Rebekah Bernhoft

According to the latest research on intergenerational trauma transmission, the memory of our ancestors lives in our DNA, in every cell of our bodies, and its echos show up in far reaching ways. Intergenerational trauma can be taught, inherited, and profoundly healed without rejecting our culture or those who came before us, if we so choose. Whatever your background, your story matters. P.S. I have a BA in History that I use nearly every day in my practice for this type of work.

As a fellow individual on The Spectrum (I’m AuDHD, a lovely combination of ADHD and Autism), I love helping members of my community unlearn the limiting, pathologizing programming we’ve been inundated with. Here, we learn how to navigate a world that wasn’t built for us, using tools and methods that expand our capacity and quality of life, while reducing the discomfort we feel existing in such a LOUD place.

Trauma comes in both “Big T” and “small t” varieties, and all of it matters. Whether you’ve survived something life or death, or a childhood with a narcissistic parent, the somatic strategies I use help our bodies heal from the memory it carries, as well as the mind. When simply talking about our trauma does little to change how we feel and function, evidence-based somatic therapies can be life-saving and life-changing.

I integrate Gestalt-style inner child work with much of the somatic modalities I utilize, because so much of our childhood trauma is remembered in body memory. This approach helps to retroactively give ourselves the parenting and development we didn’t get, while increasing self-love, self-esteem, and capacity for healthy relationships.

EMDR is the gold standard of trauma modalities, and is heavily discussed in the book, The Body Keeps the Score. It’s excellent for treating specific traumas, and can assist in the treatment of complex trauma when well-integrated with other methods. EMDR works by helping the nervous system remain stable enough to process triggering memories, allowing us to metabolize and resolve them, instead of just understanding them.

Somatic Therapy helps us process deeply stored memory of trauma throughout the body’s nervous system. Somatic therapies also allow us to re-calibrate our threat-detection systems, and shift out of survival state into a “rest and regenerate” state. For those with severe trauma or mood dysregulation, somatic therapy can provide much needed relief from dissociation, psychic numbing, panic/anxiety, rage, and hyper vigilance.