Our Story
After working with clients across the trauma spectrum, Psychotherapist Xue Yang saw the need to focus her work on treating individuals experiencing acute suffering from complex trauma. While many therapists shy away from the most intense end of the trauma scale, Xue knew this is where she could make the greatest impact through The Trauma Recovery Place.
As The Trauma Recovery Place grows, we're working to extend our reach to help those who may not have access to our one-on-one therapy services. As we move forward, we aim to share and teach our Ensemble Method widely, so that those suffering the effects of trauma can once again find hope, healing and joy.
Our Beliefs
At The Trauma Recovery Place, we believe every one of us has an intrinsic intelligence that directs us toward health. We listen to, support and collaborate with this intelligence to guide us in the healing process.
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Xue Yang
Three things aroused my curiosity as a graduate student at the College of Social Work at the University of Houston, and these three things continue to inspire me as a trauma psychotherapist:
- • Humans are resilient. No matter how difficult or unbearable life appears to be, we figure out a way to endure and live another day. This spirit and energy also drive us to search for health.
- • The mind and body are connected. Complex PTSD cannot be resolved without working on both fronts – the mind must have insight and understanding, and the body must have release.
- • The loss of potential to humanity due to trauma is incalculable. When all energy is devoted to survival, there is very little left over for cultivating one’s potential.
As an intern at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, I was surprised by the resilience of the chronically homeless veterans I met. I also noticed how most of them weren't present in their bodies, a state called dissociation. This observation led me to further studies as a postgraduate social work student at the Menninger Clinic; I wanted to better understand how the psyche processed and made sense out of pain and suffering.
The education I received was of great importance, however, the answer for how to treat dissociation and the distress held in the body still eluded me. This quest led me to the work of Peter A. Levine, PhD, the developer of Somatic Experiencing (SE). Dr. Levine's explanation for dissociation – that the body needs to be able to complete self-protective motor responses and release the thwarted survival energy bound within it – finally explained what I noticed in my patients. It was then that I decided to take on the arduous studies to become licensed in Somatic Experiencing. With extensive experience in treating trauma and a holistic view of the mind-body connection, I feel truly equipped and confident to help those who seek healing.
Amber R. Grant
I believe there is a deep intelligence within each of us, an ongoing movement toward connection, healing, and wholeness that remains present even when it has become difficult to feel.
Our bodies carry the stories of our lives. Experiences of being welcomed and protected, of belonging and loss, of having our needs met or going without, become woven into the ways our bodies and nervous systems learn to meet the world. What we sometimes come to know as anxiety, disconnection, vigilance, collapse, or patterns we cannot seem to change may have once been wise and necessary ways of caring for us.
I am interested in meeting these places with curiosity rather than trying to change them.
In our work together, I offer a warm and steady presence where we can slow down and listen for what is arising. Sometimes this happens through words, and sometimes through sensation, movement, stillness, imagery, energy, or therapeutic touch. There is no particular place we need to arrive. We begin with what is here and allow your system to show us the way.
My work is integrative and draws from Somatic Experiencing, CranioSacral Therapy, relational neuroscience, NeuroAffective Touch, Compassionate Inquiry, developmental and relational repair, trauma-informed touch, the Wheel of Consent, somatic sex education, and energy medicine. Rather than applying these approaches as separate techniques, I allow them to inform how I listen, respond, and meet the whole person in front of me.
I believe something meaningful happens when we are deeply accompanied. Our nervous systems are shaped in relationship, and they can also discover new possibilities there. In the presence of another person who is willing to stay, listen, wonder, and not require us to be different, places that have long been held alone may find enough support to soften, move, speak, rest, or simply be known.
This way of working asks us to listen to more than symptoms. I experience each person as a whole and intricate living being—body and mind, history and relationship, energy and spirit, the known and the mysterious. Each of us is a small universe in our own right, while also belonging to something much larger: our relationships and communities, the living world, and the cosmos of which we are a part.
Healing, for me, is not about becoming a better or more regulated version of ourselves. It is about becoming more able to inhabit our own lives.
With enough safety, choice, accompaniment, and time, we may discover there is room for more of us to be here—our boundaries and our longing, our grief and our pleasure, our vulnerability and our strength, our need for others and our capacity to stand firmly within ourselves.
My role is not to decide where your healing should take you, but to accompany you with curiosity, respect, and trust in the intelligence already living within you.