When Your Voice Goes Silent: How Somatic Vocal Awareness and IFS Therapy Can Help You Reclaim Your Power

Your voice isn't just how you communicate — it's how your nervous system signals safety, connection, and belonging. When early attachment experiences taught you that being fully heard wasn't safe, that learning doesn't stay in childhood. It shows up in the throat that closes mid-sentence, the words that disappear in conflict, the boundary you couldn't quite finish saying out loud.

At Green Willow Counseling, Christy Peterson, AMFT, brings a rare combination of classical vocal training and IFS-based trauma therapy to this work — helping clients understand not just why their voice goes quiet, but what it takes to bring it back.

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What OCD Really Feels Like: Understanding Obsessions, Compulsions, and the OCD Cycle

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is one of the most common, yet most misunderstood, mental health conditions. Despite how frequently it occurs, many people wait years, sometimes over a decade, before receiving an accurate diagnosis. That delay isn’t random. It stems from a mix of stigma, misinformation, and the way OCD actually shows up in real life—often very differently from what people expect.

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Understanding Your Window of Tolerance: A Guide for Trauma Survivors

There is a concept in trauma therapy called the window of tolerance. It is one of the most useful frameworks for understanding what happens inside your body when childhood trauma still impacts you in your adult life. At Green Willow Counseling in Murray, Utah, we use this framework every day with clients across Salt Lake County who are working to heal from past trauma, abuse and neglect.

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