Trauma therapy in Reading and online

When your mind understands but your body still reacts, therapy can help with what your nervous system learned to do to survive.

Trauma is not only about what happened. It is also about what your mind, body, and nervous system had to do to survive — and what the system may still be carrying afterwards.

You may feel anxious, on edge, shut down, disconnected, easily overwhelmed, or aware that something in you still reacts as though safety cannot quite be felt yet.

Trauma does not always look dramatic from the outside. It may show up through anxiety, shutdown, self-protection, people-pleasing, dissociation, poor sleep, relationship difficulties, or a body that still expects to stay ready.

It can also show up relationally — finding it hard to trust, losing your words under pressure, withdrawing quickly, trying hard to keep the peace, or finding that closeness and care feel harder to tolerate than you want them to.

Insight matters. But when trauma is carried in the body and nervous system, understanding alone is often not enough.

In therapy, I do not force change. We begin with stabilisation and capacity. When you are ready, we may move into trauma processing and longer-term therapeutic work.

Over time, this can help life feel less organised around survival and more open to rest, steadiness, and connection.

How I work with trauma

My work with trauma is relational, body-aware, and tailored to the person in front of me. We agree a direction, review progress, and adjust as needed.

I do not tend to rush toward the deepest material. Often, the first task is helping the system become less overwhelmed, so that deeper work becomes possible without flooding, collapse, or shutdown.

I draw from an integrative background, but I do not throw techniques at you. The aim is to work in a way that fits your needs, your pace, and your capacity.

This may include:

relational work — how patterns formed and how they can show up between people
body-based trauma work — what your system does automatically under threat
parts-informed work — working respectfully with protective strategies

A core component of my trauma work is Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR), which works with deep orienting and threat responses that can sit underneath symptoms.

The wider framework I draw on includes Relational Transactional Analysis, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, parts-informed work, EMDR, DBR, and, where appropriate, ILF neurofeedback.

What trauma can look like

Trauma often shows up as a nervous system that struggles to settle.

You might feel on high alert — scanning, bracing, easily startled, or unable to relax — or swing the other way into shutdown: numbness, fog, sleepiness, or a sense of being unable to mobilise.

Some people experience panic surges. Others feel unreal, distant, or disconnected from their body. Sleep and energy are often affected.

For many people, the biggest impact is relational — people-pleasing, withdrawal, conflict cycles, difficulty trusting, or feeling unsafe with closeness.

Some people can trace these patterns to a particular event or period. Others cannot.

These responses can feel like personality rather than adaptation, but often reflect a system shaped by threat.

Why trauma can be hard to recognise

Many people minimise the impact of the past because their ways of coping have felt normal for a long time.

Survival strategies can be highly effective — until they begin to feel restrictive.

You might recognise some of these patterns:

going numb or not feeling much
staying busy to avoid what you feel
perfectionism, self-criticism, or over-responsibility
controlling closeness by withdrawing, avoiding, or people-pleasing
pushing through until you crash
feeling a strong need to control situations, outcomes, or sometimes other people in order to feel safer

None of these is a personal failing. They are adaptations — signs that your system did what it needed to do.

When these patterns have been present for a long time, they can feel like “just who I am”.

Different kinds of trauma

People use the word trauma in different ways, and sometimes it helps to name what you may be working with.

Trauma may take the form of shock trauma — a single overwhelming event, or a short period of acute danger.

It may also be developmental or relational trauma — earlier experiences that shaped safety, attachment, and identity over time.

In other cases, it may reflect chronic stress or ongoing threat — long periods of uncertainty, pressure, or relational danger that keep the nervous system in survival mode.

We can start with what is happening in you now.

How trauma work usually unfolds

With support, time, and enough patience, the nervous system can regain more balance and flexibility.

The work is rarely about forcing change. More often, it is about helping the system loosen old survival responses and discover new possibilities.

In everyday life, that may mean less bracing, more rest, and more capacity to stay present under stress.

In practice, therapy usually moves through three overlapping phases:

stabilisation and regulation — strengthening capacity in daily life
trauma processing — working with underlying threat and shock responses when appropriate
integration and growth — supporting more choice, connection, and vitality

I may integrate ILF neurofeedback in person where it fits your needs.

Read more about ILF neurofeedback ›