Insurance plans accepted:
BlueCross and BlueShield
Medicare
Optum: Allways, VACCN, UnitedHealthcare, Health Plans Inc, Oxford, UMR, Mass General Brigham
Point32: Tufts Public, Tufts Health Plans, Harvard Pilgrim
Tufts Commercial
Tufts Public
Out-of-Pocket/Self-Paid

Location: Hadley, Hybrid

Tim Oaks (they/he/she) has been helping people recover and grow from trauma for over 20 years. Tim started in massage therapy, movement and awareness education, then after an MSW at Smith College trained and practiced intensive trauma therapy at Northampton’s Trauma Institute before joining Advance Psychotherapy in 2025. 

Tim has worked with a broad range of clients to help them process experiences including child abuse and neglect, domestic and sexual violence, medical trauma, discrimination across many identities, military and humanitarian service, poverty, substance abuse, etc.  Tim uses memory treatment techniques including EMDR, Flash, and Progressive Counting, and offers intensive treatment (2-6 hours per day) to suitable clients to increase efficiency and shorten the treatment trajectory. 

Tim follows a structured, stepwise therapy which is collaboratively adapted to each client: first building a common understanding of goals, strengths, symptoms and challenges; second, supporting nervous system capacity with increased well-being, awareness, and useful concepts; third, identifying key past experiences and digesting them in small chunks at the client’s pace, and fourth, integration – supporting the client as they explore life from this new experience.

A brief understanding of trauma: When the intensity of life matches a person’s capacity to feel and make sense of it, each experience is processed: “digested” and filed in memory as a completed experience with life lessons and helpful information noted for future use.  Trauma can be thought of as unprocessed, undigested memories and memory fragments which get replayed on top of whatever’s going on now.  They can be entire memories flashing back at once or fragmented, uncomfortable sensations that come, linger, or go without apparent cause. At best, these re-lived memories pull energy and attention away from the present.  At worst, they turn up the intensity of life so much that they cause outsized or unhelpful reactions like anxiety, anger, hopelessness, spacing out, shutting down and dissociation.