Your body remembers pain, but it also remembers how to heal.
Trauma Therapy & CPTSD Care for Artists, Musicians, and Creatives
Healing With the Body’s Wisdom.
At Mindful Self Therapy, we offer trauma-informed care for adults and creatives in New York City, including support for Complex PTSD (CPTSD) and chronic nervous system dysregulation. Our approach draws from somatic awareness, and polyvagal theory to help you gently rebuild safety within your body and your life.
For many artists and creatives, trauma and creative expression often live side by side. The same sensitivity that fuels your art can also make it harder to rest, trust, or feel safe. You might channel your pain into your work, yet still feel trapped inside patterns of self-protection, hypervigilance, or emotional shutdown.
When the Past Still Lives in the Present
You might appear calm or high-functioning on the outside while feeling constantly on edge inside. Maybe your emotions swing between numbness and overwhelm. For those living with Complex PTSD, these patterns can feel constant like your system never truly relaxes. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget.
Polyvagal-informed trauma therapy helps you understand these responses as intelligent survival adaptations, not personal failures. Together, we’ll explore how to calm and regulate your nervous system so your body can begin to trust safety again.
You deserve to live in a body that feels like home, not a battlefield.
You deserve a nervous system that feels safe enough to rest, connect, and create freely.
What Happens in Trauma Therapy
Feeling constantly on edge, anxious, or emotionally flooded
Struggling with chronic exhaustion or a body that never fully relaxes
Experiencing flashbacks, shutdown, or dissociation when overwhelmed
Feeling numb, disconnected, or detached from your emotions or body
Caught in cycles of perfectionism, self-blame, or people-pleasing
Finding that your art or work has become your only outlet for emotion
Through polyvagal-informed and somatic approaches, you’ll begin to understand how your body carries the weight of past experiences. You might be:
These are all signs that your system is asking for regulation and care. You don’t have to wait until everything collapses to begin healing.
How These Patterns Shape Your Life
When trauma lives in the body for too long, it can quietly influence everything your relationships, your creative energy, even how you breathe. You may feel disconnected from joy, stuck in survival mode, or unsure how to trust your emotions.
Healing from trauma is not about forcing yourself to move on. It’s about creating the conditions for your nervous system to finally feel safe enough to let go.
As your system begins to regulate, you may notice more space inside yourself. More clarity, more calm, and more capacity for creativity. Your art may begin to feel less like a coping mechanism and more like a true expression of who you are.
You don’t have to carry your pain alone. Healing is possible, even after years of feeling shut down or overwhelmed.
When you make space to care for your nervous system, your healing, your creativity, and your life begin to expand again.
How Working with Mindful Self Helps
Our therapists aren’t here to psychoanalyze you or sit silently while you talk into the void. We’re here to engage, collaborate, and gently challenge you to reconnect with what’s been lost. We understand what it’s like to live and create in New York’s fast-paced, high-pressure world because we’re part of that creative community too.
Feel grounded and regulated in your body, not just your thoughts
Reignite creativity and purpose without burning out
Strengthen relationships through clear communication and emotional attunement
Manage anxiety, depression, and self-doubt with evidence-based tools
Build awareness and compassion for yourself and your nervous system
Working with Mindful Self can help you:
