Trauma therapy

Not before you are ready, and not in detail to be helped. This is the single most common reason people put off trauma counselling for years. Early sessions are usually about steadying the present: sleep, triggers, what happens in your body, what helps you come back down. The account of the event itself comes later, at your pace, and some of the work never requires it at all.

Probably, and the comparison you are making is not a useful one. Trauma is not ranked by how bad the event sounds to somebody else; it is about what it did to your nervous system and what you were left holding afterwards. A childhood of never feeling safe, a bad birth, an accident, a medical event, sustained bullying, one frightening night, or years of someone else's rage all show up in the same ways.

That is normal rather than an obstacle. Memory of frightening events is often fragmented, out of order, or missing altogether, particularly from childhood. The work does not depend on reconstructing an accurate account, and nobody here is going to go looking for memories or tell you what must have happened.

Done badly and too fast, it can, which is exactly why pacing matters and why you keep control of it. A session can be stopped, slowed down or steered elsewhere at any point, and you are not obliged to finish a sentence you have started. Feeling stirred up for a day or two after a difficult session is common; being wrecked by it is a sign the pace is wrong and needs to be said out loud.

No, and you do not need a referral. Advance Minds does not diagnose PTSD; that sits with a GP, psychologist or psychiatrist. You can book directly and describe what is happening in your own words.

We do not provide EMDR. We provide trauma-informed counselling using a range of evidence-based approaches tailored to each person's needs.

Rather than relying on a single therapy model, we focus on helping you understand the impact of trauma, develop emotional regulation skills, work through underlying issues, build healthier coping strategies, and move towards long-term recovery in a safe and supportive environment.

If, after an initial assessment, we think a different approach or a specialist service would suit you better, we will say so and point you towards it.

To the building or onto the call, yes, and plenty of people do for the first appointment. Whether they stay in the room is worth thinking about, since it changes what you will say. It can be discussed at the start and changed later.

Yes. Aisha specialises in trauma and works with women and LGBTQIA+ clients, and you can book with her directly rather than being allocated to whoever is available. For a great many people this is the difference between attending and not attending, and it is not a preference anybody needs to justify.

Yes, by secure video anywhere in Australia, and being in your own space with your own exit is something many people prefer for this work. In-person sessions are available in Bankstown.