Trauma Counselling

Most people who come to trauma therapy aren't falling apart. They're functioning. They've been functioning for years, sometimes decades, holding things together with strategies that worked well enough until they didn't. The numbness, the hypervigilance, the relationships that keep going sideways, the way certain moments can pull you back into something you thought you'd moved past. These aren't weaknesses or overreactions. They're the marks of a system that learned to survive something it shouldn't have had to survive.

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Healing from trauma isn't about revisiting the past for its own sake. It's about helping your nervous system learn, at a level deeper than thought or insight, that it's safe to come out of survival mode. That the strategies that protected you then don't have to run your life now.

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I work with trauma using an integrated approach that brings together Compassionate Inquiry, Internal Family Systems, and Somatic Experiencing. What this means in practice is that we work slowly and carefully, following what's actually happening in the room rather than a fixed protocol. We pay attention to the body: the tightening in the chest, the urge to disappear, the sudden flatness that descends without warning. We get curious about the parts of you that have been carrying the heaviest loads, often for a very long time, and we approach them with something most of them have rarely received: genuine care and interest rather than judgment or urgency.

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This is not therapy where we push through, or where I guide you to places you're not ready to go. The pace is yours. The work is collaborative. And the goal is not to perform healing but to actually experience the difference between a nervous system organised around threat and one that has more room to breathe.

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I work with adults who have experienced:

• Childhood trauma, including physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, neglect, and growing up in households shaped by addiction, mental illness, or violence

• Sexual trauma and assault at any point in life

• Relational trauma, including emotional abuse, coercive control, and betrayal by people who were supposed to be safe

• Single-incident trauma such as accidents, medical events, natural disasters, or sudden loss

• Occupational and first responder trauma, including cumulative exposure to distressing events in the line of work

• Complex and developmental trauma, where the wound is not one event but a whole environment, a whole childhood, a whole relationship

 

Trauma counselling can support you to:

• Understand what your body and nervous system have been trying to do, and why, without shame

• Reduce the grip of hypervigilance, reactivity, numbness, or dissociation on your daily life

• Work with the parts of you that formed to protect you, rather than against them

• Process what happened without being retraumatised by it

• Rebuild a felt sense of safety in your own body

• Untangle trauma from your sense of identity and self-worth

• Begin to trust again, including trusting yourself