In-person Trauma Therapy for Trauma + PTSD, and online throughout Ontario
Do past experiences continue to impact your life and relationships?
You don’t have to continue to suffer.
What is Trauma?
Trauma can cast a long shadow over our lives, leaving us feeling overwhelmed, disconnected, and stuck in a cycle of pain. It can have a profound impact on your mental and emotional well-being. The experience/s are over, but you can’t ‘shake it off’.
Maybe you find yourself:
Pre-occupied by memories or triggered by seemingly innocuous events
Experiencing chronic anxiety and depression.
Stuck in patterns of emotional reactivity or addictive behaviours.
Numbing out or ‘zoning out’ just to get through the day.
Struggling to maintain emotional connections with others and not sure why.
Unsure of who you ‘really are’.
The impacts of trauma are not always obvious. Sometimes they can manifest in PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) symptoms like nightmares and flashbacks, but often impacts are not so clearly connected - difficulties with self-love, a belief that you are not worthy or good enough, people-pleasing patterns that you can’t break, making your needs small, perfectionism, chronic feelings of sadness or emptiness. These are all symptoms of trauma.
How does trauma therapy work?
People often come to me aware of how they are stuck and intellectually knowing, at least to some extent, that the core beliefs they hold are probably not true. But they can FEEL true in our core.
For example, some part of you may know (at least intellectually) that what happened wasn’t your fault, that you are safe now, and that you are worthy of love. But deep down you feel worried that you are actually broken. That you are to blame, that you are unworthy or bad, and that your body is constantly in survival mode.
Sometimes folks come to me having no idea what these thoughts and feelings are connected to, they just know that they don’t feel the way they want to feel in their life.
Either way, I can help.
We will go on a journey together of understanding where your brain, body, and nervous system are stuck. Then we will make a plan that will target these areas of stuckness in order to shift your mind, body and spirit to a more calm and confident you.
In therapy with me, you don’t have to talk in detail about what happened. You don’t even need to know what happened. You just need to show up and be ready to do the work.
I specialize in treating the following types of traumatic experiences:
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When we are young, we have less capacity to handle overwhelming experiences, so they 'get stuck' in our nervous systems and impact our beliefs about ourselves, the way we relate to others, and some of our behavioural and emotional patterns.
This can include big "T" traumas like physical or sexual abuse, a parent passing away or incarcerated, as well as experiences that we might not identify as 'trauma' (what I call little 't' traumas) such as bullying, experiences of migration/immigration or moving around lot, experiences of discrimination, difficult dynamics with a parent that made us feel shame or unloved, etc.
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This is painful experiences or dynamics that occur with our caregiver or other trusted people in our lives. Because we rely on these first relationships in our early lives to understand ourselves, relationships, and the world around us, they can have a profound impact on us.
Some dynamics that can contribute to this kind of trauma include:
physical, sexual, or emotional abuse
A parent who was cold, shaming, harsh or unreliable
A parent who was over-involved, had poor boundaries or relied too much on you for their own needs
A parent with mental health or addiction issues
Patterns of relating that feel passed down through generations
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Research shows that getting help early on after a traumatic experience can decrease the likeliness of developing PTSD. Even if it is not likely to cause PTSD, processing the event can help ensure that it does not impact your life negatively in the future.
Whether something was traumatic or not is all about how your brain and body are reacting. So something can feel traumatic for one person and not for another.
Some common experiences that people come to me to process include:
Accident
Experience of abuse
Betrayal in their relationship
Incident at work
Divorce or break up
Parenting a child with severe mental health or behavioural issues
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Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can result from a singular event or from a series of events - overloading your systems' ability to cope with overwhelm that was too much, or lasted too long, for your nervous system to handle and be able to 'metabolize'. These experiences get 'stuck' in the body and our nervous systems. We are left with symptoms that are often challenging to cope with:
Flashbacks and nightmares
Avoiding certain places, people, behaviours in order to feel safer
A change in your core beliefs about yourself and the world around
Intense emotional reactions that feel like they come out of nowhere
Feeling out of control
The research keeps showing us that in order to heal and recover from trauma, we require a ‘bottom-up’ approach to treatment that can access and shift the ways that we store trauma in our bodies and nervous systems.
I got you.
I work with a number of methods that do just that.
Research about trauma and neuroscience has greatly evolved over the past few decades.
These advancements continue to confirm that ‘the body keeps the score’.
My approaches:
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EMDR is a therapeutic approach designed to get relief from traumatic and distressing memories.
It allows you to access the natural healing processes of the brain in order to:
Decrease the emotional and body reactivity caused by past experiences.
Shift negative core beliefs to more positive ones.
Alleviate a wide variety of symptoms, including flashbacks, insomnia, chronic pain, anxiety, chronic guilt, etc.
It is a highly researched and effective approach to often get rapid relief from symptoms and does NOT require you to talk at length about what happened. You can read more about EMDR therapy here.
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Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) is a cutting edge approach that uses the latest research on trauma and brain science to help clients to finally move out of survival mode to be more grounded and present.
DBR is a body-based approach, meaning that there isn't a lot of talking involved. Rather, we spend the time focusing on helping you 'rewire' the brain/body patterns that are causing havoc in your life.
It is a great approach for finally shifting those deep-seated reactions and triggers that feel so automatic.
Go from fight/flight/freeze reactions to calm and grounded responses.
You can read more about DBR here.
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Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a creative and dynamic approach to change through improved internal harmony. It is like getting to know your 'internal family', the different parts of yourself that make you 'you'. Through IFS (AKA 'parts work'), we can:
Better understand conflicting internal motivations, desires, and fears to get unstuck and move forward with clarity and confidence.
Help heal emotional wounds from the past that are driving current behaviours.
Feel more internal harmony and better communicate with our self and others.
You can read more about IFS therapy here.
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DBT is a practical and skill-based approach to addressing intense emotions and difficult relational situations.
DBT offers lots of super useful skills for:
Emotion regulation (Being able to experience our emotions without getting hijacked by them);
Distress tolerance (Being able to 'ride out' a period of intense emotion without making the situation worse)
Interpersonal Effectiveness (Being better at relationships and getting your needs met).
Mindfulness (Using your ability to be in the present moment in order to respond rather than react).
Please note: While I incorporate DBT into my individual therapy, I do not offer a full DBT program.
You can read more about DBT here.
“When we can see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build the necessary foundation for self-love…”
- Bell Hooks
Trauma Therapy Can Help With:
Relief from symptoms: Find relief from debilitating symptoms such as flashbacks, nightmares, and hypervigilance.
Increased self-awareness: Gain insight into how past experiences have shaped your beliefs, behaviors, and relationships.
Enhanced coping skills: Learn practical strategies to manage triggers and regulate your emotions in healthy ways.
Healing of past wounds: Release pent-up emotions and find closure through the process of healing and integration.
Greater sense of self: Reclaim control over your life and rediscover your inner strength and resilience.
Trauma Therapy FAQ:
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Fill out the form in the 'get in touch' section of my website. We will set up a time to connect and see if we are a good fit in working together!
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I often start where other therapists leave off. Meaning that we start by gaining clarity about where and why you are stuck and do a deep exploration of what work we need to do to shift things for you.
I go deep with folks to get at root causes of their difficulties to achieve lasting change.
I work in a more condensed format, so that you can get relief sooner. 90-minute sessions allows us to get into flow together and access the energy and focus that is often required for deep transformational change.
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This depends on how much you want to work on.
I am someone who likes to help folks achieve relief and growth as efficiently as possible, all while fostering a trusting relationship and going at a pace you are comfortable with.
With some folks we do one short-term focused piece of healing and they move on with their lives, while other folks want to work on a few different areas of their lives.
Because I work in a more intensive format of 90-minute or longer sessions, people tend to be in therapy for less time overall. This is because a more condensed format allows us to focus our time and energy on your goals and less time on the opening and closing of sessions, or just managing symptoms.
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No, you do not have to talk in detail about what happened. In fact, you don't necessarily even need to know the details yourself.
Because I use deep brain- and body-based methods (aka 'bottom-up' approaches), we don't spend a lot of time talking about the details. We identify the overarching themes and then identify and process the trauma-based core beliefs, body sensations, emotions and images that are 'stuck'.
You can generally share as little or as much detail as you feel comfortable.
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If you are someone who feels stuck in certain behavioural or emotional patterns that you can't shift, if you are in a constant state of overwhelm or disconnect, if your survival mode gets triggered often or is stuck in the 'on' position, then you are likely a good candidate for trauma therapy.
who is constantly stuck in overthinking, someone who is constantly worried about what others think, who experiences chronic feelings of guilt, who second guesses yourself, or who experiences symptoms like panic attacks, knots in your chest/stomach or chronic tension, then you are likely a good candidate!