Martineau Counseling

You may be functioning on the outside while feeling stuck in patterns that don’t seem to change—anxiety, emotional overwhelm, overthinking, shutdown, difficulty trusting others, or a sense of disconnection from yourself or the people around you. Many people I work with are managing daily responsibilities, relationships, and work while also carrying an internal weight that others don’t see. Even when life looks fine externally, it can still feel exhausting, tense, or emotionally distant internally. These experiences are often connected to past events, ongoing stress, difficult relationships, or situations where something felt overwhelming, unsafe, or emotionally difficult to process at the time. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone, and trauma therapy may be helpful. I specialize in trauma and PTSD therapy for adults in Boise and the surrounding areas, including Meridian, Eagle, and Nampa, as well as through telehealth across Idaho. My focus is on helping you reduce the ongoing impact of past experiences so they feel less present in your daily life and less disruptive in how you think, feel, and relate to others. Trauma is not only about what happened, but also about how your nervous system adapted afterward. This can show up as overthinking, emotional shutdown, hypervigilance, difficulty trusting others, or feeling disconnected from yourself. Therapy can help you begin to understand these patterns and change how they show up in your life. Over time, this work often involves reducing the emotional intensity of distressing or traumatic memories, becoming more aware of patterns of avoidance or shutdown, reconnecting with emotions in a way that feels safer and more manageable, and building greater stability, clarity, and self-understanding while also improving relationships and boundaries. I use EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to support this process. EMDR helps reduce the emotional intensity of distressing or traumatic memories so they feel less overwhelming and less present in your daily experience. ACT helps you become less caught in cycles of overthinking, avoidance, and internal struggle while building more flexibility in how you relate to difficult thoughts and emotions and reconnecting you with what matters most in your life. Together, these approaches support both processing past experiences and developing more effective ways of navigating present-day emotional life. Therapy is a collaborative process, and we move at a pace that feels safe and manageable for you. You do not need to have everything figured out before starting, and many people begin therapy feeling unsure of where to start or how to describe what they are experiencing. In our work together, we focus on making sense of your emotional patterns, processing experiences that continue to affect you, reducing the intensity of overwhelming thoughts and emotions, and building emotional resilience and self-compassion over time. I work with adults experiencing anxiety related to past experiences, emotional overwhelm or shutdown, childhood emotional neglect or abuse, trauma and PTSD symptoms, relationship difficulties connected to past experiences, and long-standing patterns of feeling stuck in how they cope or respond emotionally. Reaching out for therapy can feel like a significant step, especially if you have been managing things on your own for a long time. I offer a free 15-minute consultation where we can briefly talk about what you are looking for and see whether working together feels like a good fit. You can contact me by phone, email, or through the contact form on this website to schedule a consultation. Change in therapy often does not happen all at once. It tends to begin with small shifts—less reactivity, more awareness, and moments where things start to feel a little less heavy than before. You do not have to navigate that process alone.