CompassionWorks

🌱 "My client has so much trauma, I don't even know where to start."

If you've thought it mid-session, you're not alone — it's one of the questions Amber hears most.

Her reframe: think of memory as a garden. And the metaphor isn't random — Amber grew up with a landscape architect for a mother, watching overgrown gardens get brought back to life. An overgrown garden never gets cleared all at once. You sort first.

🔷 Which plants do we keep? → the adaptive, resilience memories

🔶 Which have taken over? → the maladaptive memories that aren't serving the client anymore

From there, there are two ways in — and which one you choose depends on what you can get hold of first. (That part's in the reel. 🌿)

💬 Where do you usually start with a complex history — the first memory, the worst, or the one most present right now?

📌 Save this for your next complex intake.
(Keep an eye out for the four-legged guest who makes a cameo. 🐾)

"You don't need a war story to have trauma."

This is one of the most clinically misunderstood truths about PTSD — and during PTSD Awareness Month, it's worth saying out loud.

In trauma psychology, we often work with two categories:

🔻 Big T trauma — events involving actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. These are the events the DSM-5-TR recognizes as "Criterion A" for a PTSD diagnosis.

🔻 little t trauma — experiences that don't meet that threshold but quietly shape your nervous system over time: emotional neglect, chronic criticism, betrayal, repeated loss, growing up walking on eggshells.
Here's the part most people miss.

The brain doesn't rank threat the way a diagnostic manual does. When something feels overwhelming and inescapable — even if it would look "small" from the outside — the amygdala still fires the alarm, the hippocampus still struggles to file the memory in coherent time, and the body still stores the imprint.

That's why people who never lived through a single "Big T" event can still carry hypervigilance, shutdown, shame, or chronic distrust. Repeated little t can leave the same fingerprints as PTSD.

So many people dismiss their own pain because their story "wasn't bad enough."
It was bad enough. Your nervous system already knew.

Save this for someone who needs to hear it. 🤍