Area of Focus

Complex Trauma & PTSD Therapy

Healing relational, childhood, and chronic trauma in MA & RI

Complex trauma develops from repeated or ongoing experiences that overwhelmed your nervous system, often in relationships or environments where you could not safely process what was happening. Unlike a single traumatic event, complex trauma shapes how your body perceives safety, connection, and self-worth over time. The effects can show up years later as patterns you understand intellectually but cannot seem to change.

What This Can Look Like

• •Chronic hypervigilance or a sense of bracing for impact, even in safe situations
• •Emotional flashbacks: sudden waves of shame, fear, or collapse without a clear trigger
• •Difficulty trusting others or letting your guard down in close relationships
• •A persistent feeling of being "too much" or "never enough," often both
• •Somatic symptoms like gut tension, muscle bracing, or exhaustion that sleep does not fix
• •Patterns of over-functioning, people-pleasing, or shutting down under stress

Why It May Happen

Complex trauma often stems from experiences that were ongoing or relational rather than a single event. This can include emotional neglect, growing up in an unpredictable household, or long-standing relational betrayal.

When your nervous system cannot complete a protective response, it stays activated. Over time, that activation becomes your baseline, and your body learns to stay prepared even when the original threat is gone.

Because these experiences often happened before you had words for them, the patterns they created live in the body, not just in conscious memory. That is why understanding them intellectually does not always change how they feel.

How It Shows Up in High-Functioning Women

Many high-functioning women do not recognize their experiences as trauma because they survived them well. You pushed through. You adapted. You became the responsible one, the capable one, the one who held everything together. But the survival patterns that got you through those experiences do not always stop when the circumstances change. They keep running, quietly, beneath your competence.

How Nervous System Patterns May Be Involved

Complex trauma lives in the nervous system as much as in the mind. The bracing, the shutdown, the startle responses, the difficulty resting: these are not character traits. They are protective responses your body learned and has not yet had the opportunity to release. Working at the root means meeting those patterns where they actually live, in the body, not just in the story.

How Regina Approaches This Work

I begin by building safety. Before any processing, your nervous system needs to trust that it does not have to stay on alert. That foundation is what makes the deeper work possible.

From there, I use EMDR to help the brain reprocess stuck memories, DBR to work with the earliest, pre-verbal layers of the response, and IFS to understand the protective parts that formed around those experiences.

The work is paced, collaborative, and consent-based. Nothing is forced. I move at the speed your nervous system can handle, and you are always in control of the process.

What Sessions May Feel Like

Sessions are slow and steady. I might start by noticing what is present in your body, following a sensation, or getting curious about a part of you that is showing up. When I use EMDR or DBR, I work with what feels manageable, not with what feels overwhelming. The goal is to help your nervous system complete what it could not at the time, so the patterns that have been running can finally soften.

Frequently Asked Questions

Ready to experience real relief?

Get in touch for a free 15-minute telehealth consult with Regina Tetreault, LICSW.