Trauma & PTSD Counselling
You've probably already decided your thing wasn't bad enough to count.
Most people who come to me about trauma open with some version of that. Nobody hit me. It was years ago. Other people have had it far worse.
Meanwhile you're reacting to things bigger than they deserve, sleeping badly, and wondering why you cried in a car park at lunchtime.
What makes something traumatic
It's what your nervous system did with it at the time.
When something is too much, too fast, or goes on too long, your brain files it differently from an ordinary memory. It stays live, close to the surface, ready to fire. The size of the event has surprisingly little to do with it.
Which is why two people can go through the same thing and come out carrying completely different weights. And why the comparison you keep making, the one where other people have had it worse, has never helped you.
It comes in two broad shapes
Something that happened. A car accident, an assault, a medical emergency, a birth that went wrong, a death you witnessed. One event, clearly marked, with a before and an after.
Something that kept happening. Growing up walking on eggshells. A parent who was there and unreachable. Years in a relationship where you slowly stopped being yourself. Being responsible for adults when you were still a child.
The second kind is harder to spot, because there's no single day to point at. People often go decades without naming it as trauma at all.
How it shows up years later
Reacting far bigger than a situation warrants, then feeling embarrassed about it
Being on alert in ordinary places, reading the room, knowing where the exits are
Going numb, or watching your own life from somewhere just outside it
Sleep that won't come, or dreams you wake from with your heart going
Avoiding people, places and conversations without ever quite deciding to
The same painful pattern in one relationship after another
Stretches of your life you can't remember clearly
Pain or tension nobody can find a physical cause for
Plenty of people live with all of that for years and never connect it to anything that happened to them.
Why time hasn't sorted it out
Time does heal a great deal. It struggles with this.
An ordinary memory gets processed, filed, and put behind you. It becomes something you can recall without reliving. A traumatic memory skips that step and stays active, so your body keeps responding as though the thing might still be happening.
The event finished years ago. Your nervous system never got the message.
Something you can try
When you notice you've gone somewhere else, look around wherever you are and find five things you can see. Say them out loud if you're able to, in your head if you aren't. The colour of the wall. The chair. Your own hands.
It sounds far too simple to matter. What it's doing is telling your nervous system the date. Trauma responses run on the assumption that you're back there, and giving your eyes something present to land on interrupts that assumption.
This will get you back in the room. That's the piece you need in place before any of the deeper work can happen.
How I work with trauma
We build stability first. Sleep, the grounding tools, and enough steadiness that we can go into difficult material and you can come back out of it. How long that takes depends on you and on what we're working with.
Then we process. I'm EMDR trained, and EMDR carries a strong recommendation for adults with PTSD in the Australian treatment guidelines, alongside trauma-focused CBT. It works on how the memory is stored, so it can shift things that talking about them for years has left exactly where they were.
There's more about EMDR here, including what a session is actually like.
You won't have to tell me everything
This is the fear that keeps people out of the therapy room, so I'll be plain about it.
You don't need to give me a full account of what happened. Not in the first session, and in some cases not ever. EMDR works on the memory itself, which means far less narrating out loud than people expect.
You decide what gets said and when. If we get close to something you're not ready for, we stop. Stopping is part of how this work goes.
If you need someone right now
Reading about trauma can stir things up. If today is difficult:
Lifeline, 13 11 14, 24 hours. Or text 0477 13 11 14.
1800RESPECT, 1800 737 732, for sexual assault, family and domestic violence.
Mental Health Emergency Response Line, 1300 555 788 (Perth metro), 1800 552 002 (country WA)
13YARN, 13 92 76, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
In an emergency, call 000
I'm not a crisis service and I can't always answer straight away. Please use these numbers if you need someone today. When you're ready for ongoing work, I'm here.
What changes
The memory stays. What goes is the charge on it.
People describe it as finally being able to think about the thing without their body joining in. Sleeping properly. Being in a crowd without scanning it. Realising a fortnight has passed since it last crossed their mind.
And often something they weren't expecting: the sense that it belongs in the past, which sounds obvious until you've spent years with something that refused to go there.
Starting
The first session is a working session. We'll start with what's happening now, and I want you leaving that first hour with something you can use.
I've been doing this for twenty years, in person in Joondalup and by video anywhere in Australia. With a mental health treatment plan from your GP, Medicare rebates part of each session.
Call me on 0410 461 588. If it's easier to send a text first, do that.