Trauma-informed therapy takes into consideration the impact of what’s happened to you, and prioritises creating a safe and supportive environment for you to process what has happened. 

In practice this means we will start by building awareness of how your experiences affect various aspects of your life, and what could (or does) strengthen and resource you. I will suggest we pace things, giving us time to build trust and to explore together what approach might best suit you. 

To help with safely processing traumatic memories, I can offer EMDR, a structured approach that invites you to focus on a memory while also experiencing bilateral stimulation (e.g. eye movement or hand tapping). This process helps to reduce the emotional distress you may feel around the memory and therefore reduce its impact on your life. 

Working with painful thoughts and feelings means trauma therapy can be hard, but it should not be retraumatising. We will go carefully, taking time to notice how you’re doing to help guide us on what is the best way forward for you. You may decide not to focus on the traumatic memories themselves, and that’s fine too, there are many ways we can work on the issues that are important to you.