Trauma Counselling

Trauma counselling in Colchester

Trauma is not a story about what happened. It is a description of what happens in a person’s body and psyche in response to what happened. The knowing-without-feeling-safe. The body that braces before the conscious mind has registered a threat. The sleep interrupted by a nervous system that has never fully stood down. The way certain situations, sounds or moments produce a response that is disproportionate until you understand its history.

Dr Jacquet offers specialist trauma counselling and PTSD therapy in Colchester. He is an EMDR practitioner with over 20 years of experience, qualified to the highest European standard in trauma-focused therapy.

For those dealing with the effects of traumatic experience, we offer dedicated trauma therapy in London: an integrative approach combining EMDR, somatic work, and depth psychology.

The therapeutic approach

Trauma counselling at the Colchester practice integrates EMDR within a broader psychotherapeutic framework. EMDR processes the specific memories that retain their emotional and physiological charge; the surrounding psychotherapy provides the relational container that makes that processing safe and sustainable. The two together produce more thorough and durable results than either would achieve alone.

Art psychotherapy is also available where the traumatic material is difficult to approach through verbal language, which is often the case with early trauma, or with experiences that were too overwhelming to be encoded in narrative form.

Types of trauma treated

The Colchester practice works with single-incident trauma, complex and developmental trauma, childhood abuse, assault, accident and medical trauma, and the traumatic underpinnings of presentations including eating disorders, addiction, depression and anxiety. Many people arrive not with a clear sense that they are carrying trauma, only that something has never resolved, and that ordinary conversation has not reached it.

Complex trauma

Complex trauma, arising from repeated, prolonged or relational adversity rather than a single event, requires a particular clinical patience. The work proceeds at the pace of the person, without pressure toward any particular milestone. This practice has extensive experience in complex trauma work.

Trauma work in a garrison town

Colchester is one of the British Army’s principal garrison towns, and that shapes the trauma work this practice sees. Serving personnel, veterans and army families carry presentations that range from single-incident trauma to the longer shadows of repeated deployment, and they often prefer to address them privately, outside military structures. EMDR is well suited to this work, and sessions at the Colchester practice are conducted with complete confidentiality. The practice also sees civilians across Essex, including London commuters whose trauma symptoms have outlasted the demands of simply keeping going.

Getting started

An initial consultation in Colchester is the appropriate first step. You will not be asked to go anywhere you are not ready to go.

EMDR therapy with 20+ years of clinical experience. Dr Philippe Jacquet is an EMDR practitioner with over 20 years’ experience. See the full EMDR therapy London page.

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See all therapy services in Colchester.