Healing, Transformation, Growth

Mentorship for deep trauma healing and complex life changes.

A portrait of David Staab with mountains in the background
An illustration of a person swinging through life with and without trauma

Trauma Healing

Healing trauma restores your natural resilience to life’s uncertainties and dangers. It makes your experience of life more expansive and joyful. It makes it easier for you to soften into the pleasant and restful experiences of your own life.

In a Somatic Experiencing® (SE) session, the healer guides the client through memories of traumatic experiences as they arise in the body. Memories might be emotional states, felt-senses, sensations, images, sounds and smells, or actual (narrative) rememberings. The practitioner helps the client to allow this content to surface without its overwhelming them, so it often looks like a "guided mindfulness session". However SE also includes movement, working with props, supportive touch, talking, and other things you don't see in seated or movement meditations.

SE is an APA-approved methodology for healing psychological trauma and other stress disorders.

What SE can help to repair

  • Effects of shocking or surprising incidents

  • Constant feeling of "unsafe" after bodily harm or boundary rupture

  • Relational patterns driven by childhood experiences

  • Struggling to feel belonging and connection

  • Changes or limits in attention and cognition

What I do

  • Provide anchoring + support to your mind-body

  • Structure the healing work to keep you safe from harm

  • Teach you the theories and methods behind the work

Working with me, you'll learn how to support the natural healing of your own trauma. You'll develop a capacity to support your own psyche when stressed so new traumas are less likely to develop. These skills stay with you for life.

An abstract illustration of using the process of Focusing to solve a complex problem

Transformation and Change

The important problems in life are complex, involving factors beyond our full control, and sometimes beyond our ability to reason about. Focusing is a method similar to SE (see above) that taps into every person's capacity for profound intuition.

Focusing illuminates the solution to a complex problem, but it often requires that we face the fears and traumas the problem involves. It's important to avoid trigger and traumatic symptoms when tapping into intuition.

Trauma-Informed Focusing

I teach Focusing and guide its use while watching for signs of trauma trigger. This helps you dive into your complex problem and surface a real solution without potentially retraumatizing yourself or surfacing psychological content that overwhelms you.

Somatic Experiencing Professional

Becoming a certified Somatic Experiencing Professional (SEP) is not trivial. It requires 3 years of multi-modal training. I am currently earning this title as I practice professionally.

My progress toward SEP

As of November 2021, I have completed:

  • Classroom training: 90+ contact hours

  • Time in practice: 120+ session hours

  • Time as a client: 100+ session hours

  • Time in case consultations: 10+ hrs

In addition, I have a mentor and a supervisor who each provide direct feedback and guidance to my work.

Contact

Please contact me if you're looking for help with a life situation that might be connected to trauma. If you'd rather talk than write, you can even schedule a video call on my calendar directly.

More Art about Trauma and Healing

It's so hard to describe all the ways trauma can look and feel! It's an abstract concept that takes impossibly many forms in our minds and bodies. I like to make art to describe the experiences I and my clients have had living with trauma and healing from it.

Here's a little gallery of some of my art. 😊

© 2021 David Staab. All rights reserved.