Childhood Trauma Counselling
You’ve spent your whole life being good at reading the room, knowing when to go quiet, when to smooth things over or when to make yourself smaller so things don’t escalate. Somehow, despite all of that, your relationships still end up feeling lonely and confusing. You’ve tried to be close and open to people and you either end up running away because you feel they are too clingy or they are constantly distant. It feels as though you are trying to guess what happens next and its exhausting.
Your childhood experiences repeatedly shaped the nervous system in lasting ways, often long after the events themselves have passed. Here, we make space for the parts of you that learned to freeze, comply, disappear, fight, or stay on high alert when you were young. Therapy focuses on helping those parts come back into safety, at a pace your nervous system can hold.
Your experiences are unique, and your therapy is shaped around you. While we draw on established trauma frameworks, this work is never formulaic. The goal is not to fix you, but to support real, embodied change, so your present-day life is no longer run by survival strategies from the past.
Key Benefits
- Outcomes that will help you understand the way and why you react
- Increase self-esteem and self-worth – stop feelings too much or not enough
- Build relationships that don’t leave you feeling overwhelmed or empty
- Go deeper than talking and work with trauma held in the nervous system
- Understand longstanding patterns through a developmental lens
- Reduce chronic anxiety, shutdown, emotional numbness, or hypervigilance
- Build a felt sense of safety in your body and relationships
- Experience therapy that moves beyond coping toward meaningful change
What childhood trauma counselling is
Childhood trauma counselling recognises that trauma experienced early affects how the nervous system develops.
When safety, care, or consistency were disrupted, your nervous system learned how to behave and react in ways that helped you survive at the time.
These behaviours might now show up as:
- Difficulty trusting or relying on others
- Feeling responsible for everyone else’s needs
- Struggling to set boundaries or speak up about your needs and wants
- Dissociation, emotional shutdown, or constant vigilance
- Anger, having a short-fuse, or feeling trapped in big emotions.
None of these responses mean something is wrong with you. They reflect a nervous system that learned ways to survive within extreme conditions.
What this work focuses on
We focus on how early experiences live on in the body, emotions, and relational patterns today.
Together, we explore:
- The patterns that keep showing up in your relationships
- The reactions that happen faster than your thoughts
- What happens when your body doesn’t feel safe
- The stories you’ve been telling yourself about who you are
- What you’ve learned about love, safety and trust when you were young
- The parts of you that are still living in the past
- How your family showed up or didn’t show up for you as a child
- Your family history beyond just you and your parents – grandparents had an impact to
What this is not
In our work together, we do not need to rush disclosures, relive painful memories, or push through distress. You don’t need to remember everything or explain everything for healing to occur. Therapy moves at a pace guided by your nervous system, and focuses on establishing trust and a felt sense of safety before we go deeper.
Approaches we use
We draw on evidence-based, trauma-informed approaches, including:
- EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprossessing) – to process traumatic experiences and belief systems safely and without needing to talk about the story
- Parts work to understand and work with younger selves and protector responses
- Body-based and nervous system-informed approaches to support emotional regulation and safety
- Developmental and psychodynamic frameworks that recognise how early trauma shapes our experiences into adulthood.
These approaches are integrated carefully, with consent and collaboration at every step.
Who is this for
Counselling for childhood trauma may be a good fit if:
- You live with the impact of childhood abuse, neglect, or in a home where your need were not met (attachment ruptures)
- You’ve tried therapy before but felt it stayed too surface-level
- You feel stuck in patterns that you understand but still can’t shift
- You carry a sense of shame, responsibility, or feel like you’re “too much”
- You want trauma therapy that understands the body and heart as well as the mind
- You’re done with just coping and you want to start living
Childhood trauma counselling is available in Perth (Midland and Ellenbrook) and online across Australia.
