Trauma Therapy
Trauma-informed support for nervous system regulation and integration
Trauma therapy with Tess Hunneybell is a clinically informed approach to working with the lasting effects of trauma — including childhood trauma, relational trauma, complex PTSD, and prolonged stress. Sessions are conducted online.
A Clinical Approach to Trauma Therapy
Trauma is not only what happened. It is how the nervous system continues to organise around threat, protection, and survival.
Over more than 20 years of clinical work across Europe and Africa, supporting thousands of people, this approach has been shaped by direct, sustained experience with how trauma presents and resolves in real lives.
Trauma therapy focuses on helping the body and mind regain a sense of safety, orientation, and capacity.
This work is paced carefully, with close attention to the client’s window of tolerance, personal history, and current life demands.
Sessions draw on somatic awareness, nervous system regulation, parts-informed work, and attachment-focused practice.
The emphasis is not on revisiting distressing material quickly, but on establishing enough internal stability for integration to occur safely.
Who Trauma Therapy May Help
This work may be helpful if you are experiencing:
- persistent anxiety or hypervigilance
- emotional shutdown or numbness
- difficulty with trust or relationships
- unresolved grief or complex loss
- the long-term effects of childhood or relational trauma
- burnout following prolonged stress or caregiving
Specialist Areas of Trauma Therapy
Some clients arrive with a specific presentation or a clearly defined history.
Some clients arrive with a specific presentation or clearly defined history.
Each area draws on the same clinical foundation — Relational Completion Therapy — applied precisely to distinct patterns of experience.
Specialist Areas of Trauma Therapy
Some clients arrive with a specific presentation or a clearly defined history. Each area draws on the same clinical foundation, applied carefully to distinct patterns of experience.
PTSD Symptoms
Working with the persistent effects of trauma — including hypervigilance, anxiety, intrusive thoughts, shutdown, and a body that remains on alert long after the event is over.
→ PTSD symptomsSomatic Therapy
Working directly with the body’s responses to trauma — sensation, movement, and physiological activation — as a route to resolution that does not depend on verbal processing alone.
→ Somatic therapyNarcissistic Abuse
Supporting recovery from relationships characterised by sustained manipulation, control, and psychological harm, including the confusion, self-doubt, and hypervigilance that often persist long after the relationship has ended.
→ Narcissistic abuse therapyGrief
Working with loss that has not been able to move — whether recent or long-standing, sudden or anticipated — including grief that has been carried privately without space or support.
→ Grief therapyThese processes are not applied in isolation. They form part of a single clinical model.
Stabilisation
and safety
Reducing Threat Responses
Working with patterns of hyperarousal, shutdown, and protective responses that continue after the original threat has passed, allowing the system to recognise that the threat is no longer present.
Restoring Capacity
Supporting the nervous system to tolerate a wider range of emotion, connection, and everyday life without overwhelm, so experience becomes available without triggering defensive responses.
Relational Completion Therapy
Relational Completion Therapy is a clinical model developed through more than 20 years of trauma practice across Europe and Africa, supporting thousands of people.
It centres on the completion of interrupted survival responses — physiological processes activated during threat that were never able to resolve.
Work is conducted at a tolerable pace. There is no expectation to disclose more than feels manageable, and no pressure to process before adequate safety and regulation are established.
Many people arrive after years of coping privately.
This work recognises the intelligence of those adaptations, while supporting the nervous system to move out of survival-based patterns — not through effort or insight alone, but through resolution.
The aim is not to erase the past. It is to resolve its ongoing activation.
Stabilisation and Safety
Establishing internal and external resources, strengthening regulation, and creating the conditions in which the nervous system no longer needs to remain organised around threat or protection.
Reducing Threat Responses
Working with patterns of hyperarousal, shutdown, and protective responses that continue after the original threat has passed, allowing the system to recognise that the threat is no longer present.
Restoring Capacity
Supporting the nervous system to tolerate a wider range of emotion, connection, and everyday life without overwhelm, as capacity increases through reduced internal activation.
Integration
Where appropriate, therapy supports the completion of responses that could not resolve at the time, alongside the linking of past experience with present awareness.
This work only takes place once there is sufficient stability and regulation, and is paced so the nervous system can recognise the difference between past threat and present safety.
The aim is not to revisit events in detail, but to resolve their ongoing activation.
As this occurs, what has happened is held as history, rather than experienced as something still unfolding.
Speak with Tess
If you’re considering working together — whether through online trauma therapy or a residential retreat — you can book a short call to talk it through.
You’re welcome to bring any questions. There’s nothing to prepare.
Or email: info@tesshunneybell.com