kildare offaly counselling psychotherapy

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Welcome to my website. My name is Antonia and I offer virtual EMDR and psychotherapy services for the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Complex Trauma (C-PTSD), dissociation (such as de-realisation, de-personalisation, or amnesia episodes), and Dissociative Disorders, such as DID.

I am a fully accredited psychotherapist (with the Irish Council for Psychotherapy and the Association of Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy), and I am trained up to Masters level with the University of Oxford, with internationally recognised complex trauma and dissociation training.

I offer virtual EMDR therapy, trauma-informed mindfulness/compassion-based interventions, and trauma-sensitive psychodynamic psychotherapy and body-oriented psychotherapy. You can attend your virtual sessions from wherever you feel comfortable, and be assured that EMDR therapy and trauma therapy are very effective when done online. Reseach conducted in 2020 showed that online EMDR therapy was even more beneficial than when done face-to-face and that attendance rates were better (study by Naomi Fisher, Iain McGowan and Justin Havens, 2020).

It might be scary and confusing to start seeing a therapist, especially when there are so many therapists and options, and even more if you have a history of trauma. Talk therapy or regular counselling where the therapist or counsellor has no trauma training might be re-traumatising for people with PTSD of C-PTSD, or may really worsen their symptoms. The same goes for mindfulness courses that are not trauma-sensitive. Therefore, if you have a history of trauma, neglect or abuse in childhood, or PTSD, it is wise to look for support that is trauma-sensitive or trauma-informed. You can meet me for a consultation online to see if the services I offer are suitable to you. I will leave it up to you to contact me after the consultation, and I put no pressure on people to make any decisions. If you decide not to start after the consultation, you do not have to even let me know.

A traumatic experience is an overwhelming event, which can be a single-incident such as in PTSD (an accident or assault), or something that is repetitive, chronic or that goes on for a long period of time, such as in Complex PTSD (ie: being raised by an abusive or emotionally absent parent or living in a war zone). During traumatic experiences, we might involuntarily go into a sate of fight, flight, freeze or submit, and if the trauma was chronic we might have gone into one or other of these states at different times. We might have felt utter terror or, in certain situations, we might have experienced numbness or detachment from the experience, our bodies, or our feelings. This is called dissociation and it happens because the situation is so overwhelming that we automatically detach from it in order to survive.

If the trauma happened in very early childhood and it involved a parent or close carer, the mind might not be fully integrated and we might have been left in our present adult lives with a sense of angry or terrified voices inside, such as in Dissociative Disorders, and this can be very frightening. Later in life, even if the trauma is over, with both PTSD and Complex PTSD, we might still have frequent moments of terror or detachment (flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, dissociation), or intense feelings and emotions such as deep shame or rage that we don't know how to manage. It might be hard to live a full life or have healthy relationships, and we might feel like we are constantly scanning for danger or attack. It might be hard to trust others even thought deep down we crave connection, or we might be very needy and anxious in relationships . We might not even remember the traumatic event, of if the trauma was chronic there might be gaps in our memory.

These are all normal symptoms of traumatisation and are not our fault. Recovery from trauma happens in community, so with the help of a trauma-informed therapist and a number of other supports there is hope. Please get in touch if you have any questions or want to book a free initial consultation.