Many people face incredibly difficult situations that stay with them long after the event. You may find yourself saying “I should be over this by now,” even years later. There’s no timeline for trauma or PTSD. Carrying it longer than you expected doesn’t mean something is wrong with you.
You May Relate If:
- you experience flashbacks, nightmares, or unwanted memories that intrude on your day
- you feel disconnected or numb a lot of the time
- you carry guilt, shame, or self-blame about something that happened to you
- anxiety and fear are impacting your life, or you’re withdrawing from people close to you
- you notice unexplained aches, pains, or fatigue, or your heart races for no reason
Understanding Trauma
Trauma isn’t always one big event. Sometimes it’s a single moment — an assault, injury, or catastrophic event — that changes how you move through the world. Other times, it builds quietly over years through experiences like neglect, child abuse, first responder situations, or combat exposure, shaping how your body and mind respond long before you have language for it.
Either way, trauma threatens your sense of safety, esteem, and identity. It can leave you dealing with depression, anxiety, addiction, or emotional numbness. These responses make sense given what you’ve lived through.
For some people, these patterns meet the clinical criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For many others, trauma doesn’t fit a diagnostic label but still shapes daily life. Either way, the work is the same.
Counselling can help you understand:
- how your nervous system adapted to protect you, and what that’s costing you now
- why certain triggers set off responses that feel out of proportion
- how memories can stay stored in the body, not just in the mind
- why what once helped you cope may be getting in the way now
- what healing from trauma actually looks like
By understanding how trauma has shaped your story and your nervous system, you can begin to respond to yourself and the world differently.
How Counselling Can Help
Counselling can help you:
- Learn new strategies and coping techniques for managing distress
- Cope effectively with daily stressors
- Identify and manage triggers
- Integrate memories to relieve traumatic stress
- Gain a sense of peace and hope from the effects of trauma
- Transform what happened into a story of survival
- Build stronger interpersonal relationships
Healing from trauma isn’t about forgetting what happened. It’s about changing how it lives in you.
Our Therapeutic Approaches
We draw on a range of evidence-based approaches, grounded in a flexible, collaborative, and client-centred way of working that adapts to what is most helpful for you.
This allows us to shape our work around your needs, experiences, and goals, drawing from different therapeutic modalities as needed. Learn more about our approach to care.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
EMDR is one of the most researched approaches for trauma and PTSD. It helps the nervous system process memories that haven’t fully settled. It often involves less traditional talking than people expect.
Somatic Experiencing
Somatic Experiencing works with the body, not just the mind. Trauma often gets stored in the nervous system, and somatic approaches help release what’s been held there without having to retell the whole story.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS approaches trauma by working with different parts of you. There’s usually a part that stays vigilant, a part that still carries the pain, and a part that wants to move on. The work happens at the pace those parts are ready for.
Attachment-Based Therapy
When trauma happened in childhood or within close relationships, the healing often has to happen there too. Attachment-based work looks at how early experiences shape how you relate to others now, and helps you build a different pattern.
Compassion-Focused Therapy
Trauma often leaves people with intense self-criticism, shame, or self-blame. Compassion-focused work helps you learn to respond to yourself with the kind of care you’d offer someone you love. For many trauma survivors, that’s the hardest thing to do.
Prolonged Exposure Therapy
Prolonged Exposure Therapy is one of the most researched approaches specifically for PTSD. It involves gradually revisiting trauma memories and the situations you’ve been avoiding, in a safe and supported way. Over time, the nervous system learns these triggers are no longer the threat they once felt like.
You don’t have to carry this on your own. Counselling can help. At your pace. Book an appointment when you’re ready.
Meet Some of Our Counsellors Who Work With Trauma & PTSD
Kira Charanduk
Alissa Caskey
Erica Burdzy
Warren Tews
Cynthia Smith
Jaqueline Brodbin
In my work with trauma, I aim to create a safe and steady space where clients can process painful experiences at their own pace. Trauma often lives not only in our memories, but also in our bodies and relationships—shaping how we think, feel, and connect. Together, we may use approaches like EMDR, somatic work, and exploring attachment patterns to help untangle these impacts. I believe healing from trauma is not about erasing the past, but about reclaiming your sense of safety, connection, and choice in the present. My role is to walk beside you as you reconnect with your body, rework unhelpful patterns, and discover new ways of relating to yourself and others. Each step we take will be guided by your needs, strengths, and goals, with the understanding that trauma recovery is deeply individual and always possible.
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Frequently Asked Questions About Trauma & PTSD Counselling
No. Many people who come to River’s Edge for trauma work don’t have a PTSD diagnosis, and don’t need one. Some don’t meet the clinical criteria for PTSD but are still deeply affected by what they’ve lived through. Others meet the criteria but have never been formally diagnosed. Trauma-focused therapy works with your experience, not with a label.
No. Many trauma approaches don’t require you to describe in detail what happened. Some, like EMDR and somatic work, process the nervous system’s response without needing a full verbal account. Your counsellor will work with you at a pace that feels safe, and you decide what you share.
Missing or fragmented memory is common, especially with early or ongoing trauma. You don’t need to remember what happened for healing to occur. The body remembers what the mind can’t always recall, and trauma-focused therapy can work with that. Sometimes memory returns during the process. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way is okay.
No. People come to River’s Edge to work on trauma from childhood, decades-old experiences, or events they’ve never told anyone about. The nervous system holds what it holds, regardless of how much time has passed. What shifts during trauma work is how it lives in you now.
Sometimes trauma work can surface difficult feelings temporarily, and we won’t pretend otherwise. But thoughtful trauma therapy is paced carefully to keep you resourced and supported along the way. If something feels like too much, we slow down. You’re part of the decision about how fast the work moves.