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PTSD & Complex Trauma Therapy in Kew
Trauma doesn't always look like what people expect. It isn't always a single, dramatic event frozen in memory. Often it's something quieter and more persistent: a nervous system that never quite settles, relationships that keep repeating the same painful shape, a sense of safety that seems to belong to other people but not to you.
At KYND Psychology, therapy for PTSD and complex trauma starts from the understanding that the mind and body adapted to survive something difficult, and those adaptations don't simply disappear once the danger has passed. Complex trauma in particular, the kind that builds slowly over time rather than arriving in a single moment, often shapes how a person sees themselves, trusts others, and relates to their own emotions long before they have language for what happened.
Working from a psychoanalytic foundation, and drawing on trauma-informed and evidence-based approaches where they serve the person in front of me, I offer a pace of work that respects what the body and mind can hold at any given time. This isn't about retelling the story until it loses its power. It's about slowly making room for what couldn't be processed at the time, always in service of the person, never the protocol.
Why the Past Keeps Returning
Freud noticed that what cannot be remembered tends to be repeated instead, played out in present relationships and reactions rather than recalled as memory. This is often why trauma feels less like a story from the past and more like something happening right now, in the body, in a flinch or a shutdown that has no obvious cause in the room. Understanding what is being repeated, and why, is often where the real work of trauma therapy begins.
What Sessions Look Like
Early sessions focus on building enough safety and steadiness for difficult material to be approached without becoming overwhelming. From there, therapy moves at a pace shaped by what the person can tolerate, never rushed toward a fixed timeline.
Sessions are available for adults and young adults at our practice in Kew. Many clients travel from Hawthorn, Camberwell, Balwyn, and Richmond for a therapeutic approach that treats them as a whole person rather than a diagnosis. Clinical psychology offers structure and safety, psychoanalytic thinking offers depth and meaning, and my training in both allows sessions to move between grounding in the present and a slower exploration of where these patterns began.