Living with trauma can be one of the loneliest and most misunderstood experiences you’ve known.
I often use the term “emotional orphan” to describe the internal experience of someone living with trauma. People who carry these wounds tend to describe similar experiences:
- Difficulty with boundaries, or an inability to say “no” even when you want to
- Inability to rest or guilt about prioritizing self-care
- Gravitating toward emotionally unavailable partners or friends, or experiencing difficulties in unsatisfying or tumultuous relationships
- Losing yourself in caregiving roles, equating worth with being needed, and feeling unseen even as you pour yourself into helping others
- Emotional exhaustion, anxiety, or depression that you keep hidden behind a façade of competence, independence, or overachieving
- A deep longing for connection and nurture, but an inability to let down your guard or receive from others
- Difficulty trusting others or never feeling like relationships are truly safe
- Intense feelings of sadness, anger, and a desperation to feel seen, heard, and held
Emotional orphans have often had to grow up too fast. You may bury your pain in caring for others, but no matter how indispensable you become to those around you, you carry a quiet ache inside:
Why am I not enough? Why is no one there for me?
Even if your emotional orphaning happened decades ago, it still feels fresh.
Not all trauma is caused by what happened. Some of the deepest trauma comes from what didn’t happen.
While most of us define trauma as a catastrophic event—an assault, a car accident, a natural disaster—a deeper, more inclusive definition of trauma encompasses so many experiences many of us might call “normal,” or even treat with dark humor or flippancy:
- Growing up without consistent emotional support, comfort, or stability
- Separation from a caregiver, even through circumstances like divorce or adoption
- Having your emotional experience invalidated or being told your feelings were wrong, bad, or too dramatic
- Chronic experiences of neglect, abandonment, loss, and loneliness
- Living with unpredictable caregivers or in unstable settings where other basic necessities and safe routines weren’t always guaranteed
These experiences and so many more impact your mind and body just as severely as a devastating catastrophe. The term for these kinds of chronic challenging experiences is “complex trauma.” Many people who have “shock trauma” or PTSD also have complex trauma, and so both types of trauma are often treated together.
At Smart Therapy, I specialize in treating complex trauma, offering an integrated approach focused on healing deep emotional wounds that often formed early in life and have been with you for a long, long time.
My approach to treating complex trauma focuses on healing deep attachment wounds and repairing your relationship with yourself.
I bring extensive training in a wide range of unique therapeutic approaches to my trauma work, including:
- Schema Therapy
- By exploring your history and identifying the underlying schemas, or the mental templates into which you fit your life experiences, schema therapy helps you not only deepen your insight but also shift out of well-worn ruts of beliefs or behaviors to experience new, more life-giving possibilities. Common schemas (core beliefs) revolve around themes of Emotional Deprivation, Abandonment, and Subjugation or Self-Sacrifice.
- Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT)
- EFT helps you access deeply buried emotions rooted in early attachment wounds, in order to process and ultimately transform them. By learning to slow down, you can stop avoiding or bypassing your feelings and, instead, approach them gently, with acceptance and support.
- Depth & Jungian Therapy
- The emotional orphan experience is fundamentally an archetype; often emerging in film or literature, it pulses with a mythic energy that contains both pain and potential. Depth therapy approaches use deep insight as a container, for growth and rebirth to occur. Jungian therapy is a powerful framework for exploring the struggle and the shadows that have marked your life and emerging into a vibrant life of wholeness, connection, and joy.
- Dream Work & Psychodynamic Therapy
- Dream work and psychodynamic therapy have been around for a long time, but sadly, are often overshadowed by newer, flashier approaches. I’ve found, however, that dreams carry messages from the orphaned self, and open portals to parts of yourself that can’t speak with words but still long to be known and held. Together with dream work, psychodynamic therapy helps trace the threads that stitch together your childhood and adult life in familiar patterns of relationships, defense mechanisms, or beliefs.
- Inner Child Work & Corrective Reparenting
- By offering your inner child the attunement, compassion, sensitivity, and nurture that you missed in earlier stages of life, you can release that part of you and allow the inner child to break free of the haunting past. Inner child work often incorporates imagery, dialogue, somatic awareness, and emotional responsiveness. It goes deeper than talking about the pain, and allows you to interact directly with the part of you that holds that pain, offering that young and vulnerable part of you what it so desperately needs.
- Brainspotting & Hypnotherapy
- These body-based, non-verbal approaches allow us to bypass the intellect and release what’s stored in your nervous system, where you may experience the lingering effects of trauma as tension, pain, stress, or other physical symptoms. Brainspotting and hypnotherapy are powerful techniques that can improve emotional regulation and provide immediate relief while depth-oriented approaches repair old wounds.
If you’ve lost parts of yourself to trauma, It’s not too late to find them and bring them home.
Trauma therapy starts with safety and stabilizing, but it leads to so much more.
With trauma therapy, you can learn how to manage emotions and self-regulate through anger, sadness, fear, and hurt. You can recover an ability to build healthy and satisfying relationships. You can gain insight into the wounds and longings that drive your decisions and actions, and use that insight to open up new possibilities.
Many people find that trauma therapy involves a good deal of grief work, as you grieve the life you deserved but didn’t have, and accept the painful circumstances over which you had no control. But on the other side of grief, you can find gratitude, peace, and hope for the future.
Doing trauma work at Smart Therapy will bring you into intimate contact with the deepest parts of yourself. Knowing yourself more fully heals shame, frees you up to live life the way you’ve always wanted to, and teaches you to love the parts of you that were once rejected. From those roots can bloom healthier attachment, deep self-confidence, and joy.
Online Therapy for Trauma Across Ontario
If you are hungry for a life of more connection, peace, and fulfillment, and wondering whether trauma is holding you back, reach out today to schedule a consultation. You don’t have to do this alone anymore.
I provide online therapy to adults across Ontario, including Kitchener-Waterloo, Toronto, London, Ottawa, and surrounding communities.
