What has happened cannot unhappen.
With trauma-focused psychotherapy, you can change your relationship to what happened.
Threshold Center is a trauma-focused therapy clinic that offers specialized care for people impacted by traumatic life events.
This can be a long history of multiple events that span childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, or it can be a one-time event like a car accident, assault, medical issue, or loss.
Trauma therapy in Connecticut & Wisconsin.
All sessions are currently virtual for clients.
Threshold Center for Trauma and Creative Arts Therapy treats the following kinds of traumatic experiences:
Childhood experiences of abuse and neglect that happened once or repeatedly and still shape how you see yourself, others, and the world
A single-event such as a car accident, an assault, a medical emergency, a sudden loss that is still running your life today
Sexual assault and abuse, and the aftermath on the body, your relationship and sense of self
Trauma that’s led you to feeling disconnected from parts of yourself, your memory, sense of who you are, including dissociative identity experiences
Medical trauma: surgeries, diagnoses, births, or hospital stays that left psychological wounds
Grief and loss, especially when it feels complicated, sudden or unfinished
The weight of what you carried home from military, combat, or first-responded work
What it’s cost you to survive displacement, migration, or starting over somewhere new
At Threshold Center, the approach to the work is that I join you where you are at- even in the darkest of places, the underworld, the winter of life- and together, work with you, to help you cross the threshold into a life of possibility, connection, and creativity.
When we experience life-changing events, we can feel frozen in a state of loss, distress, and isolation; similar to Persephone in the underworld. It can feel like an unending season of fall and winter.
Our approach to treating trauma at Threshold Center is that we don’t work on erasing the past, instead we create space for you to acknowledge and process the past. We won’t pretend that things that happened didn’t happen, but focus on how to help you be able to move again between the different emotional seasons within you in the present day.
My trauma-focused treatment approach includes specific skills and training to work through the nuances of working with the psychological effects of trauma.
Additionally, my approach is:
-
Oriented around how Trauma shows up in the room
Together we will work to understand how trauma has impacted your perception of relationships, and in our therapeutic alliance, together, will work on how to differentiate the experiences of the past from the present.
-
Interdisciplinary and Multi-Modal
I have a wide variety of techniques to draw on to treat trauma including EMDR, psychodrama, parts work, drama therapy, and trauma-focused group therapy.
-
Focused on Strengthening Your Inner Self-Trust
In session, my focus is on supporting you in strengthening your capacity to connect with your inner self-trust, so that you can, over time, become more independent and empowered in managing your life day-to-day.
-
Committed
I approach my role as a therapist with professionalism, care, and commitment. If you are ready to commit to a therapeutic process, I will meet you in that commitment.
About the Pomegranates & the Story of Persephone
Here, at Threshold, we hold both meanings around the symbol of the pomegranate: it represents the moment of no return, and the delicacy and care required to understand what that experience uniquely means to you.
I’m sure you have noticed there are a lot of pomegranates on this website. They represent our unique approach to working with traumatic experiences at the Threshold Center.
Persephone is the daughter of Goddess of Spring, Demeter. One beautiful spring day, Persephone goes with the god of the underworld, Hades, to his domain. Some say that she is invited, others say that she is enticed, coerced, forced. Once she reaches the underworld- just as when someone experiences a traumatic event- her life changes forever. Her life changes because she eats the seeds of a pomegranate, unaware that this seals her fate. Once one has eaten the food of the underworld, one can never again fully live in the land of the living.
Her mother, Demeter, learns of this, and she is distraught and heartbroken that she has lost her daughter to the underworld. She pleads her daughter’s case to Hades, asking to return Persephone to the land of the living. But what’s done is done, and what has happened cannot unhappen. Yet Demeter, Persephone, and Hades are gods and goddesses, so there is some leeway, and a deal is struck- Persephone will live half of her year in the land of the living, and half of her year in the underworld. And so, she lives between the land of the living in the spring and summer, and the underworld in the fall and winter. The seasons change as her mother, Demeter, deeply misses her daughter when she is away in the underworld.
How Persephone relates to our approach at Threshold Center
When we experience life-changing events, we can feel frozen in a state of loss, distress, and isolation; similar to Persephone in the underworld. It can feel like an unending season of fall or winter. At Threshold, we don’t work on erasing the past, or pretend that things that happened didn’t happen, but to help you be able to move again between the different emotional seasons within you. We honor the experiences of fall and winter, and also find ways to make more space to experience the summer and spring again. What’s done is done, and what has happened cannot unhappen; but, what is in your control to change is your relationship to what happened.
A Symbol of Complexity: The Pomegranate
And, the pomegranate. The seeds of the pomegranate are the food of the underworld that Persephone eats that seals her fate. One could say that the pomegranate is a symbol for the moment of no return. One could also say that the pomegranate is a symbol for complexity, uniqueness, and delicacy- because within that ruby peel lies a multitude of details, a multitude of specificity.
