Pacing the work to what your system can hold.
Written by Gerry McNamara, LMFTLast reviewed May 2026
Trauma-informed isn't a separate modality. It's a posture I bring to everything: pacing what we open to what your nervous system can hold, working with the resources you already bring, and keeping you a real participant in your own work.
Request a free 15-min consultation →Posture first, modality second.
A posture, applied across every modality. Trauma-informed care shapes pacing, language, and the structure of every session — not just the ones explicitly about trauma.
Pacing is the biggest practical difference. We open material at a rate your nervous system can actually metabolize. Going too fast is one of the most common reasons therapy doesn't work — clients drop out or get worse before they get better because the work outpaced their capacity to hold it. Trauma-informed pacing slows that down on purpose.
Resources alongside difficulty. Before we go deeper on hard material, we build the practical skills and stabilizing routines you'll need to come back from sessions intact. The skills work doesn't pause while the deeper work happens. They run together.
Naming what we're doing as we're doing it. Nothing happens to you in session. We talk through what we're working on, what to expect, what to do if something gets too intense. You stay in the driver's seat the whole time.
Working with what you already bring.
Trauma-informed without strength-based can drift toward deficit-focused work. Both halves are required for the work to feel like it's about your whole self.
Strength-based work starts from the assumption that whatever has kept you functioning so far has real intelligence in it — the coping skills, the relationships, the parts of you that have managed. Some of those have done so at a real cost, and the work involves updating them. But we collaborate with the existing intelligence, not against it.
The two postures together — trauma-informed pacing plus strength-based stance — make the work feel collaborative rather than corrective. You're not broken; some of your strategies are out of date. That's a different conversation than the one most clinical training defaults to.
Questions I get asked about trauma-informed work.
What does trauma-informed actually mean?
It means I bring an awareness of how trauma affects the body and the nervous system into everything we do, whether or not trauma is the headline reason you're in the room. Practically, it changes pacing — we open material at a speed your system can hold — and it changes the questions I ask, the resources we build alongside the harder work, and the explicit collaboration on what we're doing and why.Is this only for clients with trauma?
No. Trauma-informed is a posture, not a specialty. Plenty of clients I see don't have a clear trauma history; some do but it's not what they came in for; some came in specifically for trauma. The posture is the same regardless: pace what we open, build resources alongside the difficult material, and keep the client an active participant in their own work.What does strength-based add?
Strength-based means we work with the resources you already have — the things that have kept you functioning, the parts of you that have coped well, the relationships and skills you bring — rather than starting from a deficit list. It pairs naturally with trauma-informed because the nervous system that survived whatever you survived has real intelligence in it. We collaborate with that intelligence, not against it.Do you do EMDR?
I don't. EMDR is a specific trauma-processing protocol that has good evidence for some presentations. If EMDR is specifically what you're looking for, I'd point you to a colleague who specializes in it. The trauma work I do uses cognitive behavioral therapy, attachment-informed work, and pacing-first protocols, but not EMDR.
The rest of how I work.
CBT & DBT
The practical skills half of the work. Trauma-informed pacing applies to how we sequence and dose the skills.
Read morePsychodynamic work
The depth half of the work. Trauma-informed pacing is especially load-bearing when we touch older material.
Read moreTrauma therapy
The specific service framing. Trauma therapy for adults in Oregon, paced for what your system can hold.
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Ready to talk it through? Let's see if we're a fit.
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