Trauma
Trauma
Trauma is not defined by the scale of an event but by its impact. What leaves a lasting mark on one person may not affect another in the same way, and that difference says nothing about strength or resilience. Trauma happens in families and relationships as much as in dramatic single incidents, and it often leaves traces that persist long after the original circumstances have changed.
Many people I work with don’t initially identify with the word trauma at all. They may describe anxiety, difficulty trusting others, a persistent sense of not being safe, or patterns in relationships that repeat despite their best efforts to change them. These experiences often have roots in traumatic history, even when that history doesn’t look like what most people picture when they hear the word.
PTSD and Complex PTSD
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder can develop following a single overwhelming event: an accident, assault, sudden bereavement, or other acute experience that the mind struggles to process and integrate. Symptoms typically include intrusive memories or flashbacks, hypervigilance, avoidance of reminders of the event, and difficulty with sleep, concentration, and emotional regulation. These are normal responses to abnormal circumstances. They become a problem when they persist and interfere significantly with daily life.
Complex PTSD develops following prolonged or repeated trauma, often of an interpersonal nature. It can follow childhood abuse or neglect, sustained domestic violence, coercive control, or other situations where harm was ongoing and escape was difficult or impossible. The effects reach further than single-incident PTSD, into identity, into how you relate to others, into your capacity to feel safe inside yourself.
One of the most disorienting features of complex PTSD is emotional flashbacks. These are different from the visual or sensory flashbacks more commonly associated with PTSD. In an emotional flashback, you don’t necessarily see or relive a memory. You suddenly find yourself flooded with an emotional state that belongs to the past, overwhelming shame, terror, grief, or rage, without any clear image attached to it. These episodes can be confusing and frightening, but they respond well to careful, paced therapeutic work.
Developmental Trauma
Developmental trauma refers to chronic stress or relational harm that occurs in childhood, during the years when the brain and nervous system are still forming. It doesn’t require a single catastrophic event. It often grows in environments where care was inconsistent, emotional needs went chronically unmet, or safety was conditional or unpredictable. The impact gets woven into how a child develops: how they learn to relate to others, how they read threat, how much of themselves they feel entitled to take up.
Many adults with developmental trauma don’t recognise it as trauma at all. It can feel simply like how things were, or like a set of deficits in themselves rather than reasonable responses to an unreasonable environment. Therapy can help untangle those two things.
Trauma and Relationships
Trauma that developed in relationships tends to show up most clearly in relationships. Difficulty trusting others, hypervigilance to shifts in mood or tone, a pull toward familiar but painful dynamics, or a tendency to withdraw before intimacy becomes threatening are all common responses to early relational harm. They made complete sense in the original context. In adult relationships, they can create significant confusion and difficulty.
Dissociation
Many people who have experienced trauma also experience dissociation, a disconnection between aspects of themselves that would normally be integrated. This can range from mild experiences, losing track of time or feeling briefly unreal, to more sustained disconnection from identity, memory, or the body. You can read more about dissociation and how I work with it on the dissociation page.
How I work with trauma
My work with trauma is rooted in relational psychodynamic therapy, informed by attachment theory and an understanding of how trauma affects the nervous system and the sense of self. I work with the full range of trauma presentations, from single-incident PTSD through to complex trauma, developmental trauma, and dissociative disorders including DID.
The work is relational and carefully paced. We don’t push toward material before there is enough safety and stability to approach it. We pay attention to what’s present, in the room and in your body, and we work at a pace your nervous system can tolerate. The therapeutic relationship itself is central to the process, because trauma that developed in relationships tends to heal inside them too.
I also offer clinical supervision to therapists working with trauma and dissociation, including those encountering complex presentations for the first time.
Client resources
- Trauma and Recovery — Judith Herman
- The Body Remembers — Babette Rothschild
- It’s Not Your Fault — Nicola Ayers
- Survivors UK: survivorsuk.org
- PODS (Positive Outcomes for Dissociative Survivors): pods-online.org.uk
Professional resources
- Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books.
- Rothschild, B. (2000). The Body Remembers. Norton.
- Terr, L. C. (1994). Unchained Memories. Basic Books.
Samantha Merry is a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist in private practice in Bromley, South East London, and a doctoral researcher at the University of Chester. She holds the SCID-D qualification and has specialist training in trauma and dissociation from the Pottergate Centre, the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation, and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust.