Integrative Trauma Therapy For Women In Austin
For women looking for deeper work, integrative, body-based, and built for what conventional therapy hasn’t reached
Some things don’t move through talk and thought alone.
You may already know that. You may have done meaningful work in therapy, built real self-awareness, found language for your patterns, understood where some of it comes from. That work matters.
And still, something remains underneath it because trauma and attachment wounds don’t live only in what can be named. They also live in the body, the nervous system, and the protective patterns that keep shaping the present long after you understand them.
Work that reaches that layer is different from conventional therapy. It’s experiential. It works with what’s happening in your body, not only the story around it.
It’s bottom-up, meaning it begins with the nervous system, rather than analysis alone, and it’s grounded in how the brain processes and holds overwhelming experiences.
That is the kind of work I offer.
You can have a life that looks good from the outside and still feel hemmed in by the same patterns.
The overthinking. The depth of feeling. The questioning around whether you’re too intense, too different, too much, or not enough. The self-abandonment.
The pain that doesn’t move in a straight line. The relationships that pull on old injuries. The part of you who looks functional enough from the outside while something underneath stays overworked, and quietly worn down.
This Is Usually More Than One Thing
No one would guess how much your body still tracks. The pause in someone's voice. The email that lands differently than it should. The subtle shift in closeness.
What looks like overreaction from the outside is often an old internal alarm system catching signal before you do. What looks small on the surface can hit an older fault line underneath it. The amount of energy it takes to stay level when something small brushes against something old.
Most of the women who find their way here aren't falling apart in obvious ways. They're functioning. Professionally respected. Often the ones others rely on most, while having very little infrastructure for what they hold privately.
What doesn't show from the outside is how much vigilance has come to feel permanent. How difficult it is to fully exhale in a relationship. How quickly something old can organize the moment before you've registered what happened.
And usually it's not just one thing.
Trauma is often here, sometimes named clearly, sometimes it took years to call it what it actually was. Attachment is usually part of it too, what your nervous system learned early about closeness, need, and what happened when you wanted something you weren't sure you were allowed to want. And grief can move quietly through it all. Not only grief after loss, but grief over what never fully arrived.
That's often the deeper architecture underneath the life that looks, from the outside, like it should feel easier by now.
How This Work Goes Deeper
EMDR: Trauma memories can stay vivid, fragmented, and easy to activate long after the original experience is over. EMDR helps process what still feels unfinished so your nervous system is no longer responding as if the past is still happening.
Brainspotting: Some material shows up first in the body: hypervigilance, contraction, dread, the internal shift before words arrive. Brainspotting helps access and process what is held there more deeply.
Trauma-Informed Hypnotherapy: Some protective patterns and deeply learned expectations about closeness, safety, and worth continue below conscious awareness. In a focused state of attention, those layers can become more available to change.
Attachment-based, somatic, psychodynamic, and IFS-informed approaches are woven through this work, and integrated as tools used in response to you, your history, and what’s actually unfolding in therapy.
If you’ve done therapy before and still felt like something important stayed untouched, that doesn’t automatically mean the therapy was wrong, you were resistant, too complex, or doing it wrong.
Sometimes it means the work never fully reached the layer where the pattern and the story actually live.
Some of what you're carrying has been held in the body long enough that it has stopped waiting to be understood.
It needs to be reached differently.
You may not be looking for therapy for the first time. You may have already spent time making sense of your patterns, talking through what happened, and trying to understand why certain things still get activated.
Sometimes that work helps to a point.
Sometimes it leaves something deeper untouched.
Because trauma isn’t only held in what’s known. It settles into the nervous system, the body, and the relational patterns that took shape early on. This work goes there carefully, directly, and with the clinical range to respond to what actually shows up.
"She was a woman who knew the difference between what she needed and what was simply available." Toni Morrison
What It Looks Like Working Together
My practice is based in San Antonio. I work with women in-person in San Antonio and by telehealth in both San Antonio and Austin.
For many women, doing this work from home is not a lesser version of therapy. It removes a layer. Your own room is quieter. There is less exposure. Less performing on the way in, and less composing yourself on the way out.
Some women find that being home actually removes a barrier.
The effort of getting to therapy, the drive, the parking lot, the waiting room, the composure required to walk through a building, was never part of healing. Without it, more of your energy can go toward processing what’s underneath.
Austin's therapy community is substantial, and for some women, that's part of the concern. Your world here is more connected than its size suggests. The wellness community, the medical and legal world, the tech industry, creative and entrepreneurial circles.
Working with someone outside that world isn't a workaround. For many women it's what finally makes it possible to bring everything into the room.
EMDR, Brainspotting, clinical hypnosis, attachment-based therapy, and somatic work, all work effectively online. The depth of the work is the same, with the advantage of being in a setting where your nervous system feels more at ease.
What Often Lives Around Trauma
Highly Sensitive Person
The intensity of your inner life is not the problem. What’s often been missing is the right way of working with it. Not less depth. Not less feeling. Not pressure to override what your body picks up so quickly. This work makes room for the way you're wired and helps you live inside it with less overwhelm, not more self-erasure.
You've always taken in more. More deeply, more persistently. This work is built for the way your system actually operates.
Anxiety
It doesn't always look like anxiety from the outside. It looks like preparedness. Staying three steps ahead. Reading tone, timing, and possibility before anything has fully happened. But underneath it is often a nervous system that learned too early that waiting to see was not the safest option.
The hypervigilance that masquerades as drive. The anxiety you feel in your body first, the tension that rises, the stomach that turns, the chest that tightens, the self-monitoring that never fully lets up. The exhaustion of staying three steps ahead of everything.
Perfectionism
Not the kind that drives results. The kind that keeps moving the finish line. The internal standard that exists independently of what you have actually built, what you have accomplished, what anyone else can see. It can look like discipline from the outside, while quietly keeping relief out of reach.
The standard that recalibrates the moment you get close to meeting it. The version of enough that stays just out of reach. The quiet cost of high achievement that no one outside of you can see.
People Pleasing
The yes that arrives before you've decided. The need that feels like too much to voice. The boundaries that exist in theory. The version of you everyone else gets, and the one still waiting for her turn.
An adaptation that outlived its original conditions. The reading of rooms. The management of other people's comfort before your own needs have fully registered. You learned to stay oriented to what other people might feel, want, or need, often before you had the chance to stay with yourself inside the moment.
FAQ: Integrative Trauma Therapy for Austin Women
Why do you work with women in Austin even though your practice is based in San Antonio?
Do you offer in-person therapy in Austin?
Because the fit tends to be strong in ways that go beyond location. Many of the women in Austin tend to arrive with a particular combination: real self-awareness, a clear sense that what they’ve tried hasn’t gone far enough, and a deep understanding of their patterns. They value the kind of pace, depth, and specificity this work is built around and they’re looking for therapy that’s more integrative than conventional therapy has offered them.
This combination tends to align well with how I work and telehealth makes it possible for that fit to matter more than proximity.
Does EMDR work online?
Yes, EMDR translates fully to telehealth. The bilateral stimulation, the processing, the nervous system work, all of it is possible online. I hold certification through EMDRIA and offer EMDR by telehealth to women in Austin.
Does Brainspotting work online?
What kinds of concerns do you work with besides trauma?
How do I know if this is the right fit?
Yes, Brainspotting works effectively online. The eye position, the body-based processing, the access to what's held below the story, none of that requires being in the same physical space. I'm a listed Brainspotting therapist through Brainspotting.com.
Can clinical hypnosis be done by telehealth?
Why do some Austin women prefer working with a therapist outside their immediate community?
Yes, trauma-informed clinical hypnotherapy works well online. Being in your own space often supports the focused state of attention this work uses, your environment is already familiar, which can make it easier to settle in. I'm certified through the National Board for Certified Clinical Hypnotherapists.
Austin's professional and wellness communities are more networked. The therapy world, the medical and legal communities, the tech industry, creative and entrepreneurial circles often overlap.
For some women, working with someone outside that world removes a layer of management from the room. You're not tracking whether your therapist knows someone who knows you. That kind of privacy changes what becomes possible to bring in the therapy space.
Trauma is rarely the only thing present. Most of the women I work with are also navigating attachment wounds, grief, anxiety, the HSP trait, and people pleasing patterns. These tend to be layered. The work addresses what's underneath all of them.
No, my practice is based in San Antonio and I work with women in-person in San Antonio. For women who live in Austin, I typically work with them by telehealth.
You're probably already partway there if you've read this far. The women who find their way here are usually looking for something specific, depth, specialization, and a therapist whose world doesn't overlap with theirs.
If that's what you're looking for, the next step is requesting a phone consultation. From there, I'll be in touch to schedule a time to connect.
