Everything that happens to us in our life affects us in some way, are you being held back by things that happened a long time ago? Research has found that events that have a strong emotional charge associated with them are encoded into the brain in different ways to regular events. Some situations and experiences are so intense that they trigger a response in the amygdala, as your brain seeks to protect you from re-experiencing the event by continually scanning the environment for any threats that might be similar. Even though you logically know that you’re safe and that the danger has passed, you still experience the strong automatic emotional responses.

Do you have past events that replay over and over in your mind?

Do you feel filled with strong emotions like shame, embarrassment, guilt or loss over situations that have happened?

Trauma means different things to different people.  Some people believe that trauma is a catastrophic incident, but others know that much more subtle events can leave a lasting scar on a person’s psyche. We are only scratching the surface on our understanding of how trauma affects the body and the mind. Carrying trauma and strong negative emotions around for years is now linked to a range of mental health and physical health conditions. There are significant links between childhood experiences of trauma (including divorce, changing school and significant illness, and the experience of mental health struggles later in life.

While the intention of the emotional triggers is to keep us safe, what actually happens is that we end up changing our lives, doing less of the things that make us happy. Integrative therapy for trauma utilises a wide range of techniques to help you process, integrate and move on from traumatic experiences. I am trained in many trauma-specific techniques such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), and the Rewind Technique which can quickly and effectively resolve the emotional charges of significant trauma.