Trauma Therapy in Palm Beach County – Boynton Beach Trauma Therapist
If parts of your life feel governed by something you can’t quite name — reactions that come faster than thought, a body that stays braced when nothing is wrong, a sense of being too much or not enough that follows you into every room — you are not broken. You are carrying something. Trauma is the lasting imprint of experiences that overwhelmed your capacity to cope — not a flaw in your character or a failure of willpower — and it is treatable.
At Hawkins Counseling Center, trauma work is not a sideline. It is the center of what we do. This page explains what trauma actually is, how it shows up in the body and in daily life, and the specific approaches we use to help people move from surviving to living. Whether the source is a single event or years of experiences that quietly shaped you, healing is possible, and it is more concrete than most people expect.
What is Trauma?
Trauma is often misunderstood as the event itself — the accident, the loss, the abuse. But two people can go through the same event and come away changed in completely different ways. What makes an experience traumatic is not its severity on paper but whether it overwhelmed your nervous system faster than you could process it, leaving the experience stored in the body rather than resolved and filed away as memory.
When something is too much, too fast, or too soon, the brain does not encode it the way it encodes ordinary events. Instead of becoming a memory you can look back on, it stays active — a live wire that a sound, a smell, a tone of voice, or a passing feeling can touch off years later. This is why trauma can feel less like remembering and more like reliving.
Trauma, Post Traumatic Stress, and Complex PTSD
Trauma – “Unwanted and unwilled overwhelming emotions in the face of helplessness or aloneness.” (Diana Fosha)
In my opinion, the aforementioned quote is the preeminent and most comprehensive definition of trauma I have heard. I will explain as we go why Dr. Fosha’s definition of trauma captures trauma most succinctly but is also the most scientific.
Few clients walk into my office and assert they would like to work on trauma. They arrive saying things like, “I’m depressed, but I have no reason to be,” or, “I had a great childhood; I was never abused.” To the former I respond a bit ‘tongue in cheek’, “Apparently there is because you are:)”, and the latter, “That’s interesting because of all the clients I have worked with who I would deem as having a great childhood, none of them ever say that.”
The clients who experienced emotionally secure attachment will give you a cohesive narrative with specific details of what they are referring to when they discuss their history. Each of these responses indicates the client has developed a pattern of dissociation. They may also look a little confused or spaced out as I begin to ask for more explicit details.
Big-T and Little-t Trauma
Some trauma comes from obvious, life-altering events: a serious accident, an assault, combat, a natural disaster, the sudden death of someone close. This is sometimes called big-T trauma, and it is what most people picture when they hear the word.
But trauma also accumulates from experiences that look smaller from the outside — chronic criticism, emotional neglect, a childhood spent managing an unpredictable parent, being consistently unseen or unsafe in ways no single moment would explain. This is little-t trauma, and its effects can be just as deep. People who carry it often minimize their own pain because nothing dramatic enough happened to justify it. That instinct to minimize is itself part of the wound.
Why the Same Event Affects People Differently
Whether an experience becomes traumatic depends on many things: your age when it happened, whether you had support, whether it happened once or repeatedly, and what resources your nervous system had available at the time. A child has fewer defenses than an adult. Someone facing harm alone is more affected than someone held by a community. None of this reflects strength or weakness. It comes down to the conditions under which an experience was met.
This is also why comparing your pain to someone else’s is rarely useful. People often talk themselves out of seeking help because others have been through worse, as though suffering were a competition with a single winner who alone deserves care. Trauma does not work that way. What matters is not how your experience ranks against anyone else’s, but whether it is still shaping your life in ways that cause you pain. If it is, it deserves attention, regardless of how it compares.
Limited Definitions of Trauma
Another reason people tend to discount or deny they have been through various traumas is they have a preconceived definition of what constitutes trauma. They only define trauma through the lens of what we refer to as ‘Big T’ traumas, such as sexual assault, auto accidents, war trauma, or severe physical abuse. However, as I will soon delineate sometimes the ‘medium T’ and ‘small T’ traumas can be even more destructive.
Take a single-incident sexual assault as an example. I will preface my comments by saying I am in no way minimizing the damage these type of events can have on an individual, and I have helped countless clients heal and recover from these types of traumas, so I am extremely sensitive and compassionate to the impact of such incidents. Nonetheless, if the assault occurs in adulthood and is not associated with any other traumas, I can help a person process this event pretty rapidly using several powerful, experiential therapies I employ. The main theme that needs resolved is reestablishing a sense of safety in the world.
Signs and Symptoms of Unresolved Trauma
Unresolved trauma rarely announces itself as trauma. It shows up as a collection of symptoms that can seem unrelated — and that often get treated as separate problems when they share a single root. You might recognize yourself in some of these, or notice patterns you had never connected before.
Emotional Signs
- Feeling on edge or braced for something bad, even when things are calm
- Emotional numbness, or a sense of watching your life from behind glass
- Intense reactions that feel out of proportion to what triggered them
- Persistent shame, guilt, or a belief that something is fundamentally wrong with you
- Difficulty feeling joy, safety, or closeness even when your life looks good
Physical Signs
- Sleep problems — trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or nightmares
- Chronic tension, headaches, digestive issues, or unexplained pain
- A startle response that fires too easily
- Exhaustion that rest does not fix
Cognitive and Relational Signs
- Trouble concentrating or gaps in memory around difficult periods
- Intrusive thoughts or images you cannot control
- Difficulty trusting others, or trusting too easily and getting hurt
- Pulling away from closeness, or feeling unsafe even in good relationships
If several of these feel familiar, it does not mean something is wrong with you. It means your nervous system adapted to protect you, and those adaptations have outlived the danger that created them. That is exactly what trauma therapy addresses.
It is also worth knowing that these symptoms tend to reinforce one another. Poor sleep sharpens emotional reactivity, which strains relationships, which deepens shame, which makes rest even harder. People often experience this as evidence that they are getting worse or that something is fundamentally wrong with them. More often it is a loop — a set of connected responses feeding back into each other. Loops can be interrupted. When the trauma at the center is addressed, the whole pattern tends to loosen rather than each symptom having to be fought separately.
For a fuller picture of how unresolved trauma surfaces over time, see our guide to the signs of unresolved trauma.
Impact on Safety vs. Self
Now take a person who was chronically shamed by a parent throughout childhood and adolescence. This individual will grow up with a deep sense of unworthiness and inadequacy. The issue is associated not with safety but with self, which is more extensive and time consuming to resolve. This was the example I used earlier in which the person stated they had no reason to be depressed. What we discovered in their therapy was they were burdened with so much shame they could not experience life in any meaningful way.
Although each of these clients experienced different forms of trauma, which do you believe had a bigger impact – a short-term loss of a sense of safety or a lifetime of unworthiness. My point is not to compare but to broaden your definition of trauma. Allow me now to return and elaborate on Dr. Fosha’s definition of trauma.
How Trauma Affects the Nervous System
To understand why trauma is so persistent — and why simply talking about it is often not enough — it helps to understand what happens in the body. Trauma is not stored primarily in the thinking, reasoning part of the brain. It lives in older, faster systems that operate below conscious control, which is why insight alone rarely resolves it. You can understand exactly why you react the way you do and still react that way.
Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn
When your brain detects threat, it triggers a survival response before you have time to think. Most people know fight and flight — confront the danger or escape it. But there are two more. Freeze is the response when neither fighting nor fleeing is possible: the body shuts down, goes still, disconnects. Fawn is the instinct to appease, to manage the threat by keeping others happy, common in people who grew up around unpredictable or dangerous caregivers.
These responses are not choices, and they are not signs of weakness. They are automatic, intelligent, and often life-saving in the moment. The trouble comes when the nervous system learns to fire them in situations that are not actually dangerous — a raised voice, a certain silence, the threat of being left. The body reacts to the present as if it were the past.
The Window of Tolerance
Everyone has a range within which they can handle the ups and downs of life while staying present and regulated. This is called the window of tolerance. Inside it, you can feel difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by them. Trauma narrows that window. Small stressors push you into overwhelm — flooded, panicked, reactive — or into shutdown — numb, foggy, checked out. Much of trauma therapy is about widening that window, so that more of life becomes manageable rather than threatening.
Over time, a nervous system that stays braced against threat starts to treat dysregulation as normal. The constant low hum of anxiety, the difficulty relaxing, the sense of never quite being able to rest — these can become so familiar that you stop noticing them as symptoms and start experiencing them as simply who you are. One of the quiet revelations of trauma work is discovering that a calmer baseline is even possible, that the tension you assumed was permanent was a response that can change.
This is also why body-based therapies matter. If trauma lives in the nervous system, then healing has to reach the nervous system, not just the story you tell about what happened. The approaches we use are built around exactly that.
Childhood Trauma in Adults
Some of the most persistent trauma begins before we have the words to name it. Childhood is when the nervous system is still forming, taking its cues from the people meant to keep us safe. When those early relationships are frightening, unpredictable, or emotionally absent, a child adapts — and those adaptations become the default settings that person carries into adulthood.
Childhood trauma is not only about overt abuse. Emotional neglect — growing up with your feelings routinely ignored, dismissed, or punished — leaves deep marks precisely because nothing obvious happened to point to. So does parentification, where a child becomes the caretaker of a parent’s moods or needs. So does growing up with a caregiver who was loving one moment and volatile the next, teaching the child that closeness and danger come from the same source.
Adults carrying childhood trauma often struggle to understand why their lives feel harder than they should. They may have a good job, a stable home, people who love them, and still feel a persistent sense of not being safe, not being enough, or not being able to trust. The pattern makes sense once you see where it started. The good news is that what was learned in relationship can also be healed in relationship — which is much of what therapy provides.
Recovery from childhood trauma does not mean rewriting your history or blaming your parents. Many people who carry early wounds had caregivers who were themselves overwhelmed, unwell, or repeating what had been done to them. Understanding where a pattern came from is a matter of seeing clearly rather than assigning fault, so that the survival strategies you built as a child — the vigilance, the people-pleasing, the emotional armor — can be set down now that you are an adult with choices a child never had. The aim is not to erase the past but to stop living inside it.
We explore this in depth in our guide to childhood trauma in adults, including how early experiences shape adult attachment wounds.
Complex PTSD and How It Differs From PTSD
Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is what many people associate with trauma: it typically follows a single overwhelming event or a defined period of danger, and brings symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilance, and avoidance of reminders. It is real, it is well understood, and it is treatable.
Complex PTSD, or C-PTSD, is different. It develops from trauma that was prolonged and repeated, often in situations the person could not escape — childhood abuse or neglect, long-term domestic violence, ongoing captivity or exploitation. Because the trauma was chronic rather than singular, its effects reach deeper into a person’s sense of self.
Alongside the classic trauma symptoms, complex PTSD tends to bring persistent difficulty regulating emotions, a deeply negative self-concept, and ongoing problems in relationships. People with C-PTSD often carry a bone-deep sense of shame and a belief that they are fundamentally unlovable or defective — not as a passing feeling but as an identity. This belief is not a character truth but something repeated trauma teaches, and it can be unlearned.
Emotional Flashbacks
One hallmark of complex PTSD is the emotional flashback. Unlike the vivid visual flashbacks associated with PTSD, an emotional flashback has no picture attached. You are suddenly flooded with the feelings of an earlier time — helplessness, terror, shame, abandonment — without any memory to explain them. It can feel like being hijacked by an emotion that belongs to a much younger version of yourself, because that is close to what is happening. Learning to recognize emotional flashbacks for what they are is often a turning point in healing.
For a closer look, see complex PTSD vs PTSD and our guide to emotional flashbacks.
Trauma Triggers and Trauma Responses
A trigger is anything that signals danger to a nervous system shaped by trauma, whether or not real danger is present. It might be obvious — a place, a date, a person who resembles someone from the past. More often it is subtle: a tone of voice, a particular silence, being criticized, feeling trapped, sensing that someone is about to leave. The trigger touches the old wound, and the body responds as if the original threat were happening now.
This is why trauma responses can feel so bewildering, both to the person having them and to the people around them. The reaction is real and intense, but it is calibrated to a past event, not the present one. Someone might flood with panic over a minor conflict, or go cold and distant when a partner gets too close, or work themselves to exhaustion to head off a disapproval that never comes.
Understanding your triggers means recognizing what is happening in the moment — this is a trauma response, not a present-day emergency — and slowly building the capacity to stay regulated when they fire, rather than trying to avoid them forever. That capacity is trainable, and it is a core part of the work.
There is often relief in simply learning that triggers have a logic. What feels like an inexplicable overreaction, the kind that leaves you ashamed afterward and wondering what is wrong with you, turns out to be a nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do. That reframe alone can loosen the self-blame that so often surrounds these moments. You are not overreacting for no reason. You are responding to a past your body has not yet been able to update — and updating it is precisely what trauma therapy makes possible.
Learn more in our guide to trauma triggers and how to work with them.
How Primitive Defenses Create PTSD
Dissociation is the human equivalent to what is referred to as tonic immobility in the animal kingdom. When an animal is pursued by a predator and has no possibility of escape, its last line of defense is to collapse into a catatonic state. There are different survival-based reasons for this action I won’t articulate at present. However, if a predator becomes distracted or for any reason the animal has the potential to flee, it will reactivate its adrenaline, escape to freedom, and once safe shake its body for a period of time, discharging all the unused energy and resetting its nervous system.
When humans dissociate what they cannot regulate we typically fail to go through this intuitive process of discharging and resetting our system. This is due to our large and advanced neocortex, our thinking brain. We neurologically dissociate, split off what we cannot regulate into an isolated implicit memory network. Implicit memory is the body’s memory; a felt sense with no images or conscious thought. It is also stored in a part of the brain that is the brain’s threat detector.
Implicit Memory Networks
Furthermore, it has no sense of linear time and cannot differentiate people, place, or setting. It will activate in the body with any association of the original event no matter how tangential or remote or whether one is conscious of the trigger or not. A smell, color, sound, time of day, day of the year, phrase of speech, photo, etc. is sufficient to trigger the implicit memory in the body making it feel like it is happening in the present even if it occurred decades ago.
This is how various forms of post traumatic stress (PTSD) and traumatic symptoms are generated. In essence, PTSD is a memory disorder. A part of the brain does not know the event is over. It keeps responding as if the event is occurring. Individuals can experience intrusive thoughts, images, memories, dreams, somatic reactions, etc. Moreover, the person will tend to also experience chronic hyperactivation of the sympathetic nervous system leading to anxiety symptoms or recurrent activation of the parasympathetic nervous system causing emotional numbness, detachment, chronic fatigue, depressive symptoms.
Undiagnosed Epidemic of PTSD
What makes Dr. Fosha’s definition so comprehensive is that anything that fits her description will trigger some level of dissociation resulting in chronic symptoms of some form. A great deal of what is diagnosed as depression and differing anxiety disorders are actually symptoms of post traumatic stress. People’s first thoughts when someone mentions the words post traumatic stress are soldiers, police officers, firemen, or other first responders. Population wise, these individuals are a small segment of society.
It is my experience as a trauma specialist that the vast majority of individuals suffering with PTSD are the average members of society that don’t even realize they have PTSD. It is an undiagnosed epidemic. People continue to get diagnosed with depression, anxiety, anger-management issues, addictions, eating disorders, OCD, Panic Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Relationship and Personality Dysfunctions, etc.
Symptom Management vs. Symptom Resolution
What I am asserting is that underlying the majority of these diagnosis is actually forms of post traumatic stress. Moreover, let’s say for sake of argument you would need a 7 on a scale of 10 on an intensity scale to qualify for a PTSD diagnosis. What about everyone who is under a 7 on the scale? It’s the same neurological process as the people a 7 or higher even though the symptoms they are experiencing may not be as intense as those at the higher end of the scale.
As I’ve written prior on depression and anxiety disorders, the vast majority of the mental health communities approach is symptom management from medications to cognitive behavioral approaches. Individuals receive symptom diminishment at best or develop somewhat effective means to cope with their symptoms in a more effective manner. I am all for providing symptom relief for clients. However, these approaches do not address the underlying cause of the trauma symptoms and resolve them.
The Thinking Brain is The Problem
In addition, cognitive and insight-oriented approaches perpetuate the problem. The cognitive brain is blocking access and discharge of the energy associated with the trauma. The more you activate cognitive parts of the brain, the more it will block healing. Fortunately, we have discovered and developed various experiential therapies that can gain access to parts of the brain and activate implicit memory networks in the body that are holding the traumas, initiate the body’s natural healing capacities, and release the energy associated with the trauma and reset the nervous system.
The experiential therapies I have found most effective for achieving resolution of the various forms of trauma are as follows:
I utilize these modalities in an integrative manner determining in the moment what will have the most impact on the client in session. Psychology is now biology. With the advent of neuroscience, attachment theory, neurobiology, and interpersonal neurobiology we have a much greater and ever expanding understanding of how to access the body’s innate healing capacities. Moreover, the body and brain have to follow these laws. Therefore, everyone no matter what you have experienced is capable of healing.
Complex PTSD
Trauma can come in many forms from attachment trauma, relational traumas, traumatic loss, single-incident traumas, to long-term neglect and abuse. These types of experiences will manifest in a diverse range of symptoms: overwhelming emotions, maladaptive behaviors, post traumatic stress, addictions, eating disorders, rage episodes, relationship conflict, etc.
However, one of the most challenging forms trauma can take is what is referred to as complex post traumatic stress (cPTSD). PTSD can develop at any point in one’s life. A single-incident trauma can result in PTSD symptoms or chronic exposure to a stressor, such as a toxic workplace or an abusive relationship can lead to development of PTSD.
What make complex PTSD so disruptive to a person’s life is it occurred during development so its impact on the brain is more extensive. Type 1 trauma is the single-incident one I have referred to earlier. Type 2 traumas are chronic, recurrent, and relational. These take place primarily from late adolescence down to birth. An individual experienced chronic abuse of some form, emotional, physical, sexual, or significant neglect.
These experiences result in a broader impact than single-incident traumas:
- Difficulty regulating one’s emotions
- Somatic symptoms – Chronic fatigue, Irritable Bowl Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Low immunity, Trauma-induced asthma, Trauma-Induced Migraines, etc.
- Structural Dissociation
- Innate feelings of shame and worthlessness
- Inability to develop and maintain emotionally secure attachment
Individuals who have experienced Type 2 traumas typically receive the following diagnosis:
- Major Depressive Disorder
- Generalized Anxiety Disorder
- Panic Disorder
- Agoraphobia
- Borderline Personality Disorder
- Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
- Dissociative Identity Disorder
They also tend to have significantly higher rates of substance use, eating disorders, or various compulsive behaviors due to an inability to internally regulate the overwhelming intensity of energy released when traumatic symptoms are triggered.
Until the last few decades there was a lack of understanding in the therapeutic community regarding the differentiation of Type 1 and Type 2 traumas. The result was many individuals who sought out therapy for assistance ended up being retraumatized. As a trauma specialist, one of the first things I reassure my clients is we break things up into small pieces and intensity is not the goal.
A Softer Way Through
I initially build up my clients internal and external resources prior to accessing any traumas and do so in a slow and thoughtful manner. Trauma processes much better when it is controlled and regulated. What we refer to in therapy as one’s emotional window of tolerance. We focus on remaining in the window of tolerance throughout the process both in sessions and outside of them.
Whatever form of trauma, abuse or neglect you may have experienced take hope and encouragement in the fact that both neuroscience and my experience working with thousands of clients shows everyone can heal. Every one of my clients who has remained in treatment has succeeded. Moreover, both Bissan and I are clients as well as healers. We each have experienced our own personal traumas and had developed post traumatic stress disorder and many of its associated issues. We can also personally attest to the power of experiential therapies to heal.
Healing and Undoing Aloneness
Each person’s experience is unique. However, we each have an intimate understanding of what the healing journey is like and what being a client attempting to heal from trauma consists of. This allows us to achieve a greater level of empathy and undo aloneness in the moment with our clients. The antidote to trauma is emotionally secure attachment. We teach our clients how to connect deeply with their Core Self and provide an emotionally secure relationship from which to do so allowing them to heal emotionally, relationally, and spiritually.
If you have experienced any form of trauma from ‘Big T’, ‘medium T’, or ‘small, recurrent T’s’, I want to encourage you to obtain the support you need to heal, whether through us or any qualified practitioner. There are many paths to healing. You are capable, worthy, and deserving of healing. Don’t allow trauma to rob you of the life you could be experiencing. Please contact us today.
