Yes, I am trauma-informed — here's what that actually means in my practice

For many years I worked as a primary care provider, working in immigrant communities and with patients who had fled their home countries due to war. One of my regular patients was a Cambodian gentleman (seen via an interpreter) who suffered a long list of physical complaints — chronic pain, fatigue, digestive problems, sleep that never felt restful. Every test and specialty consult came back unremarkable. What I eventually understood was that I had been looking in the wrong place. Severe, chronic PTSD was expressing itself through a lens my Western training hadn't fully prepared me to read. His version of PTSD was showing up in the only language his body and culture knew how to speak.

Trauma-informed care isn't a single technique. It's a way of approaching every person who walks into my office individually. When exploring someone’s life story it may prompt the question, “What happened to you?” I then consider how the body, mind, and spirit have responded to that trauma.

In an integrative medicine psychiatric practice this lens matters a great deal. Trauma lives in the body. It shapes hormones, inflammation, sleep, digestion, and mood in ways that standard psychiatric treatment often misses when it focuses only on symptoms. When I first assess a patient I look for the underlying cause of symptoms - it could be gut health, hormones, or genetic load. Additionally, it is always important to skillfully inquire about the past and consider, what has this person been carrying?

Trauma-informed care, for me, means creating a space where those experiences are not just acknowledged but genuinely understood as central to someone's health — not peripheral to it. Healing from trauma doesn't happen on a schedule and recovery from trauma is gradual. The honest truth is that trauma recovery can feel messy and full of dysregulated emotions; and this is something a trauma-informed provider understands. What changes, over time, is the relationship you have with your own history — it loses its grip. What most patients find on the other side isn't a reinvented self, but a recovered one. Trauma obscures; it doesn't replace. The person underneath it has been there the whole time.

In the words of Rumi, “The wound is the place where the light enters you."