Home > Trauma Counselling
What happened matters — and so does what happens next.
Trauma counselling can help you understand how difficult experiences may still be affecting your emotions, your body, your relationships, and the ways you have learned to protect yourself.
Your experience, your pace, and what feels most important right now guide the work. Together, we can explore what it may mean to live with greater safety, connection, and freedom from the past.
Sessions are available in person in Vancouver and North Delta, with online counselling available across BC.
By listening deeply, being curious to understand, and finding the path to healing. We offer you attention, compassion, and presence to help process traumatic experiences.
Trauma counselling provides a space to understand how difficult or overwhelming experiences may still affect you today. It can help you process traumatic experiences, recognize patterns shaped by the past, and move toward greater balance and resilience at a pace that feels manageable.
Have you ever felt overwhelmed by an event that just wouldn’t go away? When our nervous system is pushed to its limit, it can lead to a trauma response that lingers. You may experience this as powerlessness, confusion, fear, and shame.
Experiencing trauma earlier in life can have lasting effects, particularly when a child has limited support or ways to cope.
With childhood trauma, the consequences run deep. As a child, you have fewer resources to deal with the impact, and many people develop ways of coping, such as addictions, self-harm, destructive relationships, and isolation.
Unresolved trauma can contribute to repeated ways of managing life based on trauma responses, making stressful situations harder to navigate. Over time, this can lead to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Complex PTSD.
When trauma remains unprocessed, we may respond to present situations in ways shaped by earlier experiences. This can include shutting down, becoming highly alert, or reacting strongly when we feel misunderstood or unsafe.
Trauma counselling can help uncover and heal these patterns, allowing you to regain balance and resilience.
- Diana Fosha
Some struggles in life can have roots in trauma, but not every hardship is traumatic. Trauma can shape how we respond to challenges, leading to coping mechanisms that disconnect us from ourselves or others.
If you notice recurring patterns of avoidance, emotional overwhelm, feelings of shame, or difficulty in relationships, trauma may be a contributing factor.
Our therapists specialise in trauma therapy and have in-depth training in several experiential approaches that work on trauma recovery.
No matter where we begin, if trauma is contributing to your struggles, trauma counselling can help you understand and work with its effects. We address your most pressing concerns first, building a safe space to explore deeper experiences when you’re ready.
At Turning Point Therapy, our therapists start where you are, whether you are dealing with relationships, depression, self-esteem, or emotional overwhelm.
Trauma counselling isn’t about forgetting what happened or becoming someone who is never affected by the past.
The work starts with awareness and understanding. It begins with stepping back and noticing our automatic, repetitive responses.
As we become more familiar with our reactions, emotions, and the ways we have learned to protect ourselves, we may begin to have more choice in how we respond.
Working with trauma does not have a linear process to it. Instead, we explore your connection to parts of you rooted in the past and discover together what is held there, what needs expression, and how to let go of the consequences of trauma in your life. As we do this, you may experience increased safety and self-compassion.
Something that once felt automatic begins to feel a little less inevitable. We notice another option where there didn’t seem to be one before.
There isn’t one way to work with trauma, and we don’t begin by deciding that you need a particular kind of therapy.
We begin with you.
What are you noticing? What feels difficult right now? What happens when you get close to certain emotions, memories, or relationships? What has helped you cope until now, and where do those ways of coping begin to get in the way?
From there, different approaches can offer different ways to understand and work with what is happening. Our counsellors work with trauma in relational, experiential, and body-aware ways.
Here are a few of our main approaches.
Many of our counsellors use Internal Family Systems Therapy, often called IFS or parts work.
IFS sees parts as repetitive, habitual responses we develop that learned how to manage and cope with what happened and maintain the relationships around us.
Rather than trying to get rid of these responses (parts), IFS invites us to become curious about them—what they may be protecting, what they are afraid might happen, and what they may need from us now. This brings in self-compassion to the system and possibility for healing.
Many of our therapists have training in somatic therapy and integrate that with IFS or other forms of therapy. Somatic therapy involves understanding the nervous system and how trauma affects the way the body responds and has developed in response to trauma.
Somatic therapy uses somatic focusing (sensations, emotion, posture, behaviour), Images, and movement to process the body’s stuck energy and memories.
AEDP focuses on the therapeutic relationship to build safety and trust. The experience of aloneness that comes from trauma, and processing difficult emotional and relational experiences, are key to this approach.
Enhances positive functioning such as self-compassion, well-being, and self-esteem in both therapist and client.
The approach matters, but it is only one part of therapy. We also pay attention to the relationship between you and your counsellor, how the work feels as it unfolds, and whether what we are doing together is helping you move toward what you came to counselling for.
Finding the right therapist matters.
All our therapists at Turning Point work with trauma, and complex trauma, childhood and developmental trauma in particular. As there are many kinds of traumatic experiences, we have identified the main ones that each therapist has more experience and interest in, so you are guided towards the best therapist for you.
You can explore their profiles to learn more about how they work, what they focus on, where they practise, and whether they are currently accepting clients.
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PTSD and CPTSD can have similar symptoms, such as re-experiencing trauma, hypervigilance, avoidance, and numbing.
CPTSD can also involve further difficulties with relationships, emotional regulation, self-concept, and daily functioning. It is often associated with repeated or prolonged traumatic experiences, while PTSD can develop after either a single event or repeated trauma.
You do not need to know which diagnosis, if any, best describes what you are experiencing before beginning counselling. We can start with what is happening for you now.
Dissociation can be one way we respond when an experience feels overwhelming.
It can look different for different people. Some people describe feeling disconnected from themselves, their emotions, their body, or the world around them. Others may notice gaps in awareness or experience things as not real.
Dissociation can occur in response to trauma, particularly when difficult experiences happen early in life, but it is not limited to trauma alone.
If you’re experiencing dissociation, counselling can give you a space to explore when it happens, what seems to trigger it, and what may help you feel more present.
You do not need a complete or perfectly organised memory of what happened to begin trauma counselling.
Many people who have experienced early trauma can have large parts of their experience they don’t recall. This can be a trauma response that you used to survive. The work can start with what you notice now—your emotions, body sensations, reactions, relationships, or patterns that are affecting your life.
Counselling isn’t about forcing memories to return. You and your counsellor can remain curious about what you are experiencing and decide together what feels useful and manageable to explore.
At Turning Point Therapy, we don’t believe one approach to trauma therapy is best for everyone. We can learn something from many different approaches.
We encourage people to first find a therapist they connect with and feel comfortable with. The relationship you have with your therapist can create the trust needed to explore difficult experiences and emotions together.
At Turning Point Therapy we tend to use in-depth experiential approaches such as Internal Family Systems Therapy, EMDR, Expressive Arts, and Somatic Therapy.
A trauma response is a way our mind or body may react when something feels threatening, overwhelming, or unsafe.
When we are affected by trauma, our nervous system can keep a sense of danger or emergency even after the original situation has passed. We may become highly alert, want to get away, shut down, disconnect, or respond more strongly than we expected.
A trauma response is activated in the present as if we are experiencing the original experience from the past.
Rather than treating these responses as evidence that something is wrong with you, we can become curious about what your system may be responding to and what it has learned to do when something feels unsafe.
No.
You decide what you want to share and when.
Trauma counselling can begin with what is happening in your life now—what you are feeling, what you are struggling with, or the patterns you would like to understand differently.
There is no requirement that you begin by telling the whole story or going directly to the most difficult parts of your experience. You and your counsellor can decide together what feels useful to explore and at what pace.
There is no single timeline for trauma counselling.
How long you choose to work with a counsellor can depend on what brings you to therapy, what you want from the process, the complexity of what you are working through, and how the relationship and approach are working for you.
You and your counsellor can keep checking in about your goals, how the work feels, and whether the process remains useful.
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If you are ready to heal the impact of the past and thrive, not just survive, we are ready to work together towards a future you can feel excited about.
In-person appointments are available in Vancouver and North Delta, with online counselling available across BC.
This 2-minute guide will give you some initial pointers about who might be a great fit for you.
After reading our therapist’s bios, perhaps you are drawn to one or two, but you want to double-check. No problem!
You’re ready to get going and know who you want to work with.