Treating PTSD

Let me answer some commonly asked questions, and I'll chuck in some research too. 

 

What is PTSD and what are the symptoms?

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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a condition that can develop after experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event. This might include abuse, assault, accidents, military combat, serious illness, natural disasters, or any situation where a person felt overwhelmed, helpless, or believed their life or safety was at risk.

Most people experience stress after a traumatic event, and this is a normal reaction. For many, these feelings gradually improve over time. However, for some people, the brain and body remain in "survival mode," even when the danger has passed. When symptoms continue for weeks or months and begin to interfere with daily life, it may be PTSD.

PTSD is not a sign of weakness, and it can affect anyone. It is a natural response to experiencing something that felt overwhelming or impossible to cope with at the time.

 

Common Symptoms of PTSD

PTSD affects everyone differently, but common symptoms include:

• Intrusive memories or flashbacks, where the traumatic event feels as though it is happening again.

• Nightmares or distressing dreams related to the trauma.

• Feeling constantly on edge, alert, or easily startled.

• Avoiding people, places, conversations, or situations that remind you of what happened.

• Strong emotional reactions, such as fear, anger, guilt, shame, or sadness.

• Difficulty sleeping or relaxing.

• Problems concentrating or remembering things.

• Feeling emotionally numb, detached from other people, or disconnected from yourself.

• Loss of enjoyment in activities that once felt meaningful.

Some people also experience physical symptoms such as a racing heart, muscle tension, headaches, digestive problems, or panic attacks, even when there is no immediate danger.

The good news is that PTSD is treatable. With the right support, it is possible to reduce symptoms, process traumatic experiences safely, and regain a sense of calm, confidence, and control over your life.

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Are there different types of PTSD?

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Kind of - yes. Not all trauma is the same. The type of trauma someone experiences can influence how they are affected and what kind of support is most helpful.

Acute Trauma

Acute trauma results from a single distressing event, such as a road traffic accident, assault, natural disaster, or witnessing a frightening incident. Although the event is over, the mind and body may continue to react as if the danger is still present.

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Chronic Trauma

Chronic trauma develops from repeated or ongoing exposure to stressful or threatening situations over a long period of time. Examples include domestic abuse, bullying, living in an unsafe environment, or prolonged illness. Because the threat is continuous, the nervous system may remain in a constant state of alert.

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Complex Trauma (Complex PTSD)

Complex trauma usually occurs when a person experiences multiple or prolonged traumatic events, often during childhood and often involving someone they depended on, such as a parent or caregiver. In addition to the symptoms of PTSD, people with Complex PTSD may struggle with emotional regulation, low self-esteem, feelings of shame or guilt, trusting others, and maintaining healthy relationships.

While everyone's experience is unique, understanding the type of trauma can help guide the most appropriate and effective treatment.

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What therapies are used to PTSD?

 

There is no single treatment that works for everyone with PTSD. Different therapies use different approaches, and the most effective treatment depends on the person's experiences, symptoms, and individual needs.

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Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

CBT is one of the most widely recommended treatments for PTSD. It helps people identify unhelpful thoughts and behaviours that have developed after trauma and replace them with healthier ways of thinking and coping.

As part of PTSD treatment, CBT often includes gradual exposure to traumatic memories in a safe environment, allowing the brain to learn that the danger has passed. This can reduce fear, avoidance, and anxiety over time.

For people with Complex PTSD, however, emotional regulation, trust, and self-esteem may need to be addressed before trauma processing begins, as these difficulties can make traditional CBT more challenging.

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Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)

EMDR is another evidence-based treatment for PTSD. During therapy, clients recall aspects of the traumatic memory while following bilateral stimulation, such as guided eye movements or tapping.

The aim is to help the brain reprocess traumatic memories so they become less emotionally overwhelming. Many people find that memories remain, but they no longer trigger the same intense emotional or physical reactions.

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Attachment-Based and Integrative Approaches

For people who have experienced repeated or childhood trauma, therapy often needs to focus on more than traumatic memories alone. Building safety, learning emotional regulation, improving self-esteem, and developing healthy relationships are all important parts of recovery.

Many therapists therefore use an integrative approach, combining different evidence-based techniques to meet each person's individual needs rather than relying on a single method.

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Hypnotherapy

Clinical hypnotherapy can be used on its own for some difficulties or alongside therapies such as CBT and EMDR. Research suggests that hypnosis may enhance these treatments by helping people feel calmer, become more emotionally regulated, and engage more effectively with therapy.

Because hypnosis encourages deep focus and uses imagination as a therapeutic tool, it can help people safely explore difficult experiences, develop new ways of responding to traumatic memories, strengthen emotional resilience, and build a more compassionate view of themselves.

Rather than erasing memories, hypnotherapy aims to reduce their emotional impact, helping the brain recognise that the traumatic event is in the past. It can also teach relaxation and self-hypnosis skills that clients can continue using long after therapy has ended.

At its heart, hypnotherapy is about helping people regain a sense of safety, confidence, and control, so they can move forward rather than remain stuck in survival mode.

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What about counselling?

Traditional talking therapies are excellent, but for complex, interpersonal trauma (cPTSD), logic isn't always enough. When a person experiences prolonged trauma, the brain's survival architecture shifts, often leaving them feeling unsafe in their own bodies and disconnected from others.

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What does that mean?

Traditional talk therapy relies heavily on the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC)—the logical, analytical part of the brain responsible for reasoning, language development, and self-reflection. However, traumatic experiences significantly alter how the brain processes information, which creates a massive hurdle for standard talk therapy.

1. The Survival Brain Takes Over

When an individual is reminded of their trauma, a shift in biochemistry occurs. The medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC) and the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC)—which normally manage logic, perspective-taking, and reality monitoring—effectively shut down.

Instead, absolute authority is given to the Amygdala, the brain's emotional alarm system and fear hub.

2. Triggering the Same Stress Response

Because the amygdala is running the show, discussing a traumatic incident can activate an intense, immediate stress response. The brain doesn't register that the danger is in the past; it feels like it is happening right now.

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  The Physical Toll: The sensory input triggers the hypothalamus to flood the body with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. This can manifest physically as trembling, hypervigilance, emotional dysregulation, or severe anxiety.

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  The Freeze State: If the body feels it cannot fight or flee, the nervous system collapses into a "freeze" response or spontaneous dissociation, leaving the client feeling numb, detached, or completely immobilized.

3. Re-Traumatization vs. Healing

When talk therapy repeatedly forces a client to verbally relive an event while their nervous system is in a state of high arousal, it doesn't heal the wound. Instead, it can cause:

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  Attentional Bias: It reinforces the amygdala's hypervigilance, training the brain to stay on the lookout for threats even when safe.

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  Avoidance Cycles: Because talking about the trauma is so distressing, clients often resort to thought suppression and behavioral avoidance, which ultimately intensifies their symptoms.

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  The Language Barrier: Because traumatic memories are often stored implicitly as visual, emotional, or somatic (bodily) fragments rather than a clean narrative, forcing someone to find words for a preverbal or high-emotion experience is incredibly difficult and frustrating.

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Why, specifically, do you feel Hypnotherapy is a great choice for c-PTSD?

There's some surprising science behind this. Many people view hypnotherapy as a passive or mystical practice, but the clinical reality is deeply rooted in neurobiology. When it comes to treating complex trauma (cPTSD), hypnotherapy isn’t just a good option—it is a uniquely tailored biological and psychological fit.

Here are three fascinating reasons why:

1. The Built-In Capability: The PTSD-Hypnotisability Link

It sounds paradoxical, but individuals who suffer from PTSD actually display significantly higher levels of hypnotisability than the general population.

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  The Skill Behind the Symptom: This occurs because the exact same cognitive mechanisms your brain uses to create PTSD symptoms—like spontaneous dissociation, deep absorption, and intrusive mental imagery—are the mechanisms used in hypnosis.

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  Flipping the Script: Instead of viewing dissociation as a frightening, involuntary symptom that makes you lose control, hypnotherapy handles it as a highly developed cognitive talent. We harness this natural capability and reframe it as a structured skill set, teaching you how to use self-hypnosis to consciously dial down panic and step back into absolute control.

2. Shifting the Brain: Hemispheres and Hidden Time-Loops

Trauma creates a literal asymmetry in how you experience the world, and hypnosis meets the brain exactly where it is stuck.

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  The Right-Hemisphere Connection: Brain imaging shows that both individuals with PTSD and people who are highly hypnotisable share a unique pattern of greater neural activation in the right hemisphere of the brain. This is the side responsible for generating intense, visual imagery without any actual external sensory input.

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  When Time Freezes: This right-side dominance explains why traumatic memories can feel frozen in time. In a flashback, a person experiences a terrifying time distortion—feeling like the past event is happening right now, eternally stuck at its most painful moment. Hypnosis naturally mirrors this exact same hemispheric asymmetry and time-distortion effect.

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  The Clinical Advantage: Because hypnotherapy works in the same "right-brained" visual and timeless landscape where your trauma is stored, it acts as an ideal bridge. It allows us to safely enter those frozen emotional "hot spots" and untangle them without needing the left-brained, logical narrative that trauma typically shuts down.

3. Bridging the Deficit: Using Imagination to Build "Mentalisation"

Traditional trauma therapies like Cognitive Restructuring (in CBT) often fail in cases of severe or childhood trauma. Why? Because they require high-level cognitive skills that the trauma itself damaged.

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  The Missing Piece (Mentalisation): Early childhood neglect or repeated trauma disrupts your ability to reflect on your own internal states, regulate your emotions, and accurately perceive the intentions of others. This psychological skill is called mentalisation. If your brain cannot safely label and reflect on an emotion, trying to "restructure" it with logic is virtually impossible.

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  Imagination as a Clinical Scaffold: This is where creative imagination becomes a powerhouse. Trauma survivors frequently rely on a highly active fantasy life to survive childhood. In hypnotherapy, we anchor this imaginative strength to build up those missing mentalisation skills.

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  Reparenting and Re-authoring: By using hypnotic guided imagery to imagine a safe environment or an "ideal, nurturing parent," you experience the exact biological feelings of safety, love, and attunement that were missing in development. This structural imagination helps your brain safely practice emotional self-reflection, neutralise deeply held guilt or shame, and build a healthy self-concept. Once these core developmental deficits are mended, long-term healing finally becomes achievable.

 

So, what do you do in sessions and how many will I need?

If you are recovering from a single, sharp traumatic event—like a traumatic birth experience or a sudden accident—healing doesn't have to take years. In fact, we can often process acute trauma in just 2 to 3 focused sessions.

We start by building a strong relationship of trust. I'll get to know your unique story and how your symptoms are impacting your daily life. From there, we focus entirely on your safety. Once you feel grounded, we use advanced tools like cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy, conversational hypnosis, memory re-encoding, and bilateral eye movements to calm your brain's alarm system and take the emotional sting out of the memory.

We wrap up our work by giving you practical coping strategies and integrating everything you’ve learned into your daily life, making sure you feel strong, capable, and ready for the future.

If your trauma stems from childhood or repeated difficult experiences, standard quick-fix therapies can often feel overwhelming or ineffective. Complex trauma shifts how your brain handles safety, self-worth, and relationships, which means we must take a completely different path to healing.

First, I will never rush you. Because this work is deeply personal, it depends entirely on you, and we don't use a rigid number of sessions.

My approach ensures we never dive into painful exposure work until your nervous system is fully prepared. We start by mending the invisible deficits that trauma leaves behind. Together, we will build a strong therapeutic relationship to safely repair old relationship models, boost your self-image, master emotional regulation, and develop the mental tools needed to understand your internal world.

Once that foundation is solid, we move beautifully into the reprocessing phase to take the sting out of the past, followed by integrating your learnings into everyday coping skills for the future.

How we space the sessions: To give you the best container for healing, I typically work with clients weekly for about 8 weeks to build absolute safety and momentum. As you grow more confident in your self-regulation tools, we taper down to fortnightly sessions for a month or two, before finally moving to an as-needed basis as you confidently step into your future.

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How did you start working with PTSD?

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I actually started working with PTSD by accident.

 

After my son was born, I experienced birth trauma myself, something that was definitely made worse by my "hypnobirthing" experience. It wasn't until I qualified as a hypnotherapist in 2020 that I realised the practitioner I'd seen hadn't actually been trained in clinical hypnosis.

 

That realisation became a bit of a personal mission. My first few clients had experienced difficult or traumatic births, and I wanted to help provide the support that I hadn't received. Without really planning it, I found myself specialising in postnatal PTSD (PN-PTSD).

 

As my practice grew, I decided to study for a Bachelor's degree in Psychology (and Sociology). I became fascinated by trauma, PTSD and, in particular, attachment. Many of the themes I was learning about at university were also appearing in the therapy room, so I began integrating psychological research with my clinical work.

 

Alongside my degree, I completed additional professional training (CPD) in PTSD, read extensively, continued developing my practice, and had the privilege of working with clients who trusted me with some of the most difficult experiences of their lives. 

 

My undergraduate dissertation was titled:

 

"Using an Integrative Hypnotherapeutic Approach in Trauma Treatment – The Importance of Imagination and Attachment in Therapy."

 

During my research, I explored a wide range of therapeutic models for treating PTSD and found some incredibly encouraging evidence supporting the use of hypnotherapy. I'll be sharing more about that research with you shortly.

 

After my Bachelor's degree, I went on to complete a Master's degree in Psychology, giving me Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership (GBC) with the British Psychological Society (BPS).

 

One day, I'd love to continue my training to doctorate level or top up my qualifications to psychotherapy level. For now, though, I'm exactly where I want to be—working with clients in the therapy room while raising my family.

 

Side Note:

Why I Do This Work

Behind my psychological training is a lived reality. I grew up surrounded by the complex storms of family mental health issues, domestic violence, addiction, and deep personal loss.

Because of that, I will never look at your symptoms as a mere checklist in a diagnostic manual. While I can never fully know the exact weight of what you have carried, I want you to know that I understand the landscape of survival.

I feel you. I really fucking feel you. 

My past is the reason I am so deeply passionate about creating a fiercely safe, completely non-judgmental space for you. You don't have to explain away your coping mechanisms to me—I get it. Let's work together to build the safety you’ve always deserved.

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