Sensing the Self Psychotherapy

Sensing the Self Psychotherapy Helping disconnected people reconnect with their inner wisdom and embody lasting change. Trauma | Grief | Depth | EMDR | KAP In-person therapy in Los Angeles.

Online in all of CA & TX.

08/27/2026

What happens when a parent’s unresolved shadow becomes part of a child’s emotional world?

Children are deeply influenced not only by what their parents say and do consciously, but by what remains unresolved underneath the surface.

When a parent cannot accept certain parts of themselves—anger, ambition, vulnerability, sexuality, independence, or even their own unmet desires—those qualities may become difficult to tolerate when they appear in the child.

The child then learns:

This part of me isn’t safe here.
This part of me threatens connection.
This part of me needs to be hidden.

And those disowned parts can become part of the child’s own shadow.

From a Jungian perspective, the shadow isn’t simply the “bad” parts of ourselves. It can contain the parts of who we are that we learned were unacceptable, inconvenient, or too threatening to express.

As adults, those hidden parts may continue to influence how we relate to ourselves and others.

Shadow work is the process of bringing some of that unconscious material back into awareness—not so we can blame our parents, but so we can begin to distinguish what belongs to us from what we learned to carry.

What emotions did you learn to suppress?

What desires became unacceptable?

What qualities in yourself did you learn to make smaller?

And what might happen if those parts no longer had to remain hidden?

Sometimes becoming more fully ourselves means reclaiming the parts of us that had to go underground in order to belong.

You can have compassion for your parents and still choose not to carry their unfinished shadow forward.

That is part of the work of becoming yourself.

08/26/2026

A common way I see people coping with difficult childhood experiences is by minimizing them.

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“I had everything I needed.”

“My parents did the best they could.”

“Other people had it much worse.”

And maybe all of those things feel true. But If It Wasn’t That Bad…Why Are You Still Affected?

Having food, shelter, clothes, and opportunities doesn’t necessarily mean your emotional needs were met.

Sometimes it’s easier to understand this when we shift the perspective.

Ask yourself:

If a child you loved were growing up exactly as you did, how would you feel about what they were experiencing?

Would you feel happy or neutral?

Sad or angry?

Very sad or very angry?

This question can help us step outside the story we’ve built around our own childhood and see our experiences with fresh eyes.

Because minimizing can be protective.

As children, we depend on our caregivers. We need to believe our world is safe enough to survive it.

So we may learn to normalize neglect, dismiss our feelings, excuse harmful behavior, or tell ourselves we shouldn’t be affected.

And those patterns can follow us into adulthood.

We may compare our experiences to people who “had it worse.”

We may feel guilty for struggling.

We may believe our needs aren’t important.

Or we may simply have no reference point for what healthy emotional care actually looks like.

Trauma isn’t a competition.

You don’t have to prove that your childhood was “bad enough” to acknowledge that something affected you.

Sometimes healing begins with allowing yourself to see what happened—not through the lens of whether someone else had it worse, but through the lens of compassion.

If a child you loved experienced what you experienced, what would you want for them?

That answer may tell you something important about what you needed, too.

This is a broad reflection on childhood experiences, not a diagnostic tool. Individua experiences andtheir impact are complex.

08/25/2026

A lot of you have commented and asked whether it’s possible to develop CPTSD as an adult, so I wanted to address that question.

The short answer is yes.

While CPTSD is often associated with prolonged childhood trauma, it can also develop in adulthood following prolonged, repeated, or inescapable traumatic experiences.

The examples I shared in this reel are not an exhaustive list. There are many factors that can contribute to the development and presentation of CPTSD, and everyone’s experience is different.

This is really intended as a broad overview of some circumstances in adulthood that can be deeply traumatic—particularly when someone feels trapped, powerless, or unable to safely escape.

And one important reminder: experiencing one of these situations doesn’t automatically mean someone has CPTSD. Diagnosis involves looking at the broader pattern of symptoms, duration, functional impact, and other possible explanations.

If you’ve experienced significant trauma as an adult, you don’t have to dismiss its impact simply because it happened later in life.

Trauma can happen at any age. And so can healing.

This is internal work. Your sacred journey of knowing and self-discovery.
08/25/2026

This is internal work. Your sacred journey of knowing and self-discovery.

08/24/2026

Sometimes self-abandonment looks like disconnecting from yourself when something becomes uncomfortable.

We intellectualize. We distract. We minimize. We focus on the past or future. We look outside of ourselves for relief.

These responses often developed for a reason. They helped us cope when staying connected to our internal experience didn’t feel safe or possible.

But healing can involve learning something different:

I can stay with myself when things are hard.

I can notice what I’m feeling without immediately needing to explain it away.
I can listen to my body.
I can make space for discomfort without being consumed by it.
I can come back to the present.

Presence isn’t about forcing yourself to feel everything all at once. It’s about building the capacity to remain connected to yourself, moment by moment.

And every time you do that, you’re practicing a different kind of relationship with yourself:

I’m here. I’m listening. I’m not leaving.

That is part of how we begin to heal self-abandonment.

08/21/2026

Regulate. Feel. Know. Relate.

Healing from complex trauma isn’t a formula—and it isn’t a straight line.

But one framework I use to conceptualize the process is:

Regulate. Feel. Know. Relate.

We may begin by developing greater capacity to notice what’s happening in the body and move toward safety.

From there, we can begin reconnecting with emotional experience—sometimes starting with bodily sensations before we even have words for what we’re feeling.

As emotional awareness grows, we can begin to know ourselves more deeply:

What do I need?
What matters to me?
What are my boundaries?
What do I actually want?

And from there, we can practice relating without abandoning ourselves.

Because healing isn’t about becoming who we would have been without trauma.

It’s about developing enough safety, awareness, and new experience that we have more choices about who we are now.

These aren’t rigid stages. They’re interconnected processes that can support one another.

And sometimes healing is simply the gradual process of learning to sense yourself again.

08/20/2026

Complex PTSD isn’t only about feeling anxious, hypervigilant, or easily triggered.

Chronic trauma can shape how we regulate emotion, experience ourselves, and connect with others.

These three areas are deeply interconnected.

When emotional regulation is difficult, it can become harder to understand what we’re feeling. When we’re disconnected from our internal experience, it can become harder to know what we need, want, or value. And when our sense of self is difficult to access, relationships can become places where we adapt, accommodate, or lose ourselves.

This doesn’t mean everyone with C-PTSD experiences these things in the same way—and it isn’t a rigid sequence.

It’s one way of understanding how chronic trauma can influence our relationship with ourselves and with others.

And the hopeful part?

These patterns developed in response to experience. With new experiences of safety, awareness, connection, and choice, they can also change.

In Part 2, I’ll share one framework I use to think about that process:

Regulate → Feel → Know → Relate

08/18/2026

Sometimes, the hardest part of trauma recovery is learning how to feel safe.

When you’ve experienced chronic relational trauma, safety and vulnerability may not feel like opposites. Your nervous system may have learned that getting close to someone can also mean getting hurt, rejected, abandoned, or overwhelmed.

That’s why therapy can sometimes feel easier at the beginning—and more challenging as trust develops.

The therapeutic relationship can become a place where old attachment patterns, fears, and protective responses begin to surface.

If you suddenly feel more dependent, more vigilant, more distant, or even tempted to leave therapy, it doesn’t automatically mean something is wrong.

Sometimes, your nervous system is encountering a kind of safety it hasn’t learned to trust yet.

And that can be an important part of the healing process.

08/14/2026

Living with CPTSD can mean having a nervous system that learned to detect threat quickly—and sometimes that response happens before the conscious mind recognizes that you’re safe.

But loving someone with CPTSD doesn’t mean becoming responsible for their nervous system, avoiding every trigger, or walking on eggshells.

Healthy relationships require two people practicing curiosity, consistency, communication, self-leadership, and repair.

You don’t need to know someone’s entire trauma history to learn how to love them well.

Sometimes the most meaningful question isn’t, “Why are you reacting like this?”

It’s:

“What just happened inside of you, and what would help right now?”

And remember: support is not the same as responsibility.

We can care deeply for someone while honoring their autonomy—and our own.

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