Offices in East Vancouver
Complex PTSD, sometimes called CPTSD or relational trauma, is more than a difficult past, but it also does not require dramatic events. It develops through repeated experiences within close relationships: chronic emotional unavailability, unpredictability, neglect, control, or the absence of consistent care.
What makes this form of trauma complex is not only what happened, but what it interrupted. Early relational experiences shape the developing sense of self, how a person understands their own worth, what they come to expect from others, and what feels safe to feel or express. When those experiences are marked by fear, confusion, or the need to adapt to someone else’s emotional state, they leave impressions that do not simply fade with time.
The result is not weakness. It is a nervous system and a set of relational strategies that were shaped by particular conditions, and that continue to organize experience, often without conscious awareness.
In therapy we expand our conscious awareness and step out of the patterns by choice. The therapists role is to guide the process for you to arrive at what you need to know. I believe, each of us unconsciously know what we need to know for our healing.
In each therapy session we tend to content that you bring to the session. This may be your story of what is bringing you pain, or a piece of your thoughts in between sessions, or the report of the week. We follow your feelings and mind through what you bring to each session, watching, meditating and feeling together. Through these meanderings, we become aware of how you think and feel, and what is holding you back.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy was not developed specifically for complex trauma. But is has been historically a modality of treatment for most severe cases of mental health, probably much worse than you are experiencing. So if any of the below describes your experience, yes, This treatment can be effective:
Difficulties managing emotions
Negative emotions toward yourself
Difficulties in relationships
Discover how psychodynamic therapy in Vancouver can help you move beyond trauma.
Offices in East Vancouver and East Kitsilano
Psychodynamic treatment is evidence-based, trauma-informed, and paced to you. It is relational and conversational, and the process itself is part of how change happens.
Unlike traditional psychoanalysis, modern psychodynamic therapy is less focused on helping people recover repressed memories. The focus is on present experience, and the past comes into view only as much as it helps to understand the emotions, conflicts, and patterns currently at work. Emotional attunement and relational depth are cornerstones of this approach.
In psychodynamic therapy, the therapist does not follow a fixed protocol. Instead, she provides a relational space that can receive and help process difficult emotional experience. Within that space, hidden beliefs come to the surface and aspects of the self that were suppressed or never fully developed find room to grow.
The therapeutic relationship itself becomes part of the work. It gives the client the grounding to reach their own emotional depth, and to begin testing the beliefs that have been holding them back.
The principals of the therapy I offer can be defined as:
I have a Masters in Counseling Psychology and I am a Registered Clinical Counsellor (# 21215). I work in person in Vancouver, BC and Virtual across all BC.
I am specialized in depth-oriented and attachment-informed psychotherapy.
I am committed to creating a space for you that is
I am eager to help you find your inner compass, so you can live fully and embrace your humanity and opportunities.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is the only type of therapy that does not frame you in a box, but attempts to understand you with all your uniqueness.
Greater steadiness, more access to yourself, and more authentic connection with others
As the underlying patterns become more visible and their origins more understood, their grip tends to loosen. Over the course of this work, many people find:
This is not a linear process, and it is not about arriving at an idealized state. The goal of therapy is developing a more resilient, more honest relationship with yourself and with others that is open to complexity.
Understanding where these patterns come from is the beginning of changing them.
If you’re ready to understand what’s been running beneath the surface, I’d be glad to begin that conversation with you.
Offices in East Vancouver and East Kitsilano
CBT focuses on changing unhelpful thought patterns in the present. Psychodynamic therapy goes a layer deeper — exploring how past experiences and unconscious patterns and beliefs shape how you feel today, using the relationship with your therapist as part of the healing process.
While IFS offers a compassionate framework for understanding trauma through the lens of parts, psychodynamic therapy goes further by placing the therapeutic relationship itself at the center of healing, a critical advantage when the original wounds were relational.
Rather than mapping protective parts, psychodynamic work uncovers the unconscious patterns, transference dynamics, and attachment wounds that drive them, addressing not just what developed but why, and how those early relational blueprints continue to shape identity, self-worth, and connection in the present.
While EMDR is highly effective for discrete traumatic events, psychodynamic therapy offers distinct advantages for relational trauma. Because relational trauma is typically chronic and diffuse rather than tied to a single memory, psychodynamic therapy is uniquely suited to address the deeper patterns it creates, including attachment wounds, internalized beliefs about self and others, and identity-level shame.
Crucially, the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a vehicle for healing: for those whose trauma originated in relationships, experiencing a consistently safe and attuned connection with a therapist can be profoundly corrective in a way that EMDR's processing protocols don't replicate.
Psychodynamic therapy also reaches implicit and preverbal material that predates language, making it well-suited for early developmental trauma, and it can be paced flexibly for clients who haven't yet developed the emotional regulation that EMDR's processing requires.
The honest answer is that it varies, and any therapist who gives you a precise number upfront should be approached with caution. Complex and relational trauma is woven into your sense of self and attachment patterns, which means meaningful work takes time, many clients notice shifts within a few months, while deeper structural change often unfolds over one to several years.
In a psychodynamic approach, the pace is always guided by you, and how the therapy is progressing is something we assess together continuously throughout our work.