Healing Trauma

Dr. Babbel practices as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Online & Teletherapy are is offered for residents in CA.

Individual therapy sessions are available to adults via in-person sessions located at my private San Francisco office or online.

09/08/2026

We tend to think of self-trust as a feeling to cultivate, something you talk yourself into. In practice it behaves much more like ordinary trust. You believe people who follow through. You get quietly guarded around people who don’t, even when they mean well. Your relationship with yourself runs on the same evidence.

Which means a lot of us are carrying a long internal record of unmet intentions. The rest that kept getting postponed. The boundary set on Sunday and dropped by Tuesday. None of that makes you unreliable as a person. It usually means you were setting commitments sized for a life with more room in it than you actually have. The repair tends to start embarrassingly small, and that’s the point. Something so modest it feels almost silly, kept consistently, does more than a plan that collapses by midweek. You’re not building discipline. You’re showing your own system that your word means something.

My new book titled, 4 Minutes 4 Me explores how that connection gets lost and how we can be rebuilt, in small, meaningful and managable ways.

09/04/2026

There’s a specific kind of blankness that surprises people. You’re asked where you want to eat, or what you’d do with a free Saturday, and there’s simply no answer. Not indecision. Absence. Meanwhile you could describe what your partner wants, what your mother expects, and what your team needs without pausing.

This makes sense as an outcome. If your preferences were once met with disappointment, tension, or the sense that you were being a burden, attending to other people became a more useful skill. So that’s the one that got twenty years of practice. Wanting is a capacity like any other, and capacities go quiet without use. The encouraging part is that it comes back the way it left: gradually, and usually in small things first. Which seat? Which walk. What you’d actually like to be doing right now, before you check whether it’s reasonable.

My new book is about turning back toward yourself, and it’s coming later this year.

09/02/2026

Some discomfort arrives with a clear cause. You can name what happened and why it hurt. But another kind shows up with nothing attached to it: a quiet sense that something is off, in a life that looks fine from the outside. No crisis, no obvious problem, just a persistent feeling of being slightly out of step with your own life.

That feeling usually gets dismissed, because there’s no evidence to point to and no one to blame. But your body tends to notice a mismatch long before your mind agrees to name it. Flatness where there used to be interest. Restlessness that doesn’t attach to anything. Relief when plans get canceled. These are worth taking seriously as information rather than proof that you’re difficult or ungrateful. You don’t need an answer yet. Noticing that the feeling exists, and letting it be real, is already a shift.

That noticing eventually led me to somatic psychology, my practice, and now to a new book about how any of us can learn to listen inward again. Coming later this year.

08/29/2026

Self-abandonment rarely feels dramatic. It feels like saying yes half a second before you’ve checked, then noticing a heaviness later that you can’t quite source. The body tends to keep the tab: tension that returns to the same spot, tiredness that sleep doesn’t fix, irritation that spills onto people who had nothing to do with it.

Resentment is one of the most useful signals here, though it arrives late. It tends to mean a no went unsaid somewhere back down the line. Rather than treating it as a character problem, you can treat it as information: what did I agree to that I hadn’t finished thinking about? The answer usually isn’t a dramatic confrontation. It’s a small correction, made earlier next time.

And it helps to be gentle about all of it. Whatever you learned to do, you learned it because it worked. Something in you needed steadiness, and this was available. Warmth toward that younger strategy tends to open more room for change than criticism ever does.

My new book is about turning back toward yourself, and it’s coming later this year.

Resentment as information about a no that went unspoken.

Self-compassion opens more room for change than self-criticism.

08/28/2026

Most of us learned early which version of ourselves went over well. Maybe it was the easygoing one, the high achiever, the one who never seemed to need much. That version got rewarded, so it got practiced, and after enough repetition it stopped feeling like a role and started feeling like who you are.

The tricky part is that expectations stop announcing themselves. You don’t hear “she would be disappointed” or “people like us don’t complain.” You just feel a wave of wrongness when you consider doing something different. That feeling is worth slowing down for. The next time a should arrives, ask where you first learned it and whose approval it was protecting. Sometimes the rule turns out to have never been yours. Noticing it doesn’t obligate you to overhaul anything. It just returns a little authorship.

What’s one rule you follow that you’ve never actually examined?

How other people’s expectations become an internal voice you mistake for your own.

Tracing a should back to its origin loosens its authority.

08/20/2026

One of the things I notice most in my office is how automatic “I’m fine” has become. People say it easily, and often they aren’t hiding anything. They’ve simply grown so accustomed to disconnecting from their emotions that it’s the only answer available.

Emotional disconnection tends to show up in ordinary ways. Staying busy because stillness feels uncomfortable. Physical symptoms with no clear cause. Impossible standards and disappointment when you can’t meet them. Struggling to know what you want or need. Feeling lonely in a room full of people. None of that is a character flaw. It’s usually an old survival strategy that made sense once and outlived its usefulness. My new book is about turning back toward yourself, and it’s coming later this year.

08/19/2026

Growing up in Germany, I learned early that emotions were something you felt privately and left unspoken. I don’t think anyone intended that as a lesson. Those beliefs about emotional restraint had been passed down from a generation that survived a war and had no language for what it carried, and they arrived in me the way most inherited things do, through tone and silence rather than instruction.

Dance was what brought me back. Long before I had words for what I felt, I could sense when my movements went heavy, when I forgot choreography because sadness had crept in, when tension gathered somewhere before a difficult step. My body was speaking first. That’s what eventually led me to somatic psychology, to my practice, and now to a new book about how any of us can learn to listen inward again. Coming later this year.

08/18/2026

For years I measured myself against outside expectations and set my own needs aside. I abandoned myself without realizing it, the way so many of us do when we’re trying to fit in, keep the peace, or meet impossible standards. Nothing looked wrong from the outside. Inside, something essential had gone quiet.

What I’ve seen in my therapy practice again and again is that this feeling rarely means you’ve chosen the wrong life. More often it means you’ve lost touch with your internal compass, the guidance that develops when you’re connected to your emotions and the signals of your body. I’ve written a new book about how that connection gets lost and how it can be rebuilt, in small and doable ways. It’s coming hopefully by the end of the year, and I’ll be sharing more as we get closer. Join my email list for more updates. Link in bio.

08/13/2026

There is a specific restlessness that arrives when you are torn. Stay or go. Speak or keep the peace. Forgive or hold the line. The mind starts building arguments, the chest tightens, sleep gets thin, and eventually any decision feels better than continuing to sit in it. That pressure is real, and it helps to recognize what it is. Often it is the nervous system reaching for relief from an unresolved state rather than the psyche reaching for the right answer. Decisions made under that pressure tend to be the ones we revisit.

Jung described something he called the transcendent function: what becomes available when a person holds two opposing truths long enough without forcing either one away. A third possibility forms, an option or an understanding that neither side could have produced alone. Holding it is uncomfortable and it is survivable, especially with support. Slower exhales. Feet on the floor. A body that gets tended while the question stays open. If you are sitting with something unresolved this week, consider giving it a few more days than feels comfortable and noticing what shows up in the extra time. What are you being asked to hold right now?

08/12/2026

You can love someone and be furious with them. You can grieve a life you chose to leave. You can feel relief inside a loss that also devastates you. Most of us learn to treat this as a problem to solve, as though one feeling must be the real one and the other a mistake. So we pick a side and quietly exile the rest. What gets exiled tends not to leave. It waits in the body as tightness, restlessness, a low static that surfaces in situations that seem unrelated.

Jung understood the psyche as a system built from opposites, and he considered the ability to hold both without collapsing into one a sign of maturity. The body is usually ahead of us here. It will register warmth in the chest and bracing in the belly in the same breath, carrying the whole truth before the mind agrees to. Try this: bring to mind something you feel two ways about, and instead of deciding which feeling is correct, locate each one. Where does the first live? Where does the second? Give them both thirty seconds of attention without ranking them. What are you holding two ways about right now? One word below.

Address

3727 Buchanan Street
San Francisco, CA
94123

Telephone

+14158786463

Website

http://DrBabbel.com/

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