It may be hard to believe, but whatever is happening with you is part of the human condition because you are a human having a human experience.

I’m sorry it’s often so hard and complicated, we humans need each other, we need relational support from other humans to fully be well and that doesn’t always work out in life. We all need meaningful and loving connection, if this is absent or disordered during any phase of life it can cause emotional wounds that have impact on how we feel and on how we treat others.

I work with compassion as we nurture self-compassion and self-love, which allows us to have more compassion and love for others. This is often part of abuse recovery which impairs our ability to connect in these ways due to broken trust and trauma responses in the body.

This is true whether you have experienced abuse or even if you consider yourself to be an abuser and your own trauma may be invisible to you. Abusive behaviour comes from trauma, this can have happened anytime - between intimate partners, friends, experiences from childhood, sometimes pre-verbal experiences, often from loving parents in the form of intergenerational trauma, which is often invisible to you. Neglect is often experienced as abuse due to its profound negative impact.

Traumatized people often traumatize others, even outside of awareness. Emotional abuse can be invisible on both sides. If you experience behaviours that feel outside of your control, that’s often related to trauma. I’ll make a video about trauma to talk about it more, soon.

In therapy, we work on awareness, finding new choices, your relationship with yourself and others, and how you feel in the world. We may pick up some missed emotional skills along the way while processing and integrating traumas as you find your way to safety and connection.

If you would like to explore further, please visit other pages of this website. Thank you for reading.

Warmly,

Darren

NOTICE: I do not provide emergency services, I provide therapy for long-term healing. If you are in an immediate crisis, please contact your health provider or google, “crisis hotline near me” for a list of services to contact.