Why I’m Shifting my Focus, and What Comes Next
Over the past four years, my clinical work has taken shape around identity based and relationship trauma. This focus matters. It has been the framework I use to help clients make sense of their experiences— not only validated, but to recognize their right to stop gaslighting themselves and to name the real power and impact of what they’ve lived through. It names the realities my clients, team, colleagues, and communities continue to face. It gave me language for what I had long understood about those most marginalized and minoritized.
And over time, I began to notice something else.
I was beginning to speak in lingo and jargon, language that was accurate, but increasingly distant from the core of what our clients and communities actually need. The words were right, but the connection was thinning.
When I noticed this in June 2024, I didn’t rush to change the niche. I didn’t announce It. I didn’t even fully trust it yet. Instead I sat with it. It took months of introspection to name what was happening in midst of an already difficult and dysregulating two years.
When I returned from my maternity leave, I began stripping away the jargon in my sessions and the difference was immediate.
I was more client-centered and person-centered than I had ever been.
I was still using evidence and research based knowledge and interventions, but without the capitalistic pull to gatekeep through language. I moved further away from planting my flag on the hill of any single modality and closer to what was actually happening in the room.
During this time, I began to ask myself a different set of questions:
What is the golden thread that runs through everything I do as a therapist?
What has always been present in my clinical work, but never named out loud?
What story of who I am as a clinician remained in the shadows?
And the most difficult question, that one of my best friends asked me: what do you actually want to be doing?
These answers were simpler than I expected:
The golden thread was this: our clients, our clinical team, and everyone who has ever been a part of this practice share something essential in common. They are people who held visible and/or invisible minoritized, marginalized, targeted, oppressed, identities, they carry impactful trauma, and are repeatedly asked to make deeply uncomfortable decisions.
Decisions that challenge the safety of people pleasing
Decisions that disrupt the pattern of shoving their own needs, emotions, and truths aside
decisions that confront the belief that they have to be okay at all costs.
To be honest, these are tensions I still wrestle with, even as I move the practice in this direction. I ask myself:
Will we lose clients over this shift?
Will colleagues and friends, inside and outside the field, understand It, or accept me through It?
Will this clarity reach the people who need the most support and access?
Because if you know you know: identity based trauma and relationship trauma shape one another, and they shape the decisions we are challenged to make in our lives.
What I am choosing to center now is not a departure from trauma aware or trauma informed care, it is a return to its heart.
I am shifting our clinical focus toward the moment of decision itself: the pause before the action, the space where regulation, capacity, and choice occur. The work now lives in naming the harm AND supporting people as they slow down at these crossroads and learn how to stay with themselves while deciding what comes next.
This looks like helping clients tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into urgency. It looks like being more aware and strengthening the tools that support your nervous system so decisions are not made solely from fear, obligation, or survival. Decision making has room for informed values-aligned choices, especially when there is no option that feels entirely safe or clean.
Mistakes are inevitable here. So is discomfort. That isn’t a flaw in the process; It is the process of doing something for the first time, or of doing something differently after years of surviving another way.
This shift doesn’t erase the importance of identity based and relationship trauma. It acknowledges their ongoing impact while refusing to let trauma be the only lens through hich people understand themselves. It affirms that while trauma shapes us, It does not get the final say in how we move forward.
For the practice, this means clearer intention, fewer buzzwords, and deeper simpler presence. It means meeting clients where they are; not rushing insight, not forcing readiness, and not hiding behind language that distances rather than connects.
For me It means practicing what I’ve always believed: integrity in this work requires not only listening to our clients, but to ourselves. Evolution is not a betrayal of the past; its a response to what the work is asking of us now.
This is what comes next. Not certainty. Not perfection.
But clarity, care, and the courage to make room for decisions that honor who we are becoming.
I share this not as instruction or authority, but vulnerably as a story from someone who has stood at her own crossroads. I do this so that anyone navigating their own difficult decisions can see a reflection of their experience in another human being, a therapist who has faced uncertainty, fear, and doubt and kept moving forward anyway.
I hope it reminds people that they are not alone; that even in the messiness of growth, someone else has sat with these same questions, wrestled with these same fears, and found a way to keep choosing themselves. Sharing it like this is an act of undoing aloneness: a reminder that the work of deciding, feeling, and growing is never meant to be done in isolation.
