However You Are Healing Makes Sense
However you are healing makes sense.
It took me for actual ever to find safety in myself, and much longer to experience safety around other people. The truth is, I thought I’d never be okay. Not after everything I’d lived through. Not after the child sexual abuse, death, assaults, medical trauma. The loss and fragmentation was so great, my life was just trying to cope day-to-day. I didn’t even know I was inching toward healing when I began experiencing safety in small in-between moments—first with feral cats—wild little creatures who also needed wide space, slow approach, and consent. Then, with my husband, my grandmother, and a trauma-informed therapist.
Slowly, so very slowly, with years of practice and patience, stops and starts, rupture and repair, my baseline shifted. I began to notice that I felt reasonably well (even as a person with multiple chronic illnesses) some of the time. I felt lighter, my chest more open, my mind more calm. When life circumstances overwhelmed and sh*t hit the fan, I noticed I could often hold my center. Or, at least return to it before too long.
Expanding access to healing experiences of safety and connection is ultimately why I returned to practicing massage therapy, incorporating all of my education and my own lived experience into my work. I’ve found that trauma-informed massage therapy offers both attunement with a safe other, and a deepening of self-connection and relationship with one’s own internal state. It can be a refuge for people with complex histories of childhood neglect and abuse, prolonged stress, C-PTSD, anxiety, depression, OCD, sensory processing differences, chronic pain or illness, and all the invisible burdens that make it hard to rest and recover.
Trauma-Informed Massage As Healing Ritual
Many of us don’t even realize that underneath all of the pushing on and pushing through in our day-to-day mundane, we are longing for stillness, softness, warmth, presence, safe touch, nourishment and care. That longing is buried under years of overwhelm and stress that the body has stored in our cells, tissues, and memory.
Trauma-informed massage therapy is like an archaeology of the soul. It’s intentional, care-full, reverent. It’s a practice of consent, curiosity and compassion. It’s not about imposing an agenda, not prying open what is not ready, not about fixing you. It’s about being-with.
We go at the pace of your nervous system. We bless the body that has carried you this far. We honor the breath that quickens and the muscles that clench as guardians that kept you safe. We invite the body-mind to settle if it can and let go when it’s ready. If it’s not, we celebrate the intelligence of that protection. Sometimes, the most healing thing we can do is nothing. Simply lay loving hands on the body and wait.
The approach is part of the healing. The blessing is part of the healing. The invitation is part of the healing. The celebrating is part of the healing. The waiting is part of the healing. Whatever you need is part of the healing. However you are healing makes sense.
If you come to me for trauma-informed massage therapy in Casper, Wyoming, please know that you don’t have to name or justify why you’ve come. You don’t have to arrive in a certain state or have anything figured out. You don’t have to know what you need. We will begin exactly where you are. Your body will show us the way.
My work is for anyone carrying too much, whether that’s grief, chronic tension, illness, exhaustion, or the invisible imprints of trauma. It’s massage as ritual, designed to help you open to the possibility of safety and rest, even just a little.
Here in Casper, I offer space and time where your body is not rushed, where your nervous system leads, where every part of you belongs, where you can engage with your own healing however it makes sense for you.
