If you have experienced traumatic events in your life, recently or in the past, you can be left with difficult symptoms that affect you mentally and physically. This can continue to have a huge impact on you and your quality of life long after the event. Some people are unsure whether what they have experienced is really trauma.
Trauma can be anything that affects you and is overwhelming or difficult for you to cope with. This could include bullying, childhood neglect, childbirth, emotional abuse, domestic abuse, illness, death, redundancy as well as things traditionally seen as trauma such as accidents, sexual assaults or violent attacks.
If you are unsure whether you are affected by past traumatic experiences, please check out the Trauma symptom checklist. Symptoms may include feeling sweaty or shaky with palpitations, avoiding phone calls or reminders, increased irritability or tearfulness, difficulties with travelling, and a sense of being cut off or isolated, or other challenges described in the full list:
Sleep problems
Trauma
Increased alcohol consumption
Thinking about what happened
Problems leaving home or meeting people
Depression
Feeling cut-off
Difficulty concentrating
Loss of sexual drive
Hypervigilance
Being more withdrawn
Guilt or Shame
Headaches
Flashbacks or nightmares
Unresolved trauma requires specific trauma-focused treatment. I am specifically trained to treat trauma, using evidence-based (NHS recommended) therapies for trauma – EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) and TF-CBT (Trauma Focussed Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). I am an EMDR Europe Accredited Practitioner, so you can be assured of my experience in supporting you gently through your healing. I work with you to regulate and restore emotional and psychological balance without re-triggering your nervous system.
STEP 01
Regulating emotions and reducing symptoms
STEP 02
Processing traumatic memories
STEP 03
Integrating the healing into post-traumatic growth
In your first session, we will work at your pace to understand the difficulties you are facing and plan our work together. I am happy to work with you for short-term (6-8 sessions), or you may wish to work on issues in more depth over an extended period.
If you are goal driven, we will set therapeutic goals and review these on a regular basis to ensure that our work together is focused and on track.
If it is more important to you to get a wider understanding of who you are, what happened to make you this way and find a new way forward, I look forward to working with you on this.
Many of my clients are neurodivergent (some diagnosed and others not), and after an initial period of intense therapy with me they continue with monthly sessions to help stay on track with the progress they have made.