We are here for you to get reconnected to your self. Take the first step and contact us today. Check out our referral form below. We currently only take CCS clients in Dane County.
Luma Via’s Racial, Cultural & Intergenerational Trauma Program looks at the full story: what happened, what is still happening, what the body learned to do to survive, and what has been carried through families, culture, and systems.
Symptoms can make more sense when we understand the environment in which they developed. Our clinicians look at the interaction between the brain, body, relationships, family, culture, identity, community, and current lived experience.
Cultural responsiveness is not an extra layer added after treatment begins. When it matters to the client, it becomes part of the clinical formulation itself.
For some people, trauma is historical. For others, discrimination, exclusion, stereotyping, or identity-based stress may still be happening in the present. Treatment needs room for both.
A structured way to understand the layers of racial, cultural, and intergenerational trauma without reducing the person to a diagnosis—or reducing culture to pathology.
We explore family history, culture, migration or displacement, identity, community, generational patterns, messages about safety and strength, and the experiences that shaped how a person learned to move through the world.
We look at hypervigilance, shutdown, anxiety, anger, avoidance, sleep, body tension, dissociation, memory, trust, and the ways repeated stress can shape emotional and physiological responses.
We make room for current realities—workplace or school discrimination, microaggressions, medical mistrust, cultural stress, exclusion, stereotyping, and situations where speaking up may carry real emotional or social consequences.
Treatment moves toward choice: regulation, trauma processing, EMDR when clinically appropriate, stronger boundaries, connection, identity, self-advocacy, relationships, confidence, and a life no longer organized entirely around survival.
War, displacement, racism, poverty, violence, persecution, forced assimilation, incarceration, family separation, and other adversity can shape how later generations understand safety, trust, emotions, relationships, authority, and survival.
The experiences a family or community survived.
Beliefs and strategies that helped people endure those experiences.
Patterns in attachment, parenting, communication, silence, vigilance, or self-reliance.
Understanding the origin of a pattern creates more choice about what continues forward.
Trauma treatment should not teach someone to regulate themselves into accepting harmful treatment.
When a client is navigating discrimination or another real present-day stressor, the goal is not to convince them that the problem exists only inside their nervous system. Therapy can help a person distinguish past trauma responses from current threats while strengthening regulation, boundaries, decision-making, communication, and self-advocacy.
Racial or cultural trauma may show up through anxiety, depression, trauma symptoms, anger, exhaustion, avoidance, mistrust, relationship difficulties, or changes in how safe a person feels in everyday environments. When appropriate, treatment may include EMDR alongside regulation, psychoeducation, identity-focused work, and other trauma-informed interventions.
For some clients, insight and coping skills are only part of the work. Experiences of racism, discrimination, family trauma, or other overwhelming events can remain connected to intense emotions, body sensations, beliefs, and threat responses long after the experience itself has ended.
EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—is a trauma-focused psychotherapy that may help clients process distressing experiences and reduce the intensity of the emotions, beliefs, and physiological reactions connected to them.
When trauma involves racism or discrimination, treatment should not suggest that the client simply misunderstood a harmful experience. EMDR can be used within a culturally responsive framework that acknowledges both the reality of what occurred and the nervous system's response to it.
A behavior can be a trauma response, a cultural norm, a family survival strategy, a reaction to present-day discrimination, a mental health symptom—or several of these at once. Good care requires curiosity before conclusions.
This program may be appropriate when trauma cannot be fully understood without considering race, culture, family history, identity, environment, or experiences across generations.
Direct or repeated racism, discrimination, racial harassment, profiling, stereotyping, or microaggressions.
Family or community patterns shaped by adversity, displacement, violence, racism, persecution, or loss.
Acculturation, migration, identity conflicts, cultural disconnection, belonging, or navigating multiple cultural worlds.
Harmful experiences in healthcare, education, employment, legal, or other institutional settings.
Questions of identity, acceptance, visibility, belonging, or feeling pressure to minimize parts of oneself.
Hypervigilance, anxiety, shutdown, anger, depression, avoidance, sleep changes, mistrust, or difficulty feeling safe.
We begin with the person in front of us—their symptoms, strengths, family, identity, culture, environment, goals, and lived experience.
