Intergenerational & Racial Trauma Therapy

Virtual trauma Therapy in California

The stories we tell

As humans, we make meaning through storytelling. The stories we inherit from our families and ancestors shape how we understand ourselves, our identities, relationships, and experiences. Family histories can hold many perspectives, shaped by memory, culture, beliefs, and unresolved experiences.

Intergenerational trauma

Pain, grief, oppression, displacement, discrimination, and survival experiences of our ancestors can affect generations after. These experiences may be passed down through epigenetic changes, learned behaviors, family stories, relationship patterns, and collective memories of what did and did not happen. For historically oppressed and marginalized communities, this can also include the impacts of racism, colonization, cultural loss, forced migration, and systemic oppression.

Your living truth

You may carry both your own experiences and the weight of your ancestral history. These burdens can be compounded by pressure to acculturate, assimilate, code-switch, or conform to dominant cultural norms while navigating discrimination based on your intersecting identities. Over time, chronic acculturation and discrimination-related stress can contribute to increased allostatic load on your wellbeing. This may also look like imposter syndrome, internalized racism, low self-esteem, hypervigilance, cultural disconnection, difficulty feeling a sense of belonging, or feeling that you must change yourself to be accepted. Understanding these patterns can help you recognize what you have inherited, what you have survived, and what you may be ready to transform.

Space to Rest, Resist & Reclaim

Our sessions together provides you a space to give voice to your unique story, explore your family and ancestral history, connect with ancestral knowledge, recognize your resilience, and reclaim a sense of belonging within yourself.

My work with you supports greater awareness of the patterns that have shaped your life and helps you explore which patterns you want to continue, transform, or release. Together, we can identify internalized oppressive beliefs, interrupt harmful generational patterns, strengthen your connection to your identities and cultural wisdom, and move toward your own authenticity, self-compassion, empowerment, and community liberation.

Your Story

Exploring Family History

with Compassion

 Intergenerational trauma healing is not only about identifying trauma or focusing on what went wrong. Our work together will involve exploring your family history through a more curious, creative, and compassionate lens.

Understanding the historical, cultural, and social circumstances that shaped your ancestors can help you recognize the complexity of their experiences without excusing harm or minimizing its impact on your life. This process may allow you to develop greater compassion for yourself and previous generations, understand how survival strategies were passed down, and make choices with intentions about what you decide to carry on.

Through our work together, healing become an opportunity to honor your roots and ancestry, while creating your own path authentic to your truth. You can acknowledge your ancestral history without being defined by it. You can honor your survival while reclaiming your innate right to thrive.

"I’m both a survivor of trauma within my lifetime and of intergenerational trauma
Dr. Thema Bryant
Psychologist, minister, writer

How I can help you...

My approach integrates Brainspotting and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), along with Liberation Psychology, Critical Race Theory, identity and belonging work, and exploration of the intersections of culture, race, gender, and sexuality. I incorporate somatic awareness, mindfulness, and self-compassion to help you notice how stress and trauma can be held in the body, while creating space to process difficult experiences and develop greater awareness of the patterns you may have learned or inherited.

Together, we explore how trauma, racism, oppression, family patterns, cultural experiences, and identities may shape the way you see yourself, relate to others, and experience your body and emotions. 

Our sessions together help to put language to your experiences, process and heal trauma, understand intergenerational and learned patterns, challenge internalized oppressive beliefs, and reconnect with your identity and sense of belonging. I support you in developing greater self-compassion, resilience, agency, and liberating yourself to live more authentically—while reclaiming the parts of yourself, your culture, and your story that may have been silenced.

Brainspotting Trauma Therapy
Schedule a free 15 minutes phone consultation
619-719-5567
angel@crescentshorespsychotherapy.com
I live and work on unceded land of Kumeyaay Nation.
To learn more and join me in supporting Indigenous communities,
visit Native Governance Center, Museum of Us, and Native Lands.