THERAPY FOR TRAUMA
For the folks that are feeling destroyed and drowning in their trauma and the impacts of it and for the folks pretending life hasn’t been that bad, and they’ve never been traumatized in their life.
No matter what experiences you've gone through, you're most likely walking away with some sense of doubting your experience and questioning if what you went through WAS actually as bad as you think it was. You might be telling yourself to "get over it"- or even feeling frustrated that you still have emotions after all these years.
Trauma is best understood as the wound that we're left with, not so much the event or events that we've gone through themselves. The types of trauma we see most often include abusive dynamics, harms in relationships, being mistreated by our fu***d up system, or experiencing discrimination, racism or ableism. The reality is, it's not just about what happened-it's about what you were left carrying afterward.
OK, there's a lot to say about trauma, especially because people tend to sit on one of two extremes.
They'll either be destroyed and drowning in their trauma and the impacts of it, or they'll walk around through their life, pretending like they have never been traumatized and their life "hasn't been that bad”.
One of the hardest things about supporting yourself through this is that it's invisible and you may even be functioning perfectly well in your day-to-day life (or at least you look “well” to the outside), but you might be dying inside.
Trauma creates a lot of extremes.
If it’s not the extreme of “I'm drowning in it” or “I'm pretending it never happened,” we may instead see extremes like:
“I have to stay so busy that I never have a second to breathe OR I can’t do anything and I am stuck in bed all day.”
“I am anxiously dependent on the people in my life OR I want absolutely nothing to do with people and I’m gonna be on my own forever.”
“I hate myself and the ways that my mind works OR I need to desperately cling onto my thoughts and experiences to feel in control (even when they’re driving me nuts).”
No matter what you’ve been through or the extremes you’re navigating, the approaches that we take are grounded in creating safety, a sense of choice and autonomy, trust within yourself, and what you've experienced. We want to help you find the “and.” A sense of “This is brutal, AND, I can handle it.”
Learn more about trauma from our therapists
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Learn more about trauma from our therapists *
Frequently Asked Questions about Trauma Therapy
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Trauma isn't a competition for who had the worst childhood or the most horrible thing happen to them. It's less about whether an experience was objectively "bad enough" and more about the impact it had on you. Abuse, neglect, discrimination, toxic relationships, loss, instability, systemic harm and a whole lot of other experiences can leave wounds behind. If it affected you, we can talk about it.
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Yep. You can love your parents and still have things from childhood to work through. You can know other people "had it worse" and still be hurting. You can even have had a generally good life and gone through experiences that changed how safe you feel in yourself, your relationships or the world. You don't need to prove that your pain is bad enough to deserve support.
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Trauma doesn't always look like flashbacks and nightmares. Sometimes it looks like overthinking everything, people-pleasing, struggling to trust, needing control, shutting down during conflict, staying ridiculously busy, feeling numb, constantly waiting for something to go wrong or having huge reactions you don't totally understand. Sometimes it just feels like, "Why the hell do I keep doing this?"
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Absolutely. You can have a career, relationships, kids, friends, a packed calendar and a colour-coded Google Calendar while internally hanging on by a thread. Being able to function doesn't mean something didn't hurt you. Sometimes staying busy, productive and in control is actually one of the ways we've learned to cope.
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Nope. You are still in charge of your story. Trauma therapy doesn't mean walking into session one and giving us a chronological PowerPoint presentation of every terrible thing that's ever happened to you. We can go at a pace that feels manageable, and you get a say in what we talk about, when we talk about it and how deeply we go.
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A lot less "tell me about your childhood while I silently nod" than you might imagine. While every therapist works differently, our trauma work focuses on things like creating safety, understanding your patterns, building trust in yourself, learning to recognize what your mind and body are telling you and finding ways to cope that actually work for your life. The goal isn't to erase your past. It's to help it stop running the damn show.