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Complex Trauma Therapy
Online | Ontario
Complex trauma doesn't usually come from one thing. It builds over years, often in the place that was supposed to be safe. A home where you had to make yourself small. A parent who was unpredictable, emotionally absent, or impossible to please. A childhood where your needs were inconvenient or your feelings were too much, or love always came with conditions attached.
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You may have been told nothing bad happened. And maybe that's technically true. There was no single event you can point to. But you learned very early that the world wasn't quite safe, and that lesson got into your nervous system and stayed there.
Now, as an adult, you might not connect your current struggles to any of that. You know you had it better than some people. You function well, mostly. But you carry something. A low-level exhaustion that doesn't go away with rest. A sense of being on guard even when there's no obvious threat. Relationships that feel either too close or too distant, hard to settle into. A gap between who you present to the world and what you actually feel inside.
What Complex Trauma Is
Complex trauma, sometimes called C-PTSD, develops when difficult or threatening experiences happen repeatedly over time, usually within relationships, and usually in childhood. It's different from single-incident trauma in that it shapes the whole structure of how a person develops. The nervous system, the sense of self, the capacity to feel safe in a body, in a relationship, in the world, all of it gets organized around survival.
The effects don't show up as flashbacks to one event. They show up as a way of being. How you move through relationships. How much space you allow yourself to take up. How quickly you can go numb, or how easily you tip into overwhelm. How much effort it costs just to feel okay on an ordinary day.
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How Complex Trauma Shows Up
A lot of people carrying complex trauma are high-functioning. From the outside, they're doing fine. They're capable, often the person others lean on. But underneath that, there's something persistent. A vigilance that won't fully switch off. Shame that feels old and unspecific, not tied to anything you can name.
A self-critical voice that knows every weakness before anyone else does. Difficulty trusting your own perceptions. Cycles of getting close to someone and then pulling back, sometimes without knowing why. A body that shuts down or goes foggy under stress. A quiet, creeping sense that you're performing your life more than actually living it.
Many of the people I work with have read widely, done some therapy, sometimes years of it. They understand their patterns. They can trace them back, explain the neuroscience, articulate exactly what their childhood lacked. And still, something hasn't shifted. The understanding lives in the head. The patterns live somewhere the head can't fully reach.
What Healing Complex Trauma Actually Looks Like
Recovery from complex trauma isn't about locating the root cause and resolving it once and for all. It's more gradual than that, and more embodied. The patterns that formed in childhood are held in the nervous system, in the body's reflexive responses, in the way you brace before you've had a chance to think.
That's where the work needs to happen.In our sessions, we work slowly and with attention. We notice what's happening in your body, not in a forced or clinical way, just with curiosity. Somatic awareness becomes a way to start building a different relationship with sensation and feeling, to learn that your body can carry difficult things without needing to shut them out.
I use NARM (the NeuroAffective Relational Model) to work with the identity patterns that formed around early wounding: the deep beliefs about whether you're worthy of care, whether it's safe to have needs, whether connection is possible without losing yourself. Parts work helps us approach the protective strategies you developed over a lifetime with something closer to understanding than judgment.
Expressive arts can also be part of this. Sometimes what's held in the body finds a way through image or movement before it can come into language.This work takes time, and I want to be honest about that.
But something does shift when the body starts to feel safer, when the old alarm system begins to recalibrate, when you start to recognize your own patterns from the inside before they've already played out.
My background and approach
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I'm a somatic psychotherapist working online across Ontario. Before training as a therapist, I spent seventeen years working in ceremonial contexts in the Amazon and the Andes, sitting with people in moments of real vulnerability.
That experience shapes how I show up in session. I understand what it means to be with someone in difficult material without rushing it toward resolution.
I'm currently completing NARM professional training (November 2026) and practice under clinical supervision as a Registered Psychotherapist candidate, with full RP designation expected in late 2026.
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If any of this feels familiar, I offer a free 20-minute consultation.
We can talk about what you're carrying and whether this work might be a good fit. No agenda. Just a conversation.