It shouldn’t be this hard to feel happy, to get through the day, or to trust people.
A traumatic event can cause intense and confusing emotions.
These feelings can be experienced from a traumatic incident like an accident or sudden loss, but they can also come from more prolonged exposure including childhood abuse, abandonment issues or the feeling like you don’t belong.
Each type of trauma imprints uniquely on each person, leading to varied symptoms like heightened anxiety, emotional numbness, or intrusive memories.
No matter what has happened, your feelings are valid, and deserve to be recognized, addressed, and healed.
When you were little, who did you go to for comfort? Were they reliably available to you?
Every child deserves compassion when they’re hurting or scared. They need support in order to be present during stressful moments, and when they don’t have it, their bodies get really tense and move into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. (Fawn is the state of pleasing, placating, submitting, or being, ‘A really, really good little boy or girl.’)
These patterns of survival become etched in their nervous systems and they activate as adults during moments of stress (e.g. a partner feeling upset, blaming others for what’s happening, or being unavailable, dismissive, or uncaring). Understanding these patterns is the first step in creating change.
No amount of talking, being smart, or trying to understand what happened – changes what the body remembers. We must let the body speak and heal in a language it knows, and that language is experience.
At Sage River, we embrace experiential therapy because we understand that your body deeply remembers and learns from its experiences, and we’re here to guide you toward experiences that heal.
Sacramento Psychologist, Certified EFT Therapist and Supervisor, Founder of Sage River Psychotherapy
We start by listening to your story.
Before Sage River Psychotherapy was a practice, it was a promise—to meet people in their pain without rushing to fix it. That promise lives at the heart of everything we do.
We believe therapy begins when you feel truly seen. When someone sits with you—not to analyze, diagnose, or correct—but to listen deeply. Whether you’re feeling overwhelmed, shut down, disconnected, or just tired of pretending you’re okay, we start exactly where you are.
We help you make sense of your inner world—your nervous system’s signals, your learned patterns, your emotional landscape—so you can begin to move through life with more ease, more self-trust, and more honest connection.
Our team uses the science of relational neurobiology alongside a deep respect for your pace. Together, we help you rediscover the strength, clarity, and aliveness that’s already within you.
Come as you are. Stay as long as you need. We’ll be here.
Couples Issues, Mixed-Race Couples, Neurodiverse Couples, Self-Esteem, Anxiety,
Childhood Trauma, Complex PTSD, Relational Trauma, Grief
Couples Issues, Men’s Issues
Childhood Trauma, Complex PTSD, Identity, Transition, Collective Trauma,
Healing Shame
Couples Issues, Relational Challenges, Depression, Grief, Suicide Loss, Attachment Issues, Life Transitions
We take the time to understand your story, feelings, challenges and goals.
Together, we identify the problems you are facing and collaboratively develop a plan.
Over time, we refocus our approach to help you move forward and create lasting change.
The only requirement is a willingness to begin.
Yes, we can help. We all get hurt in relationships, but sometimes there is a defining moment where we feel a sense of “before and after.” A deep, painful new belief settles into your body protecting your heart, while also blocking repair and reconnection. Like, “before this, I thought that I could count on you, but now I know I can’t.” When this kind of injury happens in an important relationship (partner, sibling, friend), you may need help determining whether you want to stay in the relationship in the same way.
Individual therapy can help you explore the relationship you want moving forward. If you do want to rebuild a close, connected relationship with the person who hurt you, we can help. Sometimes couples therapy or family therapy may be the best fit. Our relationships live within us and can be experientially explored and healed through individual, couples or family therapy.
We get it. Going back to painful times in your life sounds terrible. Let us share three things that might help:
1) We are only interested in the past to the degree that it is shaping how you are responding to your life today.
2) You have control over what happens in the therapy. We might have suggestions about what might benefit from focused support, but we want you to listen to your body. Your body knows where something is stuck that needs release. It is very important that you feel listened to if it’s a good idea to slow down, stop, or shift gears. Much of trauma is about things feeling totally out of control. We won’t repeat that in your therapy.
3) We don’t want you to relive painful memories. There’s a name for that–retraumatization. The difference between therapy and retraumatization is that we are interested in helping you have a new experience by bringing current support to old feelings so that those feelings can complete. Every feeling is meant to have a natural arc.
With appropriate support, emotions rises up as a signal about something that is happening, they crest, and then they pass through the body and are released. The problem with trauma is that the emotions don’t complete, they get stuck in the body. It is painful to go to the places where those stuck feelings live, but the point isn’t the pain. The point is the release into ease and safety.
Absolutely. When we are overwhelmed by a painful event, it affects how a brain structure called the hippocampus forms and functions. Since the hippocampus is integral to long-term memory formation and retrieval, it is not uncommon to have difficulty recalling the details. It’s also possible, that it was adaptive for you to dissociate, or space out, when you were a young, which can lead to a cloudy sense of the past.
Many children who grow up with emotional neglect, emotional volatility, or both, learn to stay tense and vigilant so that they can be ready to react to changing circumstances in their environment. This interferes with knowing who they are and what they feel, and to form and integrate a coherent story of their life experiences. Although in each of these cases, it may feel like you don’t remember, it’s not true that the experiences are gone. In fact, your body remembers, and is likely responding to events in your current life as if they were the past. We can help your body release these memories and experience the increased resource and safety that you have built (or will build through the therapy process) in your present day, adult life.
Yes, you are not alone and we can help. What is happening to you is incredibly distressing and is a hallmark of trauma. Your body wants to heal, but doesn’t know how to process what happened, so it keeps kicking it up. Sometimes you know what triggered it, sometimes it seems to come out of nowhere. Therapy can help you process what happened and can support the distressing emotions that are misfiring to release and complete, bringing restored ease, safety, and predictability back to your life.
If you’re ready to get started with trauma therapy in Sacramento, please get in touch via our contact form, call/text, or by emailing us directly. Calls and emails will be responded to as soon as possible (within 24 hours).
916-234-0456
info@sagerivertherapy.com
Feel like yourself again with trauma therapy in Sacramemto.
