Trauma Aware Care

For a long time I felt afraid that if I didn’t remember everything that happened to me then I wouldn’t heal, but I also felt really afraid to remember everything.

Since becoming a therapist that works primarily with trauma, and continuing my own journey without remembering everything, I’ve learned that remembering can look a lot of different ways and that remembering everything is not necessary.

The reality is that sometimes our body remembers what our mind cannot. We feel these memories in the form of sensations, anxiety, or just a general sense that something bad happened.

Sometimes trauma happens when we are so little that we don’t have words or a framework yet to make sense of it. Instead it informs our very conception of ourselves and the world.

Sometimes to survive what has happened we dissociate so completely that we don’t remember what happened in a clear and concise narrative. Trauma memory can be stored differently from regular memory.

We...