Trauma Therapist Austin
For the trauma that is not in the past. It is in how you react, attach, and protect yourself right now.
Online trauma therapy in Austin via secure telehealth. Specializing in betrayal trauma, divorce and breakup trauma, attachment wounds, emotional dysregulation, fawning and people-pleasing, and the specific trauma presentations that come with ADHD and autism. For adults who understand their history but cannot understand why the patterns keep running.
Join from anywhere in Texas through a secure telehealth platform.
Most trauma therapy pages describe what trauma is. This page is about what trauma does. The hypervigilance that fires before you know why. The fawning that kicks in when conflict arrives. The attachment pattern that keeps recreating itself in relationships that feel nothing like each other. The emotional dysregulation that arrives faster than you can interrupt it. The dissociation you have been quietly managing for years.
Online trauma therapy in Austin is available for adults who want to work at the level where the patterns are running, not just understand them better.
Trauma Therapy in Austin That Works at the Right Level
Understanding your trauma history is not the same as healing from it. These are the specific presentations this practice works with in Austin adults.
Betrayal trauma
Betrayal trauma is distinct from other trauma because the person who caused the harm was also a source of safety. Infidelity, deception in a close relationship, violations of trust by someone who had access to your vulnerability. The specific difficulty of betrayal trauma is that it attacks the capacity to trust at the same time it creates the greatest need for support.
Divorce and relationship breakup trauma
Not every breakup produces trauma but many do, particularly when the relationship was long, when there was infidelity, when there was any form of coercion or control, or when the ending was sudden and unexplained. The grief of a significant relationship ending can carry a traumatic layer that standard grief work does not reach.
Emotional dysregulation
The response that arrives faster than any conscious decision and takes longer to recover from than makes sense. Emotional dysregulation is one of the most consistent presentations in adults with trauma histories and in adults with ADHD. Understanding what is driving it is different from being able to interrupt it in the moment. Therapy works at the level where the regulation is happening.
Hypervigilance
The nervous system that is always scanning for threat before you are consciously aware of doing it. Hypervigilance is exhausting to carry and hard to explain to people who do not experience it. In neurodivergent adults it often appears alongside sensory sensitivity and social monitoring in ways that compound the load significantly.
People-pleasing and fawning
Fawning is a trauma response, not a personality trait. The compulsive need to manage how others feel about you, to smooth over conflict before it can escalate, to make yourself smaller or more agreeable than feels true: these are learned survival strategies. Understanding that does not automatically change it. Therapy addresses where fawning formed and what it has cost.
Attachment wounds
The attachment patterns that formed in early relationships and keep running in adult ones. Anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, disorganized attachment: each has a specific texture and a specific set of triggers that therapy can work with directly rather than simply naming and explaining.
Betrayal Trauma in Austin
Betrayal trauma in Austin presents across a range of situations. Infidelity discovered after years of a marriage. A long-term partner who turned out to have been deceiving you in ways that are still being uncovered. A close friendship or family relationship where a significant violation occurred. The common thread is that the harm came from someone who had genuine access to your trust and used it in a way that cannot be easily reconciled.
What makes betrayal trauma distinct clinically is what it does to the relational capacity. The same system that was hurt is the one you need to use to get better. Trust was the mechanism of injury, and trust is what healing requires. Therapy holds that tension rather than trying to resolve it prematurely.
For couples attempting to rebuild after betrayal, infidelity and affair recovery counseling is available alongside individual trauma work. For individuals processing a relationship ending, individual marriage counseling addresses the relational layer.
ADHD, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, and Childhood Trauma
ADHD and trauma are deeply intertwined in ways that are frequently missed. ADHD creates conditions that are inherently more likely to produce traumatic experiences: the chronic shame of underperforming, the relational ruptures caused by dysregulation, the years of being told you are difficult or lazy or not trying hard enough. For many ADHD adults, the trauma is not a separate event that happened alongside the ADHD. It is a direct product of living with unrecognized ADHD in environments that did not understand it.
Rejection sensitive dysphoria in ADHD is one of the most specific and underaddressed presentations. RSD is not ordinary sensitivity to rejection. It is an intensely painful emotional response to perceived or actual criticism, rejection, or failure that arrives with a speed and force that feels disproportionate and is extremely difficult to regulate. It is neurological in origin but it compounds with trauma in ways that make both worse.
The ADHD-childhood trauma connection is also significant. Adults with ADHD are statistically more likely to have experienced childhood adversity, and the ADHD itself is often what made those early environments harder to navigate. Therapy that understands this addresses both the neurological and the relational dimensions rather than treating ADHD and trauma as separate tracks.
For ADHD-focused work alongside trauma therapy, ADHD therapy is available. For the Austin-specific context, ADHD therapy in Austin is linked in the related section.
Autism, Hypervigilance, and Trauma Responses
Autism and trauma responses overlap in ways that make both harder to identify and treat. Autistic adults in Austin frequently carry significant trauma that was never recognized as such: the accumulated weight of social misattunement, of being consistently misread, of sensory environments that were genuinely painful, of masking for years at enormous personal cost.
Neurodivergence and hypervigilance are closely connected. The hypervigilance that autistic adults carry is often a reasonable response to genuinely unpredictable social environments rather than a cognitive distortion. Treating it as the latter is one of the most common ways standard trauma therapy fails neurodivergent adults.
ADHD and autism together, particularly in adults who carry both, create an attachment trauma picture that is highly specific. The combination of emotional dysregulation, social processing differences, and the trauma of years of being seen as the problem produces a particular kind of relational wound that requires a therapist who understands what they are looking at.
For broader neurodivergent support alongside trauma work, therapy for neurodivergent adults is available. For autism-specific therapy, adult autism therapy is linked in the related section.
Is It Dissociation or ADHD?
This question comes up regularly in therapy with Austin adults and it matters more than it might seem. Dissociation and ADHD both produce gaps in attention, difficulty staying present, and a sense of not being fully in the moment. The experience from the inside can feel nearly identical. The difference is in what is driving it and what needs to happen therapeutically.
Dissociation as a trauma response is the nervous system creating distance from present experience because present experience has historically been unsafe. The mind leaves the room before anything happens. ADHD inattention is a neurological difficulty with sustained attention and executive function that is not primarily a protective response. Both can co-occur, and in adults with trauma histories and ADHD they frequently do.
Getting this distinction right matters for treatment. Approaching dissociation as if it were ADHD misses what it is protecting. Approaching ADHD inattention as if it were dissociation misses the neurological dimension. Therapy that holds both possibilities and works to understand which is operating, and when, produces better outcomes than committing prematurely to one framework.
Fawning and People-Pleasing as Trauma Responses
Fawning is the fourth trauma response alongside fight, flight, and freeze. It is the instinct to manage threat by becoming agreeable, accommodating, and appeasing, to make yourself less threatening and more likeable in moments of conflict or potential rejection. It is a survival strategy that forms in environments where direct opposition was not safe.
In Austin adults, fawning often presents as what looks like extreme agreeableness, conflict avoidance, difficulty knowing what you want in relationships, chronic over-giving, and a particular kind of resentment that builds when you cannot say no. It is often highly functional professionally and quietly costly personally.
People-pleasing as a trauma response is distinct from simply being a considerate person. The distinction is in the anxiety that accompanies the choice. The considerate person gives because they want to. The person fawning gives because not giving feels dangerous. That difference is felt internally even when it looks the same from outside.
In neurodivergent adults, fawning and masking are closely related. Masking socially to fit in and fawning to manage conflict both involve suppressing authentic responses to manage external threat. For neurodivergent adults in Austin, this connection is often one of the most meaningful things that comes up in trauma therapy.
FAQs: Trauma Therapist Austin
Is online trauma therapy in Austin available?
Yes. Online trauma therapy in Austin is available via secure telehealth. You join from your home or wherever you have a private space. Evening and weekend appointments are available. Many clients find that working from their own environment supports the trauma work rather than limiting it.
Do you treat betrayal trauma specifically?
Yes. Betrayal trauma from infidelity, deception in a close relationship, and other violations of trust is a specific focus. For couples attempting to rebuild after betrayal, infidelity counseling is available alongside individual trauma work and is linked in the related section below.
What is rejection sensitive dysphoria and do you treat it?
RSD is an intensely painful response to perceived or actual rejection, criticism, or failure that is neurological in origin and extremely common in ADHD adults. It is one of the most underaddressed ADHD presentations and one that compounds significantly with trauma. Yes, RSD is addressed as part of ADHD and trauma work at this practice.
How do you approach ADHD and trauma together?
They are addressed together rather than as separate tracks. ADHD frequently creates the conditions for traumatic experiences, and trauma compounds the ADHD presentation in ways that make both worse. ADHD therapy in Austin is available alongside trauma work for adults navigating both and is linked in the related section below.
Do you work with attachment styles in therapy?
Yes. Anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment are all addressed directly in trauma therapy. Understanding which pattern you carry and where it formed is useful. Working with it at the level where it is running is what produces change in how it operates in current relationships.
What does trauma therapy in Austin cost?
Sessions are $200 per 50-minute session. I do not work with insurance directly, but I can provide a superbill for potential out-of-network reimbursement. For full pricing visit the services page. Your complimentary consultation is always free.
Trauma Therapy in Austin That Works Where the Patterns Are Running
Online trauma therapy in Austin via telehealth. Betrayal trauma, attachment wounds, ADHD and trauma, emotional dysregulation, and fawning. Evening and weekend appointments available.