Trauma-Informed Healing

Trauma Informed Therapy

Trauma can lock away our capacity to feel, notice, and regulate our emotions. Trauma therapy helps you find safety in facing the feelings that have felt too risky and explore the patterns that keep you stuck, so you can process them fully and experience real, lasting healing.

Sweetnam Psychology offers trauma therapy in person across the Gold Coast and Tweed Coast, and via telehealth psychology sessions Australia wide.

Recognising the Signs

Do you carry unprocessed trauma?

Trauma can show up in striking ways, including hypervigilance, avoidance, or intrusive thoughts, or in subtler patterns we use to protect ourselves, such as over-responsibility, conflict avoidance, self-doubt, or difficulty asserting boundaries. Therapy helps you safely face these patterns, process what’s been held inside, and regain clarity, control, and emotional freedom.

My approach is best suited to processing relational, developmental, and chronic trauma

Complex trauma and relational trauma shapes how we move through the world. It has taught us to engage in mechanisms that once operated as protectors, but now operate as inhibitors in your adult life. Beneath those patterns, your natural, instinctive self, the part of you that knows how to feel, reach for what you need, and respond authentically, is still there. Therapy can help you reconnect with that part of yourself and live more fully in the present.

You may have experienced:

Relational or attachment trauma: Early neglect, inconsistent caregiving, or enmeshed/distant relationships that impact connection and trust.

Developmental trauma: Prolonged childhood stressors, including emotional neglect, criticism, or exposure to conflict.

Emotional abuse or invalidation: Persistent shaming, blame, or minimisation of feelings.

Chronic interpersonal stress: Bullying, workplace dynamics, or repeated relationship patterns that generate anxiety, self-criticism, or avoidance.

Internalised shame or guilt: Thoughts of “I’m not enough” carried from early experiences into adult life.

Understanding the Method

What psychodynamic therapy does

Psychodynamic therapy (ISTDP) is a therapy that helps you access and process emotions that have been avoided or suppressed following experiences of complex trauma that taught your body to tense up, shut down, or push things away, sometimes without you realising it’s happening. By gently guiding you to face feelings in a safe and contained way, ISTDP helps uncover patterns that keep you stuck. Through experiential and holistic processes, we move toward whats been long held back, so your nervous system can release tension, and you can respond to life more freely and authentically.

The Transformation

What healing looks like

Psychodynamic therapy doesn't erase what happened. It transforms how your brain and body relate to it.

  • The part of you that experienced the initial trauma was often young. Over time, therapy allows this part to test out what could have been, if relationships felt safe.

  • Hypervigilance eases. You can be present again. Your body remembers it's safe.

  • You're no longer defined by what happened to you. The trauma becomes a chapter, not your whole story.

  • As the trauma resolves, so do its ripples. Energy that was tied up in survival is available for living.

Take The Next Step

Ready to process and heal?

Trauma therapy requires expertise and a strong therapeutic relationship. Let's talk about your experience and whether psychodynamic therapy is right for you.

Schedule a consultation