Specialty
Trauma and PTSD Therapy in Texas
After a frightening or overwhelming experience, your body can stay braced long after the danger has passed. You might startle at a slammed door, avoid one particular street, or feel numb around people you love. In her online work with adults across Texas, Vanessa Gross, LMFT, starts with stability and moves at a pace you can sustain.
Common Trauma and PTSD Responses
Some people can point to one event that changed things. Others carry a history of smaller harms that added up, often in childhood or in a close relationship. Both can shape how settled you feel in your own body and how much you trust other people.
Trauma responses are your mind and body trying to protect you, and many of them were reasonable reactions when they began. The difficulty is that they can keep going after the threat is gone, in forms like these:
- Feeling on edge: scanning rooms, startling easily, finding it hard to relax even at home
- Avoidance: steering clear of places, people, conversations or news that stir up the memory
- Numbness: feeling flat or far away, even in moments you expected to matter
- Intrusive memories: images, sounds or smells that pull you back without warning
- Sleep problems: nightmares, waking often, or staying up late to put off going to sleep
Why Trauma Therapy Starts With Pacing and Stability
Going into painful memories before you have ways to steady yourself can leave you feeling worse for days. So the early work with Vanessa focuses on stability: sleep, daily routines, grounding skills for when a memory hits, and a working relationship where you can say "slow down" and have it respected.
Nobody expects you to lay out everything that happened early on, and some details may never need to be told in full. Vanessa watches the pacing closely and checks in when a topic starts to feel like too much, so the work stays challenging without tipping into overwhelm.
How DBT Skills, CBT and Mindfulness Fit Into Trauma Therapy
DBT skills, taught within your individual sessions, give you concrete ways through intense moments. You practice grounding yourself through your senses, getting through an urge without acting on it, and bringing a spike of emotion back down to where you can think clearly.
CBT works on the beliefs trauma can leave behind, such as "it was my fault," "I can't trust anyone" or "nowhere is really safe." You look at where each belief came from, what it protected you from, and whether it still fits the life you have now.
Mindfulness-based work helps you notice what is happening in your body right now. With practice, that makes it easier to tell the difference between a memory that feels present and what is actually in front of you.
An Attachment and Psychodynamic Lens on Trauma
Trauma often shapes relationships: who you trust, how close you let people get, how you react when someone pulls away. An attachment-based and psychodynamic lens looks at those patterns and where they started, including what you learned early on about whether it was safe to need people.
The therapy relationship is part of this work. Vanessa values open, honest dialogue, and paying attention to how trust builds between the two of you can show you something about how it works, or stalls, in the rest of your life.
Online Trauma Therapy: Who Vanessa Sees and What to Expect
Vanessa works with adults of all ages, veterans among them. Sessions run 60 minutes by secure video, and you join each one from somewhere in Texas. If you have not had therapy by video before, how online therapy works covers the basics.
Being somewhere familiar can make it easier to settle, as long as it is private: a closed door, headphones if others are home, something comforting within reach. It also helps to leave a few quiet minutes after a session before you return to work or family.
New Tide Therapy does not provide crisis care: if you are in crisis or thinking about suicide, call or text 988, or call 911 if you are in immediate danger.
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
You set the pace on this. Many people start with how trauma affects their life now, such as sleep, relationships or work, before going anywhere near the event itself. Going into a memory in more detail is something you and Vanessa would decide on together, if and when it seems useful, and you can always say you are not ready.
You do not have to prove it, or measure it against what other people have been through. What matters is how an experience affects you now. If you are on guard, avoiding things, sleeping badly or feeling cut off from people, that is reason enough to talk about it, and you can start there without settling on a label first.
Feeling stirred up for a few hours afterward can happen, especially early on. Use the grounding skills you have practiced, and tell Vanessa at the next session how it went. That feedback is how the two of you adjust the pace, so the work keeps moving without leaving you shaken between sessions.
Related Pages
DBT Skills
Vanessa teaches DBT skills for strong emotions, hard moments and difficult conversations one-on-one, as part of individual therapy.Read MorePsychodynamic Therapy
Psychodynamic therapy explores how earlier relationships shape the patterns you repeat today, and how that understanding works alongside practical skills.Read MoreAnxiety
For worry that shows up as tension, what-if thinking and avoidance, using CBT, ACT and mindfulness in online sessions.Read More
Depression
Support for low mood, lost interest and pulling away from people, combining small CBT steps with psychodynamic work and self-compassion.Read MoreA gentler next step
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