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Healing Through Connection Exploring Melissa Harte’s Expanded Focusing Task for Trauma
I am honoured to bring a deeply meaningful approach to our work together—a method I learned directly from my own psychologist and mentor, the late Melissa Harte. Melissa was not only an expert in Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) but also developed what she called the...
Why Emotion-Focused Therapy Believes Emotions Come First in Trauma Healing
In the world of psychology, it’s often said that changing your thoughts will lead to emotional change. This is the basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which says that by shifting our thoughts, we can influence how we feel. But what if emotions come first,...
Exploring Betrayal Trauma
Betrayal trauma (Freyd, 1994) happens when the people who are supposed to care for us as children, such as parents, cause deep emotional harm by betraying out trust. In this article, I will focus on betrayal trauma within the parent-child relationship, though similar...
Why Does Past Trauma Affect My New Relationships?
Our brains recreate the familiar conditions from our childhood. This means that in relationships, we tend to choose partners who reflect characteristics from our past, just as we reflect parts of theirs. Then, we tend to trigger behaviors in each other that recreate...
Dissociation – Part 2 Are you feeling confused about your own experience of dissociation and how it matches up with what you’ve read online?
Most of what you’ll find online about dissociation—whether it’s academic or more general-public stuff—focuses on the extremes. They’ll give examples of the everyday dissociation everyone experiences, like highway hypnosis, where you drive somewhere, zone out, and...
Dissociation Part 1 – Why do we dissociate? The answer is millions of years old.
What do we do when faced with a threat? When we're faced with a threat, in a split second, beyond our awareness, our primal brain instinctively determines the stress response that gives us the best chance of living. Your primal brain determines which one will give...
Deprivation trauma
Deprivation trauma is about what you missed out on when you were growing up. But, when we think about trauma, we usually think about the things that happened, or were done - like physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse or exposure to family violence. We may...
Trauma has no sense of time
Triggers are trauma memories When you are ‘triggered’ you are having a bodily or emotional memory of the trauma. You’re experiencing the emotions and bodily sensations you experienced at the time of the trauma, even if you have no memory of what happened to you. But...
Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a diagnosis listed in the DSM 5, but is not listed as a trauma disorder. Instead it is placed with the personality disorders. Despite this, research has shown that childhood trauma is a significant risk factor in the...
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