Trauma Therapy in Guelph, Ontario
Therapy for people working on trauma from relationships and childhood
Trauma therapy is for the experiences in life that may have left you feeling hurt and never fully settled.
Some trauma comes from a single event, but more often it builds up over time, for example in a relationship where you weren’t safe, or in a childhood home where you had to earn your place. Some trauma may have even started before you were born, in patterns your parents learned from their parents and grandparents, and passed along without knowing it. (This is often called intergenerational trauma).
Whatever the source of your trauma, you probably learned ways of getting through it. Over time, you may have noticed the same strategies that once helped you might actually be the same strategies keeping you stuck. In trauma therapy, we work on how the past shows up for you now, so we can learn new ways of living.
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Trauma work here can include:
A relationship, past or present, where you were controlled or afraid
A childhood where love had to be earned
A parent whose moods decided the mood of the whole house
Patterns that run in your family
Grief that never got the space and time it deserved
Some of what you’re carrying may not have started with you. If your parents never learned that feelings could be safe, they couldn’t teach you that they were. Part of the work here is sorting out what reached you from further back, and deciding what you want to do with it.
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We’ll talk, and you’ll get to choose where we begin. We might start with the present, like a reaction last week that made no sense to you, and go back further when you’re ready.
We’ll ask about your body too, because trauma shows up in things like the way you sit and breathe. But we’ll always move at your pace, and you’ll never have to explain if you want to slow down.
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A lot of people wonder whether what happened to them was “bad” enough to bring here. You don’t have to clear a threshold. What your experiences have done to you matters more than how they would sound if you tried to describe them. If you catch yourself listing reasons that you probably “don’t qualify,” we suggest you start there when you call us.
Questions about trauma therapy in Guelph
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No. Plenty of people in trauma therapy have never been diagnosed with anything, and a social worker wouldn’t be the one to diagnose you in any case. People come here because something from the past is still steering the present. Whether that’s true for you isn’t a call you have to make on your own. Give us a call and ask.
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No. Some people eventually want to tell the whole story, and some never do. We can do a lot with the patterns the experience left behind, and the details stay yours until you decide otherwise.
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We go a little at a time, and we leave room at the end of a session to settle before you go. If it ever feels like too much in the moment, we do our best to “read the room,” however we also encourage you to say so. We’ll never push past something that feels like too much (until it doesn’t anymore).
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Usually, yes. For a lot of people anxiety is the piece of this history that surfaces first, sometimes years before anyone calls it trauma. Our anxiety therapy page covers that work directly.
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You can, and couples work is one way to do it. Patterns that started long before the two of you met often turn up inside the relationship anyway. We’ll follow them only as far as you want to go. Our couples counselling page explains how that works.
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Somatic therapy brings the physical side into the room, because your body carries some of what happened too. Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), comes into trauma work as well, and we use it with the relationships closest to you, past and present. Our somatic therapy and EFT pages have more on each. We might also use narrative therapy to help you “rewrite stories” about past events.
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As long as it’s useful, and you’re the one who judges that. We don’t sell packages, so you’re never partway through something you’ve stopped wanting. Some people do one stretch and stop, and others come back a year later.
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Sessions are 50 minutes. We book the full hour, and the last ten minutes are for the practical stuff, like payment and booking your next session.
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In person at 15 Surrey Street West in Guelph, or over video from anywhere in Ontario or Alberta. You can change between the two as your weeks change.
