Why Safety Still Feels Uncertain and How That Can Change
Sometimes the earliest experiences come before you have any words or memories to express them. And sometimes we just can’t remember why we feel the way we feel. Either way, you may still feel the effects when someone leaves, closeness becomes uncertain, or your body reacts before you know why. Therapy can give you a place to understand where those reactions began and feel safer with yourself and other people.
I know something happened in my childhood, but I cannot remember it.
Some people remember violence, neglect, loss, illness, or a home where fear never felt far away. Others remember very little because the experience happened before they had words for it, or because their mind learned to disconnect from what was happening. You may only know that separation feels unbearable, closeness makes you nervous, or your body reacts as if something is wrong before you understand why.
You can take the effects seriously without remembering every detail.
Developmental trauma can shape what safety, love, anger, needs, and belonging mean to you. You may become very independent, watch everyone’s mood, panic when someone pulls away, go numb during conflict, or lose track of what you want. These responses began for reasons that deserve understanding. Making sense of them can help you respond to what is happening now instead of being pulled into an old fear.
Developmental trauma therapy may feel relevant if you recognize yourself in any of these experiences:
We can begin with what keeps happening now.
Developmental trauma therapy looks at what happens when you feel close to someone, fear being left, need help, make a mistake, or suddenly feel far away from yourself. You may remember where a reaction began, or you may only know that it happens. Together, we look at what your mind and body learned about safety and find responses that fit the life and relationships you have now.
What therapy may involve:
Let's Get Started
Being human helps me meet you with understanding.
I became a therapist because personal growth changed my life and gave me a clearer sense of what I could offer other people. I love this profession because growing as a person helps me grow as a therapist, and growing as a therapist keeps asking me to grow as a person. I take that responsibility seriously. My goal is to help you trust yourself, care for all of yourself, and build relationships where you can be known.
What I offer:
Hi, I’m Micah Fleitman, LPC
Developmental trauma can affect thoughts, body reactions, relationships, and the roles you learned to play. I draw from several approaches so I can pay attention to each of those areas without forcing every concern into the same explanation.
Parts therapy offers a respectful way to understand reactions that seem to disagree with each other. A part of you may want closeness while another expects rejection. One may keep everyone happy while another feels angry about disappearing. The work involves listening for what each response fears, needs, and wants you to recognize.
In sessions, I may begin by:
The expectations formed in early relationships often appear before you have time to think. I pay attention to the roles you enter automatically, what becomes difficult to say, and what happens between you and me when trust feels uncertain. Those moments can reveal the relationship rules you learned and which ones still belong.
That may sound like:
Your body may react before you know what you are feeling. A change in someone’s tone can bring tension, numbness, nausea, or the urge to leave even when the present moment seems ordinary. Somatic therapy helps you notice those reactions without forcing them to disappear or treating them as proof that danger is here.
I may ask you to notice:
EMDR can help with memories that continue to feel immediate, but developmental trauma often involves repeated experiences rather than one clear event. I use EMDR carefully, paying attention to how you are feeling now, the reactions connected to the memory, and whether you can stay present while you approach it.
Before approaching a memory, I may:
Early experiences can leave beliefs that sound like facts: I am too much. My needs create problems. If someone is upset, I caused it. Trauma-Focused CBT helps you slow those conclusions down, understand why they formed, and consider what the present situation supports.
This may involve:
Clinical hypnosis uses focused attention to help you stay with an internal experience while remaining aware of choice and control. It can be useful when a reaction is difficult to reach through ordinary conversation or when words disappear as soon as emotion gets close.
If hypnosis feels appropriate, I may:
Developmental trauma can affect far more than how you remember childhood. It may shape what happens when someone leaves, how your body reacts to stress, whether closeness feels safe, how easily you can identify your needs, or whether you remain present during conflict. I pay attention to the ways those early experiences still affect your adult life.
Someone leaving, becoming quiet, or spending time with other people may bring fear that feels immediate and much larger than the moment. You may seek reassurance, become angry, shut down, or pretend you do not care. This work looks at why distance feels dangerous and how you can stay connected to yourself when another person is unavailable.
Shame can make an ordinary need feel like evidence that you are selfish, difficult, or weak. Even kindness may feel uncomfortable because some part of you expects the other person to discover what is wrong with you. In therapy, you can trace how that conclusion formed, notice when it speaks as though it is a fact, and develop a more accurate view of who you are.
A raised voice, delayed reply, unfamiliar room, smell, touch, or sudden change may affect you before you know what feels wrong. Your heart may race, your body may freeze, or you may feel an urgent need to leave. Learning what your body expects can give you a moment to recognize the reaction and respond to what is happening now.
You may go blank during conflict, lose track of time, feel outside your body, or remember an experience without feeling connected to it. Sometimes disconnection began as a way to get through something overwhelming. We can notice the first signs that you are disappearing from the moment and find ways to return without forcing you past what you can manage.
You may want closeness and become uncomfortable once someone can affect you. You pull away, become agreeable, test the relationship, or wait for proof that the person will leave. A caring response can feel unfamiliar enough to question. Therapy offers a place to talk about those reactions directly and understand what trust requires for you rather than assuming closeness should feel easy.
Sometimes staying connected meant losing contact with your own anger, preferences, or limits. You can answer everyone else’s questions and still go blank when someone asks what you want. Even a simple choice can leave you searching other people’s faces for the right answer. Therapy can help you notice what interrupts that connection and begin treating your internal response as information worth hearing.
Developmental trauma can begin when fear, loss, neglect, separation, illness, medical experiences, or disrupted care affect a child while they are still developing. Some experiences become clear memories. Others happen during pregnancy, birth, infancy, or early childhood, before a person can understand them or remember them in words.
A person may not remember the first time safety disappeared. The loss of a parent, early separation, prenatal stress, birth complications, medical treatment, abuse, neglect, or repeated fear can affect development before memories take the form of a story. Years later, the effects may appear as panic around separation, a body that stays alert, or a strong reaction to an ordinary change.
Responses repeated over many years can become difficult to separate from identity. You may describe yourself as independent, easygoing, responsible, or private without seeing what those traits once helped you avoid.
Early relationships can shape what you expect when you depend on someone, disagree, need comfort, or make a mistake. Those expectations can become most visible with the people who matter now.
The first session is a conversation. You can begin with what feels most relevant today:
One meeting will not explain every response or relationship pattern. It can help identify what deserves attention first and give you a clearer sense of how I think about what you are experiencing.
It is okay if you do not remember everything from childhood. We can begin with what you feel now or what keeps happening.
Developmental trauma describes the long-lasting impact of early fear, loss, abuse, neglect, medical trauma, separation, or inconsistent care. This type of trauma can begin before a child has words or clear memories. It may shape emotions, relationships, identity, attention, body responses, and a person’s sense of safety.
Developmental trauma disorder is a proposed framework rather than a formal adult diagnosis in the DSM. Post-traumatic stress disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder describe related patterns, but they are not interchangeable with developmental trauma. A licensed mental health professional can assess your symptoms without forcing every experience into one disorder.
A symptom of developmental trauma may appear as an emotional, relational, physical, or behavioral response. The signs often become clearer during conflict, closeness, uncertainty, or moments when you need help. An adult may struggle with reactions that first developed when they were a child, teen, or adolescent.
Common experiences may include:
Signs of unresolved childhood trauma often appear in the ways you protect yourself now. You may read every change in someone’s voice, apologize before you know whether you did anything wrong, pull away when closeness matters, or become indispensable so no one has a reason to leave.
Seeing yourself in these patterns can tell you that an earlier experience still influences how you respond to needs, mistakes, conflict, safety, and relationships. Talking with a trauma-informed therapist can help you understand what is happening without forcing your story into a label.
People often use emotional developmental trauma to describe the effects of repeated emotional neglect, criticism, unpredictability, role reversal, or little repair after conflict. Primary caregivers may have met practical needs while remaining unavailable when a child needed comfort, protection, or help understanding strong emotions.
The impact can continue even when there was no single event that looked traumatic from the outside. A child’s sense of safety can be affected by what happened repeatedly, what was missing, or how a caregiver responded. In adult life, you may hide distress, distrust your reactions, or stay focused on everyone else.
Childhood trauma can be difficult to overcome because the adaptation began during your formative years, while your understanding of yourself and relationships was still developing. When fear, neglect, or instability continues over an extended period, a child may learn that staying agreeable, quiet, useful, vigilant, or emotionally distant is the safest way to remain connected.
Those responses can later feel like personality rather than protection. They tend to appear quickly, especially when something resembles an earlier relationship. Therapy gives you time to see why a response formed and consider what fits your adult life now.
Repeated or chronic stress during childhood can teach the brain to notice possible danger quickly. A change in tone, conflict, or uncertainty may bring a strong response before you know what feels wrong. These responses can affect attention, emotional regulation, self-regulation, and your sense of safety.
That reaction can change. Your brain can keep learning from new experiences throughout life. In therapy, you can recognize an old warning, return to the present, and decide how you want to respond.
Living with developmental trauma can affect emotional well-being, psychological health, self-regulation, trust, identity, physical stress, and the ability to ask for care. The long-term impact differs because each person’s experiences, relationships, background, and support are different.
In adult life, that may look like:
You can begin by understanding the adaptations that helped you get through childhood and what they do now. I may help you notice body reactions, identify emotions, name needs, listen to protective parts, and approach painful memories with enough preparation and control.
You can move forward without excusing what happened or remembering every detail. Therapy for developmental trauma can help you relate to yourself with less shame while trying new ways of responding in relationships and daily life. As your reactions make more sense, you may have more choice about what happens next.
Adults can change patterns connected to developmental or childhood trauma. The past remains part of your history, but it does not have to make every decision about trust, conflict, needs, or closeness.
Support for developmental trauma may involve understanding old roles, developing more reliable self-regulation, and having relationships where confusion or disagreement can be discussed directly. Progress rarely means that difficult feelings never return. It can mean recognizing them sooner and having more choice about how you respond.
You do not need complete certainty about the word trauma before speaking with a developmental trauma specialist. A therapist specializing in developmental trauma should understand how early experiences can affect memory, attachment, body reactions, self-worth, and relationships in adult life.
When choosing a therapist for developmental trauma, ask about their training, clinical approach, and experience treating dissociation and complex trauma. The first conversation can help you explore fit, ask questions, and decide whether their approach feels relevant to what you are dealing with.
Treatment for developmental trauma may need to address thoughts, emotions, body responses, protective adaptations, and relationships. A trauma-informed approach considers what feels manageable, how you function now, and what helps you remain present while difficult material is discussed.
Developmental trauma treatment may draw from evidence-based approaches such as Internal Family Systems, relational psychodynamic therapy, somatic therapy, EMDR, Trauma-Focused CBT, and clinical hypnosis when appropriate. I choose an approach based on what you want to address instead of asking every concern to fit one method.
Developmental trauma counseling can help you understand why certain reactions happen so quickly and what they are trying to prevent. Instead of treating shame, vigilance, withdrawal, or people pleasing as personal failures, you can examine where they began and whether they still match your adult life.
If you are considering developmental trauma therapy with a licensed professional counselor, sessions may address body responses, painful memories, relationship expectations, and internal conflict. I pay attention to what is affecting you now while making room for your questions, preferences, and pace.
The length of developmental trauma therapy depends on what you want help with, whether the effects are chronic, how they affect daily life, and whether you are approaching painful memories. The work may last for a shorter or longer period depending on your goals and what pace helps you remain present.
I can discuss session frequency based on your concerns and what feels manageable. A first meeting can clarify what you want to address and how I think about pacing. You can ask directly about availability and frequency before deciding whether to continue.
Yes. I work as a developmental trauma therapist in Virginia and provide online therapy for adults located anywhere in the state. Sessions take place online, making support for developmental trauma accessible without traveling to an office.
The relational, parts-based, somatic, cognitive, and trauma-focused approaches described on this page can all be used online. A consultation gives you time to ask whether meeting from home fits your needs.
I offer online therapy for adults across Virginia. I have listed the session fee, insurance arrangement, and service format below so you can decide whether reaching out is practical for you.
Knowing that something feels wrong is enough to start.
The consultation is free. You can tell me what you remember, what you do not remember, or what keeps happening in your relationships and body now. I will explain how I approach developmental trauma therapy so you can decide whether I feel like the right person to talk with.
The first step can be reaching out before you understand your whole childhood or know what needs to change. You do not have to sort through it alone.
Book a complimentary 30-Minute Consult
