It’s not you.
It’s what happened to you.
Recovering from trauma means finally feeling safe in your thoughts, emotions, body, and relationships. I am a Virginia therapist who specializes in treating Complex Trauma and Dissociation. I’m here to help you feel safe enough to make sense of your past and live a meaningful life with healthy relationships.
What Does Healing From Trauma Feel Like?
of your life and feel safe.
yourself and choose what is right for you.
that you are enough and you belong.
comfortable being your authentic self.
and accepted for who you are.
It makes sense to keep your guard up when you feel scared, powerless, and alone … but it’s suffocating. It’s natural to push people away when trust feels dangerous … but it’s isolating.
It’s understandable to make yourself small and take the blame when you feel ashamed and unlovable … but it hurts.
It’s reasonable to numb or dissociate when you feel you don’t trust yourself … but it’s empty.
These are normal trauma responses that helped you survive. But now you have better ways to protect and care for yourself.
Together, we can build a safe and empowering relationship to overcome the isolation and powerlessness of trauma. I’ll listen to you with respect and compassion to understand you as a whole person. I make therapy manageable by breaking it down into three phases, so you know what to expect and feel in control.
We’ll build a trustworthy therapeutic relationship. You’ll learn to regulate your emotions, cope with trauma responses, and feel more in control of yourself and your life.
I’ll help you process your past at a safe and tolerable pace. You’ll reevaluate the meaning of your experiences and integrate them into a healthy identity with secure attachment.
I’ll help you trust yourself to take risks and explore new possibilities. You’ll prove to yourself that you are capable and worthy of a meaningful life with fulfilling relationships.
Let's Get Started
Hi. I'm Micah Fleitman
I’m human too … I get it.
Shame and fear were a prison I couldn’t escape.
For years, I was driven by fears of inadequacy and rejection. I didn’t know how to let people care for me. Or even how to ask. It took time and practice to learn how to cope with my emotions and really listen to them. I discovered that the very feelings I was hiding from were actually trying to help me. And they needed my help, too.
Accepting and caring for myself freed me to choose what was right for me and be loved for who I am.
I had to trust myself and take risks to build authentic relationships. Eventually, I met my wife. As she accepted and loved me, it got easier to accept and love myself. Now I’m here to help you accept and care for all of yourself.
I’ve devoted my career to helping people heal trauma and dissociation.
Your body has been trying to tell you something. This is a place to listen.
Different approaches reach different parts of how trauma shows up. Some work with memories directly. Some work with the body. Some work with the patterns and parts that developed in response to what happened. I draw from several evidence-based approaches, but the work is never one-size-fits-all.
Sessions may draw from talk therapy as well as body-based work.
EMDR can help make memories that still feel current feel like memories you can hold without being pulled back into them. It can be useful when a specific experience keeps surfacing in ways that do not match the present moment.
What this looks like in sessions:
Internal Family Systems helps you understand the different parts of yourself and the deeper patterns behind them. The part that stays guarded, the part that pushes through, the part that shuts down, and what each one has been trying to do for you.
What this looks like in sessions:
Sometimes your body reacts before you have had a chance to think. Somatic therapy gives us a way to pay attention to what your body is still carrying: tension, bracing, exhaustion, or the sense that you cannot quite settle. The goal is not to force your body to relax. It is to help it learn, slowly, that more safety is possible.
What this looks like in sessions:
Psychodynamic trauma therapy looks at how early experiences shaped the patterns you bring into relationships now, including the one between us. Those experiences can also shape what feels possible, safe, or risky with people now. Understanding where a pattern came from is often what makes it possible to do something different with it.
What this looks like in sessions:
Trauma-focused CBT helps us look at the beliefs that formed around what happened. I should have done something different. I can’t trust people. I have to handle everything myself. These beliefs usually made sense at the time. The work is about asking whether they still fit the life you are living now.
What this looks like in sessions:
When it’s useful, we may also draw on solution-focused elements to help clarify what needs to change in daily life.
The chronic shame and fear caused by trauma are often misunderstood and mislabeled. We all need to feel safe, protected, cared for, and free to be ourselves. If these needs are not met, we learn that we are bad and other people are unsafe. That’s why I take a holistic approach to trauma therapy in Virginia, looking at all the ways your past influences and controls your present.
Some trauma begins with an experience you can name clearly: an accident, an assault, a loss, or a frightening medical experience. These are often what people picture when they hear the word trauma, and they are real. But even when the experience is obvious, the effects may not show up right away or in ways that make immediate sense.
Other trauma doesn’t come from one moment. It comes from years of smaller experiences: growing up around conflict, feeling unseen, navigating instability, or carrying more responsibility than a child should have had to carry. These experiences rarely get called trauma at the time. But they often shape how you came to expect relationships, and yourself, to work more than any single event does.
Childhood trauma often shapes adult life in ways that are hard to trace back to where they started. The patterns that formed to keep you safe as a kid, staying small, staying useful, staying alert, can persist long after they’re needed. Understanding where a pattern began does not make it disappear overnight, but it often makes it easier to recognize and work with.
Trauma does not always announce itself as trauma. Addiction, self-harm, and dissociation are ways of coping. And the strain trauma puts on the body causes chronic medical conditions. Often it shows up first as anxiety that does not have an obvious source, depression that does not lift with rest, or burnout that keeps returning no matter how much you cut back.
Trauma can also exist alongside other mental health concerns. Sometimes anxiety, depression, burnout, focus problems, or mood changes are separate issues. Sometimes they are connected to what your system has been carrying for a long time.
Trauma is not only about danger. A loss, diagnosis, chronic illness, major transition, or the end of a relationship can leave a lasting mark, especially when it changes the life you thought you were going to have.
Trauma affects more than memory. It can show up in your body, your relationships, and the way you move through ordinary days. Here’s some of what that can look like.
Your body can hold onto something long after your mind has moved on. That can look like:
Trauma doesn’t have to come from a single dramatic event. It can come from:
What happened in the past doesn’t stay in the past. It often shows up in how you connect with people now, including:
This is one of the most common questions, and the honest answer is more useful than a simple yes or no:
Trusting a therapist can be scary. Mistrust is there for a good reason: to keep you safe. That’s why navigating safety and trust are central themes throughout therapy. Blindly trusting others is dangerous. We can build genuine safety and trust by working together as you listen to yourself.
Trust yourself to know what’s right for you.
Decide what you are ready to share with me. Then observe my response and decide whether you feel safe enough to share more. We’ll work together to repair anything that feels wrong for you.
A first session is not about proving that what happened was bad enough, or telling every detail before you know whether this feels safe. We start with what brought you here, what has been difficult lately, and what you are hoping might feel different.
I will ask questions about your history and current life, but you get to share at a pace that feels manageable. We will talk about what approaches might make sense, what support you have already tried, and whether working together feels like the right fit.
A trauma therapist is someone trained to work with the lasting effects of overwhelming or distressing experiences, not just the experiences themselves, but how they continue to show up in your thoughts, your body, your relationships, and the way you move through daily life. That might mean a single significant event, or it might mean a pattern of smaller experiences that built up over time.
A trauma therapist may draw from different treatment modalities, such as EMDR, IFS, somatic therapy, or psychodynamic work, often in combination. But the goal is not just to talk about what happened. It is to help the parts of you that are still reacting begin to understand that it is over.
Unhealed trauma rarely looks like what people expect. It’s less likely to show up as a dramatic flashback and more likely to show up as patterns that feel like personality. Things like getting defensive before anyone’s actually criticized you, needing to be in control of plans, feeling unsettled by good news, or carrying a sense of guilt that doesn’t seem to have a clear source.
Other examples can include avoiding certain topics, places, or relationships without quite knowing why, physical tension that does not have a clear medical explanation, urges to hurt yourself, or feeling like you are bracing for something even when life is genuinely fine. None of this means something is wrong with you. It means something happened, and it hasn’t been fully worked through yet.
Trauma is often divided into what people call big T and little T experiences. Big T trauma refers to events that are clearly overwhelming, like accidents, assaults, or the sudden loss of someone close to you. Little T trauma refers to experiences that build up over time, like chronic criticism or feeling consistently unseen. What matters most is not how the experience would look to someone else. It is what it did inside you. A repeated little T experience can shape someone just as deeply as a single big T event, sometimes more.
People sometimes look for a list of the major types of trauma. The experiences that come up most often include:
Trauma can live in the body long after the mind has moved on. This can look like chronic tension, especially in the neck, jaw, or shoulders, fatigue that doesn’t improve with rest, digestive issues without a clear medical cause, or a startle response that feels bigger than the situation calls for.
Some people ask whether crying releases trauma. It can be part of how tension moves through the body, but it’s not a requirement, and not crying doesn’t mean nothing is happening. The body lets go of what it’s holding in a lot of different ways, through movement, breath, rest, and over time, through feeling safe enough to stop bracing. Gentle movement, including trauma-sensitive yoga, can sometimes support therapy.
Yes. Trauma is connected to a wide range of experiences that often get treated as separate issues, including anxiety, depression, burnout, and difficulty with focus or motivation. Sometimes these are the primary way trauma shows up, without an obvious connection to anything that happened.
This doesn’t mean every instance of anxiety or depression is trauma-related, but it’s worth considering, especially if you’ve tried other approaches and something still feels unresolved. Trauma therapy can work alongside support for these other concerns, often building healthy coping strategies along the way, rather than instead of it. Skills-based approaches like DBT can also be useful when emotions feel intense or hard to manage.
Trauma often shapes the assumptions you carry into relationships, sometimes without you realizing it. If you learned early on that closeness wasn’t safe, or that you had to manage how other people felt, those relationship patterns don’t just disappear because you’re now an adult with different people in your life.
This can show up as difficulty trusting people who’ve earned it, withdrawing when things get close, or reacting to a small moment with feelings that seem to belong to something bigger. Understanding where a pattern came from is often what makes it possible to respond differently, including learning to set boundaries that actually hold.
Trauma therapy doesn’t erase memories or guarantee you’ll never feel triggered again. What it can do is change how much power those memories and reactions have over your present. Most people describe this as the past taking up less space, rather than disappearing completely.
It’s also common for old reactions to resurface during periods of stress, even after meaningful progress in the therapy process. That’s not a sign the work didn’t take. It’s more often a sign that something new is asking for attention, and the resilience and skills you’ve built are still there to draw on.
Trauma is the experience, an event, or pattern that overwhelmed your ability to cope at the time. PTSD is one possible response to that experience, involving symptoms like intrusive memories, avoidance, and feeling constantly on edge that persist long after the event itself.
When trauma comes from prolonged or repeated experiences rather than a single event, some people use the term complex PTSD. PTSD symptoms generally include intrusive memories, avoidance, negative shifts in mood or thinking, and a body that stays on alert. Complex PTSD can also affect identity, self-worth, and relationships alongside those symptoms.
You don’t need a PTSD or complex PTSD diagnosis for trauma therapy to be useful. EMDR and trauma-focused CBT are often used for trauma broadly, while Cognitive Processing Therapy and Prolonged Exposure were developed specifically for PTSD.
Trauma therapy can be effective, especially when the approach fits the person, and the pace feels manageable. Approaches like EMDR, IFS, somatic therapy, and trauma-focused CBT have support for helping people process difficult experiences and reduce how much those experiences shape daily life.
EMDR and Cognitive Processing Therapy are among the most studied approaches for trauma and PTSD.
Prolonged Exposure and trauma-focused CBT are also widely used, structured approaches for PTSD. DBT can be useful alongside these when emotions feel intense or hard to manage. Effectiveness depends a lot on fit, both the approach and the relationship with the therapist, which is part of why I draw from more than one rather than applying the same process to everyone.
General therapy often focuses on present-day stressors, relationships, or decisions. Trauma therapy includes those things, but it also pays close attention to how past experiences are still shaping your reactions, your body, and your beliefs about yourself, even when the connection isn’t obvious at first.
Trauma-informed care means therapy that pays as much attention to pacing and safety as to content. Rather than assuming you’re ready to dive into difficult material right away, the work builds toward that gradually, with regular check-ins about what feels manageable along the way.
It’s a fair concern, and a common one. Trauma therapy isn’t designed to overwhelm you or force you to relive everything at once. We move at a pace that stays manageable, and there’s always room to slow down if something feels like too much.
Some approaches, like EMDR and somatic therapy, can often be used without retelling every detail of what happened. If something difficult does come up, the goal is to work with it in a way that helps it settle, rather than leaving you more on edge than when you started.
Yes. A word, a tone of voice, a smell, or a situation that resembles something from the past can bring up a reaction that feels much bigger than the moment calls for. This happens because the reaction is connected to the earlier experience, not just to what’s happening right now.
This can be confusing, especially when other people don’t understand why something seemingly small has such a big effect. Part of trauma therapy involves understanding these connections, so reactions like this make more sense and carry less unexpected weight over time.
It depends on what you’re working with. A single, more recent experience can sometimes shift in a relatively contained number of sessions. Trauma that’s layered, longstanding, or connected to childhood often takes longer, not because something is wrong, but because there’s more to work through.
I don’t work to a fixed timeline. We can talk together about what the process may look like for you once I understand more about what you’re carrying, and how trauma therapy works, walks through what that tends to look like in more detail.
Yes. All of my sessions are conducted online through secure video, which means I work with adults throughout Virginia without anyone needing to travel. Many people find that being in their own space makes it easier to do this kind of work.
Each trauma therapy session takes place in a private, supportive space of your choosing, wherever that feels safest for you.
This includes Alexandria, Arlington, Richmond, Virginia Beach, Charlottesville, and communities throughout the state. Wherever you are, the work begins the same way: with what feels safe enough to bring into the room.
Session Rates
Insurance and Out-of-Network Benefits
Submitting Insurance Claims
Book a complimentary 30-Minute Consult
