How I Work with Trauma: Why This Is Trauma-Informed Healing

In clinical trauma healing practices, practitioners talk about “trauma-informed” care. It means working with someone who has been through something difficult without putting them back through it to get to the core of the issue, letting them set the pace, giving them control over how much they reveal, and knowing when they’ve had enough. I am not a clinician, I don’t diagnose anything, and nothing in this work could be considered clinical therapy. But when I look honestly at how I actually run a session, that same principle is already built into it, arrived at through a completely different door; ancient principles applied to our modern world, not by training in trauma psychology.

This is how I approach it from a shamanic perspective.

Across many different shamanic traditions, going back long before “trauma-informed” was a clinical term at all, there is a shared belief about what happens to us when something hurts badly enough. A piece of the soul leaves. It stays behind at the moment of the event, the way a hand might stay clenched around something long after the danger has passed, and the rest of the person moves forward without it. You don’t have to take my word for this. Sit with the idea and decide for yourself whether it resonates with how a piece of you has felt missing since something happened.

I call this approach to it Soul-Level Trauma™ healing, one branch of the energy healing work I do.

In my experience, over fifty years and thousands of sessions, a large share of these stranded pieces trace back to childhood. Children don’t yet have the defenses adults build up over time, no filter for deciding what to let land and what to brace against, so an event that an adult might shake off within days can lodge permanently in a child simply because there was no established way yet to carry it. That doesn’t mean something went uniquely wrong in your childhood. It’s exceedingly common, which is part of why this work matters even for people who would say their adult life has been stable. Often the piece that comes back from those early years is something like curiosity, trust, or a basic sense of safety in the world, something a person has quietly been missing without ever being able to name what it was.

I’ve written in detail elsewhere about exactly what happens during a session, step by step, from how the journey begins to how it closes. What I want to focus on here is the part that makes this trauma-informed in the first place, and why I think it matters alongside the work most people have already tried.

Talk therapy matters and most of the people I work with are already in it, or have been. But talk therapy works with the mind, with the story of what happened and how to carry it differently. It was never built to reach the soul, and if we leave the soul out of the healing process, we’ve likely skipped over the biggest missing piece of the puzzle. That’s the gap Soul-Level Trauma™ healing is for.

The trauma-informed part isn’t only in how a session runs. It’s also in what happens after. I check in with you the day following every session, not as a formality, but to make sure whatever came up is being processed in a way that feels healthy, and to answer anything that’s surfaced since. Most clinical definitions of trauma-informed care stop at the appointment. I don’t think the responsibility does.

This is contemporary shamanic healing, not a clinical treatment, and I’m not a medical or mental health professional. If something in your past still feels like it’s holding on to you, the first conversation is free, there’s no pressure, and we can start by seeing whether any of this resonates with you.

A Few Questions People Ask

What does “trauma-informed” actually mean here?

It means the session is built around not putting you back through what happened. You name the event or you don’t, you stay in your own home the whole time, and I never ask you to relive the details. The pace and the length of the work are set by what keeps you steady, not by how much ground we could theoretically cover in one sitting.

Is this a replacement for talk therapy?

No, and I wouldn’t want it to be. Talk therapy works with the mind and the story of what happened. This work addresses the soul, which talk therapy was never built to reach. Most people I work with do both, and I see this as filling the piece that’s been missing, not replacing what’s already helping.