Clinical Corner
This is a space for ideas that have emerged at the intersection of clinical practice, teaching, research, and my own ongoing curiosity about how healing happens. Here, I share reflections on trauma, relationships, women's mental health, and the ways our histories continue to shape how we experience ourselves and others. Some pieces are personal reflections; others explore clinical ideas and frameworks I have developed through years of working with people healing from complex trauma.
The House of Healing™
A Complex Trauma Treatment Framework
The House of Healing™ is a framework I developed to help make the often complicated and nonlinear experience of healing from complex trauma easier to understand. It imagines our inner world as a house with multiple floors, corridors, and doors—each holding different experiences, relationships, wounds, strengths, and parts of ourselves. Some doors are easy to open, while others are carefully guarded by protective parts because of what lies behind them. Healing is not about forcing those doors open, but about creating enough safety, trust, and internal capacity that we can approach what has been protected when the time is right.
The framework also explores how we can unexpectedly fall through a “trapdoor” into an earlier emotional state when something in the present activates the past, even after significant healing has occurred. Ultimately, the House of Healing™ is not simply about returning to what hurt us. It is about becoming more able to move throughout our whole internal house—with greater choice, compassion, connection, and access to the parts of ourselves capable of resilience, meaning, pleasure, and growth.
The House of Healing™ is an evolving clinical framework, and I am currently developing a more comprehensive paper exploring its theoretical foundations, clinical applications, and approach to complex trauma treatment. The full paper will be published here soon.