In 20,000 therapy hours with clients the world over,

I discovered something profound.

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​​While on the outside my clients' lives looked happy, successful and comfortable, on the inside they described something quite different. A constant cycling through states of distress, dissociation, detachment, disorganisation and dysregulation. A private and perplexing struggle with seemingly unrelated emotional, mental, relational, existential and physical issues. And a sense that something hidden, powerful and painful was dominating their lives, disrupting their day to day experience, and defying their understanding.

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My clients have often read all the books, watched all the videos and listened to all the podcasts. They have attended online courses and done somatic exercises and mastered the language of trauma. Often, they have spent years in various talk therapies. Yet despite these efforts, they commonly feel they have somehow failed to translate any of it into tangible changes to their actual experience - where they yearn for it most.

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Over two decades of listening to hundreds of clients, I discovered that despite their vastly different stories, they all had one surprising thing in common.

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And that one thing, was an unrecognised history of relational trauma.

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Relational trauma (also referred to as complex trauma or C-PTSD) is the outcome of harmful relational experiences. Whether occurring in childhood or in adulthood, relational trauma is understood to have a devastating impact on all aspects of a person's experience.

 

But relational trauma remains the least known form of trauma and is frequently misunderstood, misdiagnosed and simply missed, in mental health treatments.

 

Identifying relational trauma requires a specialist lens brought to common symptoms like anxiety, depression, dissociation, emotional dysregulation and hypervigilance. Physical health issues, relationship struggles, parenting problems, a lack of life purpose, addiction, self harm, disordered eating can all be symptoms of relational trauma, but are often not seen as having relational issues at their root. Feelings of rage, terror and grief and states of helplessness and numbness, can also be hallmarks of relational trauma, but are often simply labelled, pathologised or medicated instead. 

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Contemporary theory - based on the latest psychobiological insights - has confirmed that the treatment of relational trauma requires a particular form of psychotherapy that pays equal attention to mental, embodied, emotional, existential and relational experiences. And that it requires a particular kind of therapeutic relationship that uses the therapeutic relationship itself, as the primary vehicle of recovery.

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Inspired by my clients' heroic journeys of recovery, I have dedicated the past two decades to the treatment and prevention of relational trauma. My unique therapeutic methodology brings trauma theory, human development theories, interpersonal neurobiology, somatic psychotherapy, and psychoanalytic theories together in a unified and transformational paradigm that treats issues at their root cause and in the safe holding of the therapeutic relationship, allows relational trauma recovery to finally begin. 

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