A message from Maria Coutant Skinner, LCSW, President & CEO
September 30, 2026
Dear friends,
If you have ever lain awake while your mind ran the same painful scene again and again, you know how exhausting it is.
Many people who have lived through trauma ask some version of the same question: Why can’t I just stop thinking about it?
It’s important to know that there’s nothing wrong with you, and your brain is not malfunctioning. It’s trying to protect you.
During a traumatic event, the brain’s threat-detection system, centered on the amygdala, takes over. The prefrontal cortex, which helps us organize experience into a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end, goes partially offline. As a result, traumatic memories are often stored differently from ordinary ones. They stay fragmented: an image, a sound, a bodily sensation, without the context that tells the brain this is over. So, the memory stays “open.”
The brain treats it as unfinished business and keeps returning to it, hoping to make sense of what happened, prevent it from happening again, or find the thing it should have done differently. This is why replaying can feel so compelling, and why it often brings guilt, shame, and “what if” thinking along with it.
Reminders, also known as triggers, can then pull us back in. When they do, the body reacts as though the danger is present, with a racing heart, tension, and a surge of fear, even when we are perfectly safe.
Most of us try to push the memory away. It makes sense, but suppression tends to make intrusive thoughts more frequent, not less. The memory never gets the chance to be processed and filed as something that happened then.
The good news is that the brain is remarkably adaptable, and effective treatments exist:
- Trauma-informed therapy models such as CBT and DBT help people examine the beliefs that formed around the trauma (“it was my fault,” “I’m not safe anywhere”) and gradually process the memory in a supported way.
- Narrative Therapy allows clients to rewrite their stories and differentiate the person from the issue that is causing pain and strife.
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) uses guided bilateral stimulation while a person briefly recalls the memory, helping reduce its emotional intensity.
- Prolonged exposure therapy carefully and gradually approaches trauma reminders, so the brain learns they are no longer dangerous.
- Somatic and body-based approaches address the way trauma lives in the nervous system, not just in thoughts.
- Grounding skills, such as slow breathing, naming five things you can see, or feeling your feet on the floor, help bring you back to the present when a memory surfaces.
The modality is based on our clinicians’ assessment of whether the trauma is “stored in the body” or if the person can articulate the trauma. That helps determine whether to utilize strategies for talk therapy, somatic approaches, or both.
Healing doesn’t mean forgetting. It means the memory loses its power to hijack the present. It becomes something you remember rather than something you relive.
It can feel intimidating to bring these thoughts into the open because we may worry they will become overwhelming. I want to assure you that trained therapists will walk you through the healing process at a pace and level of intensity that works for you, so you’ll be safe and feel at peace.
All my best to you always,
Maria Coutant Skinner, LCSW
President and CEO
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