Childhood Trauma Therapy for Adults

I work with adults. This page is about adults carrying what happened to them as children — I don't provide therapy for children.

People routinely disqualify themselves. 'Nothing happened to me.' 'Others had it much worse.' 'My parents did their best.'

All of that can be true and you can still be carrying something. What shapes a child isn't only the dramatic events — it's chronic unpredictability, an adult whose mood set the weather in the house, being the one who managed everyone else's feelings, being unseen, being bullied, illness or loss at the wrong moment, love that was conditional on performance.

The nervous system records what it was like to be small and to need something that wasn't reliably there. It doesn't check whether the story sounds serious enough.

Slowly at first, deliberately. Attachment-Focused EMDR and Resource Tapping build internal steadiness — in a real sense, providing now what wasn't available then — before we approach anything difficult.

Matrix Reimprinting is particularly well suited to this work: it uses EFT tapping to go to the moment a belief was formed and change your relationship to it, rather than only processing the event. For someone carrying 'I'm too much' or 'I don't matter' since age seven, that's often where the movement happens.

Brainspotting helps when you can feel something clearly and have no words for it — common when the experience predates the language to describe it.

This work doesn't require you to blame anyone, confront anyone, or reach any particular conclusion about your parents. Some people's relationships improve; others gain clarity about distance. That's yours to decide. The work is about what you're carrying, not about assigning fault.

How it tends to turn up later