Leanne Tanis (she/her)

The separation between you and your birth family can lead to a deep sense of abandonment, rejection, loss, confusion, identity issues, guilt/shame, and issues with control. It can also leave you vulnerable with a strong desire to search for acceptance and a sense of belonging often in unhealthy places. Without healing this trauma fuels expectations of further abandonments, relationship issues, and addictions. It's time to begin the work of acknowledging how having been adopted has affected you.

Left untreated, the wounds of incest/childhood sexual abuse can permeate every area of your life as an adult. You might be silently plagued with nightmares, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, and feeling like something bad is going to happen at any minute. Depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and maintaining the shame-based belief that the abuse was somehow your fault are all common reactions in adulthood. Know your healing is possible and that you deserve to heal.

Nothing in life can prepare us for losing someone we love. When these losses occur in your childhood, though often not intentional, the support you needed to attend to the pain and confusion may not have been available leaving you alone with intense emotions and an inability to cope. This may have created further trauma during this vulnerable time in addition to the loss itself. You may find yourself triggered during any form of loss as an adult. Healing for your broken heart is possible.

SE is body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and other stress disorders developed by Dr. Peter Levine. It offers a framework to assess where you are “stuck” in the fight, flight or freeze responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states by focusing on body sensations and releasing stuck energy while building upon and strengthening your resiliency.

Pia Mellody’s model of developmental immaturity and codependency depicts how childhood trauma affects us as adults in our lives today. Together we will connect the dots of what happened, how it affected you then, how that may have changed overtime, and it’s connection to your current circumstances.

Once we understand how the trauma is affecting you today we can do a deeper piece of work. Experiential therapy creates an internal shift and is more effective than just talk therapy alone. It breaks through unconscious resistances and gets to the root of the underlying traumas. By depicting your inner world visually through inner child work, Gestalt empty chair techniques, psychodrama techniques etc, you will experience new insights, release emotions, and new healthy beliefs about self emerge.