What is Complex Trauma?
Complex trauma can develop through repeated or prolonged experiences of threat, harm, neglect or instability, particularly when these occur within relationships or circumstances that are difficult to escape.
Unlike trauma associated with a single event, complex trauma develops over time and can have a broader impact on how we experience ourselves, our emotions, our relationships and our sense of safety in the world.
These experiences can also shape the ways we respond when we feel threatened or overwhelmed, even when the original circumstances are no longer present.
You May Recognise These Experiences...
Your emotions can feel overwhelming or difficult to manage, or you find yourself shutting down and disconnecting.
You’re highly attuned to changes in other people’s moods, tone or behaviour.
You often put other people’s feelings and needs ahead of your own.
You may not have a clear sense of who you are, what you need, or what you want.
You find yourself doubting your own feelings, perceptions or instincts
You carry a sense that something is wrong with you, even when you can’t explain why.
You want closeness, but trusting, relying on or being vulnerable with others can feel difficult.
You find yourself repeating relationship patterns you understand, but struggle to change.
How I Work With Complex Trauma
We begin by understanding patterns that developed as adaptations to difficult, painful or unsafe experiences, bringing curiosity and compassion to ways of coping that may now show up as mistrust, hypervigilance, self-criticism or responses that leave you feeling ashamed or helpless.
Using Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and nervous system regulation, we explore how these patterns show up in your thoughts, emotions, body and automatic responses, including experiences of overwhelm, shutting down or disconnecting from yourself or your surroundings. The work is paced to build greater safety and flexibility in how you respond.
We may also explore formative relational experiences, younger parts and reparenting, while making space for grief around what happened or what was missing. Over time, this can support greater trust in yourself and others, and more choice, safety and connection in how you live and relate.
What Healing Can Look Like
develop a greater sense of safety within yourself and with others
feel less overwhelmed by difficult emotions and more able to respond to them
develop a clearer sense of who you are, what you need and what matters to you
trust your own feelings, perceptions and instincts
relate to yourself with greater compassion and less shame
experience closeness while maintaining a sense of yourself
feel greater agency and choice in how you respond, relate and live
