Medical Trauma Therapy

Medical care is supposed to help us feel better, but sometimes the experience of receiving medical care can be traumatic itself. A frightening diagnosis, hospitalization, surgery, painful or invasive procedures, medical emergencies, or feeling dismissed or not believed by healthcare providers can leave a lasting impact.

Medical trauma can show up in ways you may not immediately connect to what happened. You might feel anxious before medical appointments, avoid doctors or procedures, become overwhelmed by reminders of a past medical experience, or feel hyperaware of changes in your body. You may find yourself replaying what happened, worrying that something similar will happen again, or struggling to trust healthcare providers.

For people living with chronic illness or chronic pain, medical trauma can be especially complicated. When you regularly need medical care, avoiding healthcare altogether may not be an option. You may have to repeatedly return to the same environment that has become associated with fear, pain, frustration, or not being believed.

Therapy for Medical Trauma

Therapy for medical trauma isn't about convincing you that healthcare is safe or that your experiences weren't as bad as they felt. It's about helping you process what happened, understand how those experiences continue to affect you, and reduce the amount of power they have over your life.

My approach begins with listening to and believing your experience. Depending on your needs, therapy may include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), mindfulness-based approaches, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).

EMDR for Medical Trauma

When appropriate, EMDR can be particularly useful for medical trauma because traumatic medical experiences can remain connected to distressing memories, physical sensations, fear, or beliefs about your body and safety.

EMDR allows us to work with those experiences without requiring you to repeatedly describe every detail of what happened. The goal isn't to erase the memory. Instead, EMDR can help the brain process the experience so that remembering it—or encountering reminders of it—may no longer produce the same level of distress.

EMDR isn't appropriate for every person or every situation, and we would decide together whether it makes sense as part of your therapy.

Medical Gaslighting and Invalidation

Sometimes the trauma isn't only what happened medically. It's how you were treated while it was happening.

Being told symptoms are “just anxiety,” repeatedly having concerns dismissed, spending years seeking an accurate diagnosis, or feeling that a provider didn't listen to you can profoundly affect your relationship with healthcare. You may begin questioning your own perceptions or feel that you need to prove something is wrong before anyone will take you seriously.

Therapy should not recreate that experience.

You don't have to convince me that what happened to you mattered. We can make room for the anger, grief, fear, frustration, and uncertainty that may come with difficult medical experiences while helping you move forward in a way that feels manageable.

Online Medical Trauma Therapy in Colorado & Illinois

I provide virtual medical trauma therapy for adults throughout Colorado and Illinois. I also specialize in working with people experiencing chronic illness and chronic pain and understand how physical health and emotional well-being can become deeply intertwined.

I offer a complimentary 15-minute consultation so we can talk about what you're experiencing, what you're looking for from therapy, and whether working together feels like a good fit.