Counseling trauma clients Perth, Cockburn,Fremantle

Get Your Self-Esteem & Confidence Back With Trauma Counselling In Cockburn & Fremantle

Simply put – Trauma is any event or experience which feels deeply disturbing, painful, and fragmenting, and has the individual feel disconnected from their true authentic self. This event not only happens in the mind and the states of behaviour, but encompasses the whole being: – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual as the individual’s brain and nervous system gets rewired to have the body remain in a state of fearful, avoidant, hypervigilance, acting as a protective mechanism to the original event or experience that felt terrifying and emotionally overwhelming.

So, despite having survived the original threatening incident, or event, their brain and physiology has now been rewired for them to see near and present danger everywhere and to automatically react from a place of survival. Thus, when perceiving a threat, they are left to believe the only options they have to keep them feel safe is by engaging in the coping strategies known as flight-fight-freeze-or faint.

Experiencing trauma can have profound effects on a person’s life. Anxiety, addiction, depression, relational difficulties, chronic pain and other illnesses are all markers for someone who has experienced trauma. It impacts everything that matters to you starting from how you see, relate and treat yourself, perform at work, and to who and how you love. And if this wound of disconnection to Self is not repaired, healed and integrated back into an embodied sense of wholeness, but instead left unattended, avoided, then the pain of the wound will continue to grow, poison and manifest in every area of life. And becoming hostile and aggressive, when feeling triggered by the original wound in the present moment, are examples of coping strategies that are enlisted as a way to give the person a sense of safety and control, while at the same time deepening the sense of isolation and disconnection internally and externally. Fortunately, the capacity of the human soul to heal, reconnect, and embrace wholeness through the acts of love, trust, honesty, and vulnerability, contained within the True Self, is without bounds. And it is when we offer ourselves the time, care, patience, courage and compassion to accept and acknowledge what has wounded our sense of Self that we start to rebuild within, a foundation of possibility, wisdom and hope to make different choices that foster inner peace, love, and harmony. At The Hearts’ Way; I (Sandy) offer, compassionate, insightful and evidence-based trauma counselling. I will treat you as a whole person, regarding you as the expert on your own life, while guiding you to identify and manage your traumatic symptoms as presenting in your day-day living, which could have also been diagnosed as PTSR (Post Traumatic Stress Response)

Speak To Me & book a session whenever you see fit.

I offer trauma counselling sessions in and across Cockburn and Fremantle, Perth!

Treating Trauma - How I Help You Get Better?

As an experienced and highly knowledgeable trauma counsellor serving near you; the foremost thing I will do is offer you hope, and reassure you that you are not ‘broken’ nor ‘damaged goods’, and that your intrinsic worth and value as a precious human being has remained the same, untouched, in spite of the trauma incurred. Then the focus will shift to managing physiological overwhelm, exploring ways in which you can gain a sense of agency over your activated nervous system, while identifying patterns of catastrophic thinking and beliefs that maybe reinforcing the sense of emotional overwhelm and loss of feeling safe in your own body, relationships, and environment.

Our work together will focus on building a sense of trust, safety and connection within your whole body; physically, mentally emotionally, and spiritually. For if trauma is the experience of feeling disempowered and disconnected from a sense of Self, and a fracture in trust, then it is essential that our work together center around the restoration and healing of that sense of mistrust, dislocation, fragmentation, and loss of autonomy to a sense of empowered, embodied wholeness through cultivating honest self-awareness. We will do this safety and self-trust building through engaging in specific processes of inquiry that are compassionate, open-hearted and free flowing, while also utilizing therapeutic modalities, which are nonverbal in nature. This will provide you with the understanding that there is incredible wisdom that lies within us, even in our darkest pain. And it is through this connection to our inner light that we make peace with what has hurt us and made us feel unsafe to show up and be authentic and to do the inner work to heal so we can have open-hearted, honest, healthy and interdependent relationships. Thus, giving us the strength and courage to be vulnerable and truthful, no longer choosing to stay stuck in fearful, avoidant, addicted, numbing out, rageful, self-sabotaging survival mechanisms that just serve to pass on our hurt, trauma, and pain within our families, businesses, and communities.

This work of trauma counselling, healing and integration takes time and compassionate care. It is one of truth speaking and liberation. It requires patience, a willingness to be open, curious and vulnerable so as to allow for that awareness and understanding to empower you to go beyond your survival coping mechanisms as you learn to offer yourself new ways of managing fearful thinking, feeling physically uncomfortable, and regulating emotional overwhelm and stress. How long this process of True Self recovery and restoration will take, will be dependent on the complexity of your trauma and where and how it is manifesting in your life, along with your sincere commitment to take responsibility and be accountable for feeling and healing what still triggers you, from what has hurt you, without blame, guilt, judgement and shame.

🙏 I welcome, whole heartedly, the joy of being able to hold space and facilitate your knowing your own lightness of Being, beauty and truth, so you can freely Laugh, Love and be Loved 'THE HEARTS WAY' - the way Life has always, and will ALWAYS LOVE You/Us.

Much love and blessings.
Sandy🌟

So, to summarize, during the counselling session; I will work wholistically with the body, and the emotions, alongside the traditional CBT and in conjunction with Sensorimotor Trauma Psychotherapy to –

Help explain the trauma to you
Reveal to you how your trauma is some anomalous reaction to some atypical incident/happenstance
Educate you on how your trauma triggers come about and how you can calm and re-regulate your nervous system through using practices that have you increase your awareness of what is occurring in your body, in your thinking and emotions, and also in the words that you speak, so that you can use the wisdom of your body to act as a guide to rebuild and reshape your beliefs to ones that foster self-love, compassion, connection, peace and trust.
And above all, by meeting you in presence I will act as a mirror to remind you of your true beautiful, pure, and uncorrupted Self, while guiding you in practices to feel grounded, safe in your body, trusting yourself to remain gentle, open and vulnerable, present in the moment, rather than succumbing and getting besieged by the horrors of your past through holding on to images of misperception that feed into and reactivate the survival processes of fear, avoidance and hypervigilance, through the suppression, repression and denial of your original wounding and pain.

I Offer Dedicated Counselling to All Types of Trauma Clients

It is my souls joy to offer dedicated counselling and guidance to every troubled soul who genuinely cries out for help and wants to know who they truly are beyond their habitual thoughts and feelings and what has happened to them. So, they can choose new beliefs and actions that demonstrate that they are worthy of love, care and respect, while at the same time accepting that we are the source for our own love, happiness and well-being.

I offer counselling to all categories of trauma clients.

They Include The Following: -

Individuals Suffering from Complex Trauma - that which results inside the context of a specific relationship, time –frame and setting
Individuals Suffering from Developmental Trauma - that which forms during an infant’s first few years of their life
Individuals Suffering from Sexual Trauma - that which takes place during childhood in the familiar home, domestic violence, peer to peer assault or if you are a victim of sexual trauma from educational, religious and other social institutions, and now struggling to have and maintain connection and intimacy in your relationships.
Individuals Suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Response (PTSR) - that which forms due to either direct or indirect exposure of a terrifying incident! It may also result due to suffering intense physical or psychological harm or threat experienced over a prolonged period of time, like being a refugee locked up in a detention center, or a singular event, like a car accident. These individuals often prove to be the most challenging simply because their symptoms become persistent, and they often display sudden bouts of intense reactions to even slight cues of their terrifying incident.

Secure Your Session Today

If you are dealing with PTSR or any other mental health conditions arising from unhealed trauma, namely – perinatal difficulties, PTSR, sexual assault, interpersonal violence, stress, anxiety or depression; you don’t have to go through it alone.

Working with me, I will patiently and sensitively guide you to overcome your trauma through compassionate self-inquiry, and by providing you with tools that have been scientifically proven to calm and ground the body, support the brain to re-process and reintegrate the pieces that feel terrified and shattered, lonely and disconnected from your true Self and sense of wholeness, so you can feel confident and empowered to set healthy boundaries so as to be genuine and real in all your relationships, connected to a path of self-love, well-being, joy, gratitude, self-contentment, and freedom!