Licensed psychotherapist · 10+ years · EMDR · Lifespan Integration · Certified HeartMath trainer · English, German, Hebrew · Online, worldwide
Licensed psychotherapist · 10+ years · EMDR · Lifespan Integration · Certified HeartMath trainer · English, German, Hebrew · Online, worldwide
Who I work with
Therapy for CPTSD and complex trauma in adults who function well — often better than the people around them — and have been braced for as long as they can remember.
Book a first session50 minutes, no commitment beyond it.
You're competent. Probably more than competent. People rely on you and you're used to that.
You read rooms fast. You register a shift in someone's tone before they've finished the sentence. You're extremely good at anticipating what other people need, and often unclear on what you need.
Closeness is complicated. Rest is difficult — being unproductive feels faintly dangerous in a way that's hard to justify.
And there may be no single event you can point to. Nothing that would look like trauma if you listed it. Which is part of why it took you so long to consider that this might be what it is.
Trauma isn't always an event. A nervous system can be shaped by conditions rather than incidents — and those leave no story you'd call traumatic.
When people hear "trauma" they think of something identifiable — an accident, an assault, a catastrophe. Those exist, and single-incident trauma is real.
But a system can also be shaped by years of a household where you had to track someone's mood to stay safe. By a parent who was present but not attuned. By being the capable one, early, because someone had to be. By absence, inconsistency, or love that was real but conditional.
None of it produces a story you'd call traumatic. All of it produces a system that learned the world requires monitoring, and never received sufficient evidence to update.
Shaped by conditions, not incidents
It isn't personality. It's adaptation — it was intelligent, and it can change.
Most people in this position understand their history perfectly well. They can describe what happened, name what was missing, and explain the effects accurately. It changes very little, and there's a reason.
These patterns were laid down early — often before language, and always under conditions where reacting fast mattered more than reacting accurately. They aren't stored as a narrative you can revise. They're stored as expectations in the body: about proximity, about safety, about what happens when you need something.
Talking about them uses a system that was never in charge of them.
There's a second difficulty. Vigilance and self-sufficiency haven't merely persisted — they've worked. You built a functioning life on them. So a part of you regards them as load-bearing and will resist their removal, correctly, until there's genuine evidence that something else will hold.
That evidence has to be experienced. It cannot be explained.
Regulate → Integrate → Consolidate. With this material the sequence isn't a preference — it's a safety requirement.
We build capacity before we go anywhere near the material. Using HeartMath coherence training, you learn to recognise your own states and to shift them deliberately. This matters more here than anywhere else: processing developmental material without the ability to settle produces overwhelm, not resolution. We don't move on until this is reliable.
Lifespan Integration is the method I reach for most with attachment and developmental material. Rather than targeting a single memory — which developmental trauma rarely offers — it works with the timeline of your life as a whole, repeatedly, until the system registers at a felt level that the earlier chapters have ended. It's gentle, and it doesn't require detailed retelling.
EMDR does the heavier lifting where there are identifiable experiences — specific incidents, particular relationships, moments that still fire. It has a large research base and is recognised by the World Health Organization, NICE and the American Psychological Association among others.
Then the psychodynamic work: what the adaptation protected, what it cost, what replaces it, and how relationships change when you're no longer scanning. This is the slowest part and the part that makes the change durable.
Eventually you notice that a room is just a room.
This work takes longer than the other difficulties I work with. I'd rather say that at the start than have you discover it at month four.
The monitoring quietens, and eventually you notice it isn't running.
Settling after conflict or criticism in hours rather than days.
Being still stops feeling faintly unsafe.
Without it registering as a risk you've taken.
Less management, less bracing, more actual contact.
Rather than something considerably older.
Online work suits this material well, with limits worth stating directly.
It's appropriate if you're broadly stable in daily life, have somewhere private to work from, and have access to local support if you ever need it urgently.
It isn't appropriate if you're currently in crisis, actively at risk, in the middle of severe dissociation, or need someone able to reach you physically. In those situations you need local in-person care — and if that's where things are, I'll tell you plainly in the first conversation rather than starting something I can't hold safely.
That's not a judgement about severity. It's about what can be done responsibly across a distance.
What you won't have to do
Complex trauma results from repeated or prolonged experiences, usually in close relationships and often in childhood, rather than from a single identifiable event. It typically affects emotional regulation, sense of self, and how safe closeness feels — and because it's shaped by conditions rather than incidents, many people don't recognise it as trauma at all.
Broadly yes — CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) is the diagnostic term, recognised in the ICD-11, while "complex trauma" describes the underlying experience more loosely. CPTSD includes the core PTSD symptoms plus difficulties with emotional regulation, sense of self, and relationships. Many people recognise themselves in the description long before, or without ever, receiving the formal diagnosis — and the therapeutic work is the same either way.
Read: Is it CPTSD or PTSD — and does the difference change treatment? →
Yes, and this is common. Developmental trauma is often about what was absent or inconsistent rather than what occurred — attunement that wasn't there, a parent's mood you had to track, responsibility taken on too early. There may be no event to point to and still a nervous system that learned the world needs monitoring.
Read: Was my childhood actually that bad — or am I just too sensitive? →
Lifespan Integration works with the timeline of your life as a whole rather than targeting individual memories, which suits attachment and early experience where there's often no single incident to work with. EMDR processes specific distressing memories and has a substantially larger research base. Lifespan Integration is gentler and frequently better tolerated by people who find EMDR overwhelming; EMDR is more established and more extensively studied.
No. Neither EMDR nor Lifespan Integration requires detailed retelling of distressing events, and the pacing is set by what your system can process rather than by a schedule. We spend the early phase specifically building the capacity to stay present, precisely so that the later work doesn't become overwhelming.
That depends on what was done. If the work was primarily conversational, the processing methods here will be new. If previous trauma work was overwhelming, that often indicates the regulation phase was too short — which is the part I deliberately don't rush.
Yes, including EMDR and Lifespan Integration, provided you're broadly stable day to day and have local support available if urgently needed. It isn't appropriate during acute crisis or where someone needs to be able to reach you physically.
No detail required — you don't need to explain your history to a stranger to find out whether we'd work well together. That's all the first conversation is for.
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