A Guide to Trauma Therapies Used by Our Counsellors
At Tidal Trauma Centre in Surrey (Cloverdale), we understand how trauma can impact not just your thoughts and emotions, but also your body, relationships, and daily sense of safety. Whether you’ve experienced a single distressing event or have lived through ongoing stress and overwhelm, trauma can shape how you move through the world. It can feel isolating, confusing, and hard to name. But you don’t have to navigate it alone.
We offer a range of trauma therapies designed to meet you where you are, grounded in evidence-based approaches and adapted to your nervous system’s capacity and needs. This guide will introduce the core trauma therapy modalities offered by our clinicians, and help you decide what might be most helpful on your path to healing.
Understanding Trauma and Its Impacts
Trauma occurs when a situation overwhelms your ability to cope. That might be a sudden crisis or something that unfolded over time, like chronic emotional neglect, racism, abuse, medical trauma, or ongoing anxiety and hypervigilance in unsafe environments. The effects of trauma can include:
Persistent anxiety or fear
Difficulty trusting or connecting with others
Emotional numbness or disconnection
Overreaction to stressors or shutdown in response to conflict
Difficulty sleeping, concentrating, or regulating emotions
These patterns are not signs of personal failure. They are adaptations your body and brain made in response to danger or overwhelm. Trauma-informed therapy helps you reconnect with a sense of choice, regulation, and safety, slowly, gently, and at a pace that feels right.
What Does a Trauma Therapist Do?
A trauma therapist helps you explore the roots of distress with attunement and care. Instead of trying to talk your way out of trauma, we work with the nervous system, body cues, and emotional patterns that were shaped by past experiences.
Our therapists are trained to:
Offer grounding and co-regulation during sessions
Use pacing and consent so you’re never pushed too far, too fast
Provide practical tools for managing symptoms
Create space for meaning-making and integration
You don’t need to relive your trauma to heal from it. Our team helps you build the conditions for your nervous system to slowly release survival responses with dignity, clarity, and choice.
Modalities We Offer at Tidal Trauma Centre
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) helps the brain and body reprocess memories that are stuck in a heightened emotional state. By using bilateral stimulation (often through eye movements or tapping), EMDR activates the brain’s natural healing processes. Clients gradually feel less overwhelmed by the memory, and more grounded in the present. EMDR is often helpful for:
PTSD and flashbacks
Car accidents, medical trauma, or single-incident trauma
Ongoing anxiety or negative core beliefs linked to early experiences
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT-Informed) integrates mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. We use DBT-informed skills alongside trauma processing to help clients:
Stabilize intense emotions
Navigate high-stress relationships or environments
Develop inner tools for self-soothing and self-trust
DBT is especially useful when trauma has contributed to emotional overwhelm, self-harm patterns, or unstable relationships.
Somatic Approaches to Trauma Therapy
Many trauma survivors say, "I understand what happened, but I still feel stuck." That’s because trauma isn’t only stored in thoughts, it’s held in the body. Somatic therapies gently support you in listening to your body's signals, releasing tension, and building a felt sense of safety. We offer:
Somatic Experiencing (SE): Helps release stuck survival energy and restore nervous system balance.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Integrates body awareness with talk therapy to support regulation and trauma processing.
Somatic Attachment Therapy: Focuses on early attachment trauma using body cues and relational safety.
These approaches support healing from trauma that hasn’t responded to traditional talk therapy alone.
Observed and Experiential Integration (OEI)
OEI uses specific visual techniques to desensitize traumatic memories without needing to retell the entire story. It’s ideal for clients who:
Find verbal processing overwhelming
Feel stuck in persistent images or sensations
Need structured yet gentle support for memory integration
Developed in British Columbia, OEI is especially helpful for trauma stored in the body or right hemisphere of the brain.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS helps you meet the different "parts" of yourself, protective, reactive, vulnerable, avoidant with compassion and curiosity. Rather than pushing them away, we explore how these parts formed and what they’re trying to protect. Over time, clients experience:
Reduced inner conflict
More compassion for their emotions
A deepened sense of agency and wholeness
IFS is especially powerful for clients with a loud inner critic, people-pleasing patterns, or complex trauma histories.
The Healing Process
There’s no single path or pace for trauma recovery. Some clients feel relief quickly through targeted interventions like EMDR. Others choose long-term relational work to address attachment wounding and deep layers of dysregulation.
Our commitment is to walk with you, not ahead of you, and never pushing. We work collaboratively to find what feels doable, supportive, and aligned with your capacity. Healing doesn’t mean erasing what happened. It means gaining more access to presence, connection, and regulation.
Ready to Begin?
If you’re seeking trauma therapy in Surrey or anywhere in BC, we’re here to help.
Fill out a New Client Form to be matched with one or more therapists.
Or, book a free consult or appointment through our secure booking platform.
-
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Some people benefit from a few months of work, while others engage in deeper therapy over time. Your therapist will co-create a treatment plan with you.
-
Yes. We offer online trauma therapy across British Columbia. Many clients find that therapy from the comfort of their own home actually helps them feel safer and more regulated.
-
That’s totally okay. You don’t need to know the name of a modality, we’ll explore that together. Our intake process helps match you with a therapist whose approach fits your needs and goals.
-
No. Trauma therapy can be effective without going into detail. We honour pacing, consent, and work with the body and nervous system to support healing even when words are hard to find.
You Might Also Be Interested In:
Blogs
When Resistance Is Deeper: A Nervous System and Trauma-Informed Lens
Healing Beyond Four Walls: The Power of Online Trauma Therapy
Services
Disclaimer: The content on this website is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical, psychological, or mental health advice. It is not a substitute for professional care. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider for diagnosis and treatment.