What was handed down, and what you get to set down.
Some of what you carry did not start with you. Silence in the family, a fear that has no clear origin, a way of loving that looks like control — these travel down generations. They can also stop.
- Your family does not talk about what happened — the war, the crossing, the violence, the loss — and it is everywhere anyway.
- You react to things with a fear or rage that feels older than you.
- The way you were raised was survival, and you are trying to raise your own children differently without a model.
- You are the family's designated healer, keeper, or peacemaker, and it is crushing you.
- You belong to a community with a history of displacement, colonization, or violence, and you feel it in your body.
The hills on this coast were shaped long before anyone walked them. Families are like that too: the contours you live inside — who gets to be angry, what is never mentioned, how love is shown and withheld — were cut by events you may never have been told about. A grandmother’s war. A father’s crossing. A community’s displacement.
Intergenerational trauma shows up as reactions that feel older than you, as a body that treats safety like danger, as the exhausting role of being the one who holds the family together. I work with people who want to understand where these came from and, more importantly, who want to decide what to do with them now.
Setting something down is not the same as rejecting the people who handed it to you. Often it is the most loving thing you can do for them — and for whoever comes after you.
- Naming the patterns — silence, hypervigilance, scarcity, shame — and tracing where they came from.
- Separating what was survival then from what is harm now.
- The nervous system: why your body responds to safety as if it were danger, and how to teach it otherwise.
- Grief for ancestors and for what they could not give.
- Being the one who breaks a cycle without breaking from the family.
- Reclaiming practices, language, and meaning that were taken or hidden.
We start with your family's story as you know it — including the gaps. The gaps are often where the trauma lives. I will ask about your body as much as your history: where the fear sits, what calms it, what does not.
What is intergenerational (or transgenerational) trauma?
The way the effects of trauma — historical, collective, or within one family — get passed to people who did not live the original event, through parenting, silence, learned vigilance, and the body's own stress systems. It is well documented in communities that have lived through displacement, colonization, war, and systemic violence.
Do I have to relive traumatic events in therapy?
No. We work at a pace your nervous system can tolerate, and much of the work is with the present — patterns, reactions, relationships — rather than re-narrating the past. You stay in control of what we open and when.
Do you incorporate indigenous or spiritual practices?
I am an integrative psychologist grounded in evidence-based approaches, and I am also learning about curanderismo and indigenous and spiritual practices. If these matter to you, they have a place in the room; if they do not, they stay out of it. You lead.