healing complex ptsd
Our work together (therapy, training, coaching, learning) is informed by our ever increasing understanding of the neuroscience of trauma and wellness and the impact of secure attachment relationships on our capacity for stability, connection, self-worth and living authentically.
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I use integrative approaches that help you to access and strengthen your felt sense of safety in your body, life, relationships and present moment felt sense experiencing. I help you strengthen your healing container – your work, relationships, parenting, self-concept, life goals, rhythms and routines.
understanding complex ptsd
How your authentic self got blocked & what’s needed to free it.
If you are trauma impacted, what problem in your brain and nervous system needs solving in order for you to live a rich life, to live freely, to feel connected and safe.
4 step evolve process
body alchemy to evolve implicit trauma memories
An outline of my 4 STEP EVOLVE process and how it can make you, your brain and your nervous system whole. Connected. Integrated. Regulated. Little piece by little piece.
I help you make sense of how your current life challenges may be the ripple effect of impacts from your early life environment on your nervous system, and the ways you have had to adapt and manage around that.
our work together
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You will strengthen your healing container – your work, relationships, parenting, self-concept, life goals, rhythms and routines. |
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You will gently, kindly access and experience the patterns and parts of yourself that you’ve had to shut off from, because it’s been all too much or not adaptive when it comes to maintaining relationships and basic life functioning. |
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You will bring balance to parts that may have been running the show because they thought that was the only way and they were on their own in it. |
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You will learn your own nervous system intimately – what triggers and what soothes it, so you can access your wise and calm self across more and more life situations. |
There truly is so much beauty to experience, and what you bring matters.
More of your true self online and available to follow your dreams, desires and life goals. More free to show up the way you choose to in your relationships – to feel nourished and well met.
what therapies help complex ptsd?
Effective help for Complex PTSD must work in an informed and aware way with your nervous system dysregulation and be actively working with the physiology that shows up in relation to both triggers and resources.
It must also understand the preparations and resource building needed to support contact with traumatic material. It must support you to access these implicit body memories and fragmented parts of yourself only in safe ways that bring some meeting, kind acceptance and resolving.
There is an art to skilfully blending these modalities in service of what is emerging and what needs healing and attention.
Some modalities we might draw on.
DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy)
Skill building for distress tolerance and mindful awareness of emotions as a foundation more stable and effective communications, state management and life action.
Balancing what we need to accept about now, with finding the do-able edges for change.
CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy)
CBT looks at how our systems of meaning affect our experience and capacity to act at choice. It's important that it's utilised in a trauma-informed way and when you're in a calm and reflective state.
interpersonal neurobiology
Understanding and observing how our early life environment shaped your nervous system development and the functions it prioritises in different situations.
Being aware of your capacity to take in nourishment from others and to offer openly your gifts in ways those you care about can receive.
neuro-psychotherapy
Therapy that is directly informed by neuroscientific research and principles for the way the mind, body, nervous system and environment interact to create our moment to moment experience, as well as ongoing systemic and structural changes to brain and body functioning.
schema therapy
Working with the clusters of memory, meaning, imagery, felt sense and emotion that were formed during traumatic exposure to bring meeting, easing and increased flexibility.
somatic psychotherapy
Here and now awareness and intervention with your physiological responding and felt sense experience that goes with different states of nervous system activation - calm, wakeful, activated, distressed, shut down.
Listening to and working with the wisdom of the body.
positive psychology
Uncovering and working directly with your natural strengths and cultivating practices that support you to have a meaningful and emotionally fulfilling life.
eco-psychology
Understanding your life experience as a natural outcome of the physical, social, cultural, spiritual and relational environment you are a part of.
Being conscious of your participation in a larger eco-system.
life coaching
Support to create consciously in your life and relationships, in line with your personal values, character strengths, creative flow and deep longing.
directed mindfulness
Applying the skills of mindfulness in carefully guided ways to enhance awareness of moment to moment experience – allowing access to unresolved trauma circuits and deepening the wiring for new, more adaptive experiences and responses.
narrative therapy
Our brains are designed to join the dots and make meaning of our experiences.
As we heal it's important to update your story about yourself in the world to make room for new and rewarding experiences and to acknowledge the courage and personal resources that helped you get to here.
depth psychology
Awareness and respect for the deeper processes at play over the course of your life as your soul self, or wise self takes in life experience and is changed by it.
art therapy
Utilising sensory and expressive mediums such as drawing, sounding, music, poetry or your own creative environment to access and work with your experiences that live beneath the level of conscious narrative.
RIGHT ORDER, RIGHT PACE, RIGHT RHYTHM, RIGHT RESOURCE
For you.
The last 10 years have seen a phenomenal surge in the research and knowledge base available about the workings of our brain and nervous system as we interact with our environment over time, in particular about how our bodies adapt to maintain connection or provide relative safety when early attachment environments are unstable, unpredictable, unavailable or unsafe.
Trauma is stored in the body, as implicit sensory and somatic memory in the lower parts of our brain, activated on triggers that remind the body of how it felt then. Breaking the loop of triggered trauma responses, re-traumatising life experiences, over or under responding and the various defences and coping mechanisms we use to manage all this requires a particular kind of meeting of the traumatised parts, the memory fragments, in a way that evolves and completes them, in right order, at right pace, in right rhythm, with enough resource.
There’s no thinking your way out of it.
It’s a mind-body job that needs to be paced and artfully trauma informed.
And at some stage of the game, we need the right kind of attunement, validation and meeting from other humans in order to fully heal and evolve the stored implicit trauma memories associated with Complex PTSD.
The real focus is you and your process of emergence, grounding and stabilising as your authentic self, unencumbered.