Specialist trauma therapy

This is a dedicated service aimed to help those who have had a difficult childhood, life traumas, and for anyone suffering from PTSD or C-PTSD. We also offer specialist trauma-informed family therapy such as Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP) and Theraplay. Finally, we also offer a wide range of carefully planned weekly trauma-informed events.

Welcome to Stepping Stones Psychology

who is it for?

This is for those who have experienced traumas from life events. This may have resulted in a PTSD diagnosis.
This is also for those who lived through difficult childhoods or through childhood trauma (however you would like to define it). You might have gone through abuse (physical, emotional or sexual) or neglect (physical or emotional). You may or may not have a diagnosis of Complex PTSD.
You may be someone who already had counselling or therapy in the past, but still feel unfulfilled and think that something is missing in terms of healing. I believe that my specialisms in working with abuse, neglect, trauma and attachment issues can benefit your healing journey.
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What issues will we work on and what will be the outcome?

You will see yourself in a new way, and you will notice positive changes when it comes to your relationship with yourself, with others, and also a difference in the way you think, your mood and behaviour. Therapy will not only result in these positive changes and a newfound insight, but also offer you a set of self-help tools and techniques for your continued practice for navigating your trauma. This will lead to better mental health and wellbeing. Issues we may work and you will start seeing an improvement in are:

• Identifying how your past continues to impact your life and finding ways to reduce this
• Healthier ways for you to form and maintain friendships and intimate relationships
• Managing your trauma triggers better
• Managing your emotional triggers/emotional flashbacks better
• Developing strategies to deal with your insomnia/sleep issues/nightmares
• Identifying and managing Trauma and Attachment related anxiety, you may be experiencing, that get triggered by a sense of loneliness, separation, rejection, abandonment, unavailability/emotional unavailability
• Finding ways for you to move forward in your parenting journey, whilst managing the aftermath of your trauma
• Coping better when you have flashbacks
• Identifying and reducing any physical sensations you may be experiencing, such as pain or nausea
• Minimising irritability or aggressive behaviour, and channelling them in a healthy way
• Reducing self-destructive behaviours
• Having a better understanding of your addictive behaviours/addiction and replacing them with healthier resources
• Becoming more connected to yourself and your emotions rather than feeling emotionally numb or cut off from them
• Becoming more connected to your body rather than feeling physically numb or detached from your body
• Finding ways to handle dissociation
• Starting to be able to trust people rather than suffering from trust issues
• An ability to create a sense of safety rather than lacking sense of safety
• Making sense of and developing strategies to manage your day-to-day tasks when having difficulty with concentration. This include concentrating on simple or everyday tasks, such as remembering things and making decisions
• Feeling less anxious and more in control when there is a change
• Resource Building where we work on replacing or minimising your use of past survival resources ('fight, flight or freeze' response) with more adaptive resources
• Making sense of, and managing your overwhelming feelings better rather than becoming more triggered and starting going on a down-ward spiral. These could be overwhelming feelings of anger, sadness, guilt or shame
• Becoming more assertive
• Setting and maintaining healthier boundaries
• Developmental Trauma/Attachment issues
• Personality Disorder
• Anxiety Disorder/Phobia
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)/ Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD)

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What will we be doing in these sessions?

This will be Trauma-Informed Therapy using specialist therapeutic approaches, including both body-based and brain-based approaches to heal trauma. This also involves working on implicit memories (body memories) and subconscious or unconscious memories. Some of the specialist approaches which we may use are:

• EMDR
• David Emerson's Intervention for Complex Trauma (somatic)
• Inner Child Healing/Re-Parenting (subconscious)
• Internal Family Systems (IFS) for complex trauma
• Somatic Approaches to Healing Trauma such as aspects of Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
• Various other trauma-informed techniques on coping with trauma
• Resource Building
• Creating a Toolkit to safely self-navigate emotional triggers/emotional flashbacks
• Processing Traumatic Grief
• Processing Traumatic memories
• Processing pre-verbal trauma (trauma that took place before the age of 3)
• Trauma-informed grounding techniques
• Attachment-based yoga and meditation for trauma healing
• Attachment-based grounding techniques
• Attachment-based healing
• Trauma-informed Psycho-education, including from a brain and body perspective
• Attachment-based Psycho-education, including from a brain and body perspective

Contact us for your initial consultation

If you would like to talk to me or arrange an appointment please do not hesitate to contact me. You can also email me on: contact@steppingstonespschology.com, or use the contact form by clicking the button below.