therapist can unfortunately feel so isolating. We don’t typically talk with other clinicians about our cases when we are no longer in supervision, particularly if we’re operating from a private practice setting. And in community mental health care or an agency setting we may be working at such a constant pace that it may feel overwhelming to try and make time to consult about cases or seek out support for ourselves. But this consultation is so necessary to our work, particularly when it comes to working with trauma. Consultation can help you avoid burnout, process transferrence or countertransferrence, keep yourself protected from vicarious trauma, and remain vigilence of the impact of holding traumatic material and be conscious of taking care of yourself.

Our Approach

We utilize a reflective, relational approach meaning that rather than doing therapy “to” or “at” a client, we are engaging in relationship with them in a way that allows patterns and themes interjecting from the past to enact themselves in the room with us in the present.

Rather than only utilizing a “top down” approach where we analyze and engage cognitively, or only utilizing a “bottom up” approach where we would only pay attention to the somatic and emotional experience, we combine these in order to engage all parts of the person in front of us. We believe that this “wholeness” is the natural human state, and this is what trauma often takes from us by fragmenting and dissociating parts of our humanity from us.

Complex trauma survivors often do not have complete memories or verbal narratives to call from, but their traumatic experiences are still stored in their bodies and find ways to speak to them. But engaging fully in the somatic and experiential is not healing without being in connection with other parts of the self, the present moment, and in relationship with a trusted other. The people who we work with have often been harmed in relationship, so it is through relationship that we work towards healing.

There is not a single step-by-step process to this type of work, because every individual has different wounds and has different needs to be met in order to heal those wounds. We firmly believe that while we may be experts in how to hold space for our clients and track the process of their healing, our clients are the experts on themselves and their experience, and it’s crucial to reinforce their agency in the process of their healing.

Our approach is one of reflection, curiosity, engagement, patience, and pacing. We work to build a safe, secure, and consistent relationship to process things within and through, and this is something that takes time in order to do well. We value inquiry for the sake of inquiry, and hold self-reflection and narrative building as inherently healing.

We believe that human wellness is linked to human connection, not just environmental stress or biology.