Trauma Therapy & PTSD — Ottawa

What happened to you
is not who you are.

Gentle, evidence-informed trauma therapy in Ottawa — working at the pace your nervous system can hold.

If the world no longer feels safe,
your nervous system is doing its job.

Trauma is not weakness. It is the mark of a system that survived something it wasn't meant to survive alone. The responses that protected you then — the hypervigilance, the numbness, the way time collapses — were not failures. They were adaptations.

Who This Is For

You might recognize yourself here.

What you might be experiencing

Flashbacks or intrusive memories. Dreams that pull you back into it. Hypervigilance — always scanning, always braced. Or the opposite: numbness, dissociation, a sense of being far away from your own life.

Difficulty in relationships. Trouble trusting. A sense that something fundamental changed after what happened — and that you haven't been able to find your way back.

I work with individuals navigating single-incident trauma (accident, assault, loss), complex trauma (prolonged or repeated experiences), childhood trauma, relational trauma, and developmental trauma.

How trauma therapy works

Trauma therapy is never a rush to the wound. Before we approach difficult material, we spend time building safety — within the therapeutic relationship, and within yourself. This phase is not preliminary. It is foundational.

When it feels right, we begin to gently approach traumatic material — not to relive it, but to process it in a way that reduces its hold. This might involve EMDR, somatic techniques, or other evidence-based approaches, always calibrated to your nervous system's window of tolerance.

The goal is integration — not forgetting, but a different relationship with what happened, where the past feels more like the past and the present feels more available to you.

Approaches I use

I draw on EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and trauma-focused CBT — selecting and weaving together approaches that fit the specific texture of your experience.

No single approach works for everyone. What guides my choices is always you — your history, your nervous system, your goals, and what feels tolerable.

"Healing from trauma is not about being fixed. It is about learning that you are, and always were, more than what happened to you."

Common Questions

What you might be wondering.

No. Many effective trauma therapies do not require detailed retelling of the event. We will never move faster than you're ready to go, and I will never push you toward disclosure before you feel safe enough to approach it. Some of the most meaningful trauma work happens indirectly.
Trauma is not defined by the event — it is defined by its impact on your nervous system and your life. You don't need to have survived something "objectively terrible" to deserve support. If something happened and you haven't been the same since, that matters.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is an evidence-based therapy that uses bilateral stimulation (eye movements, tapping) to help the brain process traumatic memories. It can be highly effective, but it's not the only tool and not right for everyone at every stage. We'll discuss it together and only use it when it feels appropriate.
Sometimes, gently approaching difficult material can temporarily stir things up. This is normal and expected. My job is to ensure we never go faster than your system can handle — and to help you develop the internal resources to navigate difficult moments. We'll always debrief and ground before ending any session.
Yes. Complex PTSD, which often arises from prolonged or repeated trauma — especially in childhood — requires a more gradual and relationally-focused approach. I have specific training in working with C-PTSD and understand that the relational injuries of complex trauma require a relational healing context.
Trauma therapy is not about putting a date on something. Some of the most significant wounds are the ones that accumulated slowly, over years — in environments that felt unsafe, in relationships that hurt, in the absence of what was needed. If something in the past still shapes how you move through the present, that's enough to work with. The timeline doesn't matter. The impact does.
This is more common than you might think, and it makes complete sense as a concern. Therapy doesn't work if the relationship doesn't feel safe — and not every therapist is the right fit for every person. A previous difficult experience with therapy doesn't mean therapy itself can't help. If you're willing to try again, the free consultation is a chance to get a sense of how I work before committing to anything.