Trauma therapy
You can't change what happened. You can give your child a safe place to make sense of it.
Book a Free 15-Minute Consultation3 to 17
San Jose and Redwood City
Play therapy and Brainspotting
Every four weeks, every case
Free, 15 minutes
Trauma therapy at Your Therapy Nook helps children and teens ages 3 to 17 recover after hard experiences, a loss, an accident, a hospitalization, abuse, neglect, or something they witnessed. We use child-led play therapy and Brainspotting, so your child is never made to retell what happened. We work with both single-incident and complex trauma, parent coaching every four weeks is a standing session in every case, and we see families in San Jose and Redwood City.
For parents
Something happened, and they've been different since.
Maybe you know exactly what it was: the accident, the loss, the thing they saw, the thing that happened to them.
Maybe you only know the after. The nightmares, the clinginess that came back, the sudden rages, the kid who used to sleep through the night and now won't.
Maybe they won't talk about it at all, and you don't know whether to push or leave it alone.
And the questions you only ask yourself, on the 2am loop:
"Did I miss something?"
"Should we have come in right after?"
"Is something actually wrong?"
It starts with one memory and ends up everywhere.
People around you have opinions about the timeline.
Kids bounce back.
It was so long ago.
He seems fine to me.
Meanwhile you're the one in the hallway at 3am when the nightmare hits, and fine is not the word you'd use.
You're not overreacting. When a child changes after a hard experience, the change is them telling you it's still with them.
I'm Hannah Ly, LMFT. My training is in Synergetic Play Therapy and Brainspotting, including Brainspotting for children, and the thing I hold hardest in trauma therapy is pace. Pushing a kid faster than their body can go teaches them the therapy room isn't safe either. So we don't.
Every therapist here holds pace the same way, because I trained each of them and we go over every case together weekly. I do every consultation call myself, so we can talk through what happened before deciding who your child sees.
Behavior problems, anxiety, or a kid who should be over it by now.
A nervous system went into protection mode and never got the message the danger passed.
They can't decide their way out of that. Trauma lives in the body more than in the story, which is why being made to retell it can make things worse.
Your child is carrying something their body hasn't been able to put down.
Kids replay hard things in their play, at a distance that feels safe: the crash rebuilt with cars, the scary thing happening to the puppet instead. We follow it, we don't force it, and the processing happens inside the play whether or not the event ever gets named out loud.
A brain-body approach that lets the nervous system release what it's holding without a verbal retelling. Your teen doesn't have to find the words for it to move.
That's not a soft preference. Pushing a traumatized kid faster than their body can go teaches them the therapy room isn't safe either, and then you've lost the one place that was working.
The hardest part of parenting a child through this is not knowing what to do when it surfaces at home. We work on exactly that.
Some trauma is a single event. A car accident, a dog attack, a death, a fire, a frightening night in the ER. There was a before, and there is an after, and your child's body is still braced for the moment in between.
Some trauma is not one event but a pattern. Abuse, neglect, violence at home, years of instability, harm inside a relationship that was supposed to be safe. Therapists call this complex trauma. It doesn't just leave a memory, it shapes what a child expects from the people closest to them. Both kinds respond to therapy. They just don't respond on the same timeline, and we will be honest with you about that from the first call.
Some trauma is one event. Some is a pattern. Both respond to play therapy and Brainspotting.
A parent, a grandparent, a sibling, a friend, a pet. Children grieve in pieces, fine at the funeral and falling apart three weeks later over a lost toy. Play gives grief somewhere to go when a child doesn't have the words for it yet.
A hospitalization, a surgery, a scary diagnosis, a NICU start, a choking scare that changed how they eat. When a child's body has been through something frightening, even to save them, the fear can stay behind after the treatment ends.
A car accident, a dog bite, a fall, a fire, a near miss. It can seem small from the outside. What matters is not how the event looked, it's what your child's nervous system decided about it.
Some children weren't the target and were still changed by what they saw, at home, at school, or in the community. Watching someone you love be hurt, or be frightening, is its own trauma, and children carry it even when everyone believes they were asleep.
Physical, sexual, or emotional. If this is why you're reading this page, we're glad you found it, and we're sorry you needed to. Your child may be safe now. Their body may not have gotten the message yet. We go at their pace, with no forced retelling, and we help you know what to do at home while they heal.
Trauma isn't only what happened. It's also what didn't. Care, food, safety, or attention that wasn't there shapes a child just as deeply as a frightening event, and it often shows up as self-reliance that looks like maturity until it cracks.
Some children were too young to remember what happened. Their body remembers anyway. Play therapy reaches experiences that came before words, which is why it works when a child can't tell the story, and why we use it. Many of the foster and adoptive families we work with start here.
Sustained bullying is trauma, not a rite of passage. A child who is targeted learns something about their own worth and safety that follows them out of the school year, and it deserves the same care as any other hard thing on this page.
The same experience surfaces differently depending on how old your child is.
Regression is the headline. Potty accidents after being dry, baby talk, a child who suddenly can't sleep alone. Play gets repetitive and intense, the same crash, the same rescue, over and over. This is a young child processing the only way they can.
Stomachaches and headaches with no medical cause. Trouble concentrating that gets read as attention problems. Big reactions to small reminders, and a new carefulness, as if they've taken on a job nobody assigned them.
It often goes underground. Irritability, risk-taking, numbness, "I'm fine" through a closed door. Some teens can tell you the event didn't bother them and mean it, while their sleep, grades, and friendships say otherwise. This is where Brainspotting earns its place, because it doesn't require them to open up on command.
The reminder that used to set off a meltdown stops landing that way.
They sleep better.
They let you close again.
The experience stops being the center of gravity for the whole family.
Over time, what families describe is the charge coming out of it.
The event stays part of their story. It stops being the thing running it.
You tell us what happened, or what you've been seeing. We tell you honestly whether this is a fit, how we'd approach it, and which therapist we think fits your child best, usually one of our other therapists, each trained and supervised by Hannah. You don't have to have the whole story straight.
We take the history from you first, so your child never has to be the one to explain.
Play, or Brainspotting, at your child's pace.
What to do when it shows up at home.
No. That's the point of how we work. Play therapy and Brainspotting both process trauma without a forced retelling, and for most kids that's not just gentler, it's more effective.
No. Trauma doesn't expire, and it often surfaces at a new developmental stage, a new school, adolescence, or a reminder nobody saw coming. Showing up years later is normal, and the same therapy still helps.
Single-incident trauma comes from one event, an accident, a loss, a frightening experience. Complex trauma comes from repeated or ongoing harm, usually inside relationships, like abuse, neglect, or violence at home. Both respond to therapy. Complex trauma usually takes longer, because therapy isn't only processing an event, it's rebuilding what a child expects from the people who care for them.
Yes. Children don't need a memory they can describe for an experience to affect them. The body keeps its own record. Play therapy works below the level of words, which is exactly why we use it for early and preverbal trauma.
Trauma is defined by what your child's nervous system did with an experience, not by how bad it looked from the outside. A fender bender, a dog that snapped, one bad night in the ER can all lodge. If your child changed after it, that's reason enough to talk to us.
There's no honest fixed answer. Single-incident trauma often moves faster in therapy. Complex trauma takes longer. Sessions are weekly, and we tell you what we're seeing as we go, so you're never guessing about whether it's working.
We can be your child's therapist, and only their therapist. We don't perform custody evaluations, write recommendations about parenting time, or serve as expert witnesses, because a therapy room only works if it stays out of the dispute. If your case needs evaluation or documentation, the court has channels for that, minor's counsel, Family Court Services, or a court-appointed evaluator, and we can point you in the right direction on the call.
Sessions run $200 to $300 depending on the therapist. We are private pay, and we provide superbills you can submit for out-of-network reimbursement.
A San Jose child therapist walks through building a family safety plan for when behavior turns unsafe: triggers, prevention, and what comes after a crisis.
What to do when your child hits or lashes out at you: how to stay safe, keep yourself regulated in the moment, and know when to bring in more help.
What play therapy is, what it is not, and why children ages 3 to 10 work things out through play. For parents weighing whether it fits their child.
Tell us what happened, or just what you've been seeing. We'll tell you honestly whether this is the right fit for your child.
