Childhood trauma therapy for adults, online in Ontario

In our work together, we’ll…

Look at what your childhood was actually like from day to day, and at what you learned to do to get through it. We’ll build steadiness first, then work with the particular moments that still carry a charge, one at a time. Along the way, we’ll notice how those old solutions show up now: with your partner, your family, your manager, and the voice in your head late at night.

This isn’t about blaming your parents. It’s about understanding what you had to become, so you can choose what you keep.

When there’s no single event to name

Some people can name the thing that happened to them. This page is for the people who cannot. What there is instead is a long stretch of years with a particular weather to it: who you had to be, what was not allowed, what you learned to watch for, and what was never said out loud.

Developmental trauma and relational trauma are the usual terms for this. They describe harm that arrives through the ordinary, repeated conditions of growing up, and through the relationships you depended on at the time, rather than through a single identifiable event.

If what you are carrying is one event, or a diagnosis of PTSD, the general trauma therapy page is the better place to start. This page is for the other kind: harm that came through years rather than through an incident.

“Nothing that bad actually happened to me”

That is the sentence I hear most often from people who grew up this way. It usually arrives early, as a kind of warning, before anything else gets described.

The absence of a dramatic event is not evidence that nothing happened. A child adapts to whatever is in front of them: a parent who was unpredictable, a house where feelings made things worse, being needed as the steady one, being noticed only for achievement, or years of nobody really looking. None of that makes a story that sounds serious when you say it out loud. It still shapes what your nervous system came to expect from other people.

You do not have to establish that your childhood was bad enough before we can look at what it is doing now.

How it tends to show up now

An adaptation often keeps running long after the conditions that required it have gone, and it rarely announces itself as being about childhood.

In relationships, it can look like reading everyone else constantly and losing track of what you want, feeling crowded when someone comes close and abandoned when they step back, or finding that the people you choose are familiar rather than kind.

At work, it can look like over-functioning, trouble with anyone in authority, an apology before every sentence, or achievement that settles nothing for very long.

In the body it is usually quieter: a jaw that does not unclench, shallow breathing, tiredness that sleep does not touch, or going somewhere far away in the middle of a difficult conversation.

None of these are character faults. They were reasonable solutions to the situation you were in, and often the only ones available at the time.

Why we do not begin with the memories

People sometimes arrive expecting to go straight to the worst of it, as though therapy were a matter of getting it all out.

With this kind of history that is usually the wrong order. When the difficulty is spread across years instead of concentrated in one event, there is often less steady ground to work from, and moving toward early material too quickly can leave you flooded, shut down, or further from yourself than when you started.

So we begin with capacity. That means noticing what is happening in you earlier, finding out what genuinely settles you, which is often not what you have been told should, and having somewhere steady to come back to. With developmental trauma this phase is frequently longer than people expect, and a long stay in it is not a sign that the work is failing.

The order is the same one that runs through the rest of my trauma work: stabilise, process, integrate.

Where EMDR fits

EMDR is one part of this work rather than the whole of it. A childhood does not reduce to a single target, so a memory protocol used on its own makes little sense here.

What there often are, inside all those years, are particular moments that still carry a charge: one argument, one look, the day you were left somewhere, the time you told someone and they did not believe you. Those can be worked with directly, one at a time, once there is enough stability to approach them.

Alongside that we work somatically, because this kind of history lives in posture, breath, and reflex as much as in recollection. My body-based work is grounded in Integral Somatic Psychology, and I am an EMDR Canada Affiliate Member. If EMDR turns out not to suit you, we do not force it.

Whatever you remember, and however much you don’t, there’s enough here to begin with.