Understanding Trauma Therapy: Q&A with Brooke Pomerantz, LCSW
Trauma can leave experiences feeling stuck in the present rather than part of the past. In this Q&A, Brooke shares her approach to trauma therapy, focusing on safety, pacing, and helping people feel more vibrant and alive.
Q: What is trauma therapy, and how does it help people heal?
Trauma can be an experience that is so overwhelming and distressing that the senses are overwhelmed and the experience becomes stuck and unprocessed. In therapy, the aim is to help a person unstick so the experience is located in the past and not carry the charge that it carried before. It can still be part of a person’s history, but it isn’t running their present.
Q: How do you know if you’re still being impacted by past trauma?
Look for nightmares, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, hyper arousal or hypo arousal, avoidance, or ways it is impairing your ability to function and be in relationships. A simple marker is when the person is continuing to relive that experience in some way in the present.
Q: What’s the difference between trauma and PTSD?
PTSD is a DSM-5 diagnosis where you have to meet a number of criteria across specific symptom categories. Trauma is more general and less defined, including developmental or chronic forms and events that overwhelm our senses and are hard to process. People often go into therapy to process experiences that are traumatic, even when they don’t have PTSD.
Q: How do you approach trauma work in your practice?
I organize around relational safety, creating a very safe, secure, contained, boundary environment. Early on we develop trust, work at an individual’s pace, and control the pacing (and if they’re going too fast, I will slow them down). We build regulation of their nervous system, including bodily sensations and emotions. When useful, I do adjunctive treatment and refer a patient to my colleague who does EMDR and we collaborate together.
Q: What makes trauma therapy feel safe and empowering?
The frame matters: consistency and reliability, privacy and confidentiality, and clear boundaries. If someone feels overwhelmed or overstimulated, we slow things down, get grounded, regulate their nervous system, breathe, soothe themselves.
Q: How do our caregivers model how to navigate stress and anxiety in our lives?
Our caregivers showed us, often without meaning to, how to walk through the world and cope with stress. We tend to internalize what was modeled for us, and that can become a kind of blueprint for how to be in the world. Sometimes we end up repeating coping styles that don’t serve us. Part of the work we can do is to identify those patterns and explore how to shift them to something more adaptive.
Q: What should someone expect when beginning trauma therapy with you?
My work isn’t a manualized treatment or 12 session structure; I work… over a longer period, and creating that safety relationally takes time. I’m not averse to shorter treatments, but many stay while it helps. The larger aim: people do become unstuck, live fuller, richer lives, and feel more vibrant and alive, alongside reducing the distress and the suffering and the pain.
Brooke Pomerantz, LCSW, is a licensed therapist based in Oakland, with 18 years of experience supporting adults through anxiety, depression, and life transitions. She offers in-person therapy in Oakland and online therapy for clients in California, New York, and Indiana. Brooke is dedicated to providing inclusive, compassionate care that helps clients create meaningful change in their lives.
Are you suffering from anxiety? Learn more about Brooke’s Anxiety Therapy.
Brooke Pomerantz, LCSW
Psychotherapy, Supervision, and Consultation
Licensed in CA, NY, and IN
(415) 832-0767
brookepomerantz.com
