I work with adults whose past experiences are showing up in the present: anxiety that doesn't have an obvious cause, relationship patterns that feel familiar in painful ways, hypervigilance, emotional numbing, intrusive memories, or a sense that something happened that you've never properly processed.
What trauma actually is
Trauma isn't defined by the event itself, it's defined by how your nervous system responded to it. What was overwhelming for one person at one moment might not be for someone else. There's no objective scale. What matters is what your system couldn't fully metabolise at the time.
This includes what's sometimes called “big T” trauma, discrete events like accidents, assaults, sudden losses, but also “small t” trauma, which is often more pervasive: emotional neglect, chronic invalidation, environments that weren't safe enough for you to develop in. The latter often doesn't get named as trauma at all, which is part of why it can be so difficult to access and work with.
The body remembers what the mind doesn't always have words for. Trauma lives in the nervous system, not just the memory. That's why purely cognitive approaches sometimes only get you so far.
How I work with trauma
Trauma work has to be paced carefully. Going too fast or too deep too soon can re-traumatise rather than heal. The early stages of therapy for trauma are often about building the capacity to do the work, establishing safety, learning to regulate, developing trust in the therapeutic relationship.
Stabilisation and resourcing. Before we approach the difficult material, we make sure you have the internal and external resources to handle what comes up. This isn't a delay, it's the actual work.
Integrative approaches. I draw on psychodynamic understanding, somatic awareness, and cognitive work as fits what you bring. I don't use a single rigid trauma protocol, different approaches suit different people and different kinds of trauma.
Working with the body. Trauma changes the nervous system. We work with grounding, breath, and noticing what's happening in the body, alongside the cognitive and relational work. The goal is to help your system update, to learn, at a level deeper than thought, that the danger is over.
Relational safety as the foundation. For trauma that happened in relationships, and most does, the therapeutic relationship is itself a vehicle for healing. Having a consistent, attuned, non-judgmental presence over time can do work that techniques alone can't.
A note: I don't provide EMDR. If you've identified that EMDR is what you specifically want, I can signpost you to colleagues who do that work. The approaches I do offer have strong evidence bases for trauma and may be a good fit for many people.
What therapy with me looks like
You set the pace. Always. Trauma work that doesn't respect your pace isn't trauma work, it's re-traumatising. If something is too much, we slow down. If you need to pause the deeper work and focus on coping for a while, that's part of it.
The goal isn't to “fix” what happened. The goal is to help your system finish processing it, so that the past stops governing your present.