Langley, BC
Trauma & PTSD
Counselling
Every person is welcomed with dignity, compassion, and hope.
When we experience trauma, it is about both what happened to us and how what happened affects us. Traumatic stress is a particular kind of stress that can activate the body’s powerful systems for survival, protection, and connection when a person experiences threat, danger, helplessness, or overwhelming circumstances.
These survival responses are part of being human. We may instinctively reach for someone safe, fight against a threat, try to escape or flee, shut down, or become disconnected through dissociation. These responses are adaptive in the moment. They are powerful human mechanisms that can help us survive experiences that feel threatening or overwhelming.
Sometimes these responses continue after the danger has passed. A person may remain on guard, anxious, overwhelmed, withdrawn, numb, or disconnected. Traumatic stress can also affect sleep, emotions, concentration, relationships, marriage, work, and a person’s sense of safety and connection.
For some people, when these reactions persist over time, traumatic stress may be associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The effects may first become visible through anxiety, depression, anger, relationship difficulties, sleep problems, or simply a sense that they no longer feel like themselves.
These experiences can also arise from factors that are not related to traumatic stress. Rather than assuming what someone’s symptoms mean, a counsellor can take time to understand the person, their experiences, relationships, strengths, concerns, and what is happening in their life.
At Gentle Currents Therapy in Langley, BC, each counsellor brings their own clinical experience, areas of practice, therapeutic approaches, and way of connecting with people, while sharing a commitment to compassionate, trauma-informed and evidence-informed care.
Beginning trauma counselling can itself feel difficult. Traumatic stress can leave us with fragments of a story—memories, sensations, emotions, and experiences that may not yet feel connected or organized into a coherent whole.
You do not need to arrive ready to tell your whole story.
Part of trauma counselling can be making sense of what happened while helping the nervous system develop a greater capacity for safety and regulation.
Your counsellor can begin by getting to know you, listening to what you are experiencing, and working with you at a pace that respects your needs, circumstances, choices, and readiness.
Understanding
Traumatic Stress, Trauma and PTSD
Our responses to overwhelming experiences are not signs of weakness or failure. They are part of powerful human systems designed to help us survive danger and seek safety.
One of our earliest responses to fear or distress is proximity seeking—an attachment-based instinct to reach, call, or search for a safe and responsive person. From early life through adulthood, connection with another person can help us experience safety, comfort, and regulation. This is a social connection response: seeking safety through connection with another person.
When safety through connection is unavailable, our survival systems may mobilize us to fight or flee. Fight prepares us to resist, confront, or protect ourselves against a threat. Flight prepares us to escape, avoid, or create distance from danger. Both mobilize the body and its resources for survival.
When fighting or escaping does not feel possible, the survival system may move toward freezing, shutdown, or dissociation. A person may become still, numb, detached, disconnected from their body or emotions, or experience what is happening as unreal or distant. These responses can also be ways the mind and body attempt to survive circumstances that feel overwhelming or inescapable.
Proximity seeking, fight, flight, freezing, shutdown, and dissociation are powerful human survival responses that can be adaptive in the circumstances in which they arise.
When the Survival Response Continues
After danger has passed, our survival systems do not always immediately recognize that we are safe.
A sound, smell, place, sensation, conflict, relationship experience, memory, or other reminder can activate reactions connected with what happened. A person may suddenly feel anxious, threatened, overwhelmed, angry, shut down, or disconnected without immediately understanding why.
For some people, aspects of the traumatic experience can also remain fragmented. Memories, emotions, bodily sensations, and facts about what happened may not always feel connected as one understandable story.
A counsellor can help a person begin to recognize these patterns, understand what their mind and body may be responding to, and develop a greater capacity for safety and regulation.
When Traumatic Stress Becomes PTSD
Experiencing traumatic stress does not automatically mean that a person has post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
For some people, trauma-related reactions gradually settle with time, safety, supportive relationships, and opportunities for recovery. For others, reactions persist and begin to significantly affect everyday life, work, relationships, or wellbeing.
PTSD can involve patterns of intrusive memories or re-experiencing, avoidance, changes in thoughts and emotions, and persistent changes in arousal and reactivity.
You do not need to determine whether you have PTSD before seeking counselling. Your counsellor can listen to what you have experienced, what you are experiencing now, how it is affecting your life and relationships, and what you hope might become different.
Complex, Developmental and Relational Trauma
Not all traumatic stress comes from a single event.
Some people have lived through repeated, prolonged, developmental, or relational experiences that affected their sense of safety, trust, attachment, identity, or connection with other people.
When overwhelming experiences occur within important relationships—particularly relationships in which a person depends upon someone else for safety, protection, care, or belonging—the effects can reach beyond memories of particular events.
A person may struggle with trust, emotional regulation, shame, self-worth, boundaries, closeness, intimacy, or knowing whether relationships are safe. Some people become highly alert to possible rejection or danger. Others protect themselves by withdrawing, shutting down, or disconnecting from feelings and relationships.
Understanding trauma therefore involves more than asking: “What happened to you?”
A counsellor may also become curious about:
- “What happened within you?”
- “How did you survive?”
- “How has this affected your relationships and your sense of safety?”
- “What do you need now?”
These are questions that counsellor and client can explore together over time. Understanding can begin with one person listening carefully to another person.
Everyday Life
How Traumatic Stress Can Affect Everyday Life
Traumatic stress does not always look like what people imagine PTSD should look like.
Sometimes a person knows that a particular experience continues to affect them. At other times, they may first seek counselling because they are struggling with anxiety, depression, sleep, anger, emotional overwhelm, marriage or relationship difficulties, or a sense of disconnection from themselves or other people.
These experiences do not necessarily mean that trauma is the cause. A counsellor can take time to understand what is happening in the context of the whole person and their life.
Anxiety and Feeling on Guard
When the survival system remains sensitive to possible danger, a person may experience anxiety, worry, panic, hypervigilance, irritability, difficulty concentrating, or a persistent sense that something is wrong.
The mind and body may respond as though they need to remain prepared for danger, even when the person consciously knows they are safe.
Depression, Shutdown and Disconnection
Traumatic stress does not always produce a highly activated fight-or-flight response.
Sometimes the response moves toward shutdown, withdrawal, numbness, exhaustion, hopelessness, or disconnection.
A person may lose interest in things that once mattered, have difficulty experiencing pleasure or connection, withdraw from relationships, or feel emotionally distant from themselves and other people. These experiences can sometimes resemble or occur alongside depression.
Dissociation can also involve feeling detached from emotions, memories, the body, surroundings, or parts of one’s own experience.
Marriage, Intimacy and Relationships
Traumatic stress can also enter relationships.
A person who has learned to remain alert to danger may become particularly sensitive to conflict, rejection, criticism, distance, or changes in another person’s emotions. Someone else may protect themselves by withdrawing, shutting down, avoiding conflict, or becoming emotionally unavailable.
These patterns can become especially painful within a marriage or intimate relationship, where both closeness and vulnerability matter.
Partners may find themselves caught in cycles in which one person reaches for reassurance or connection while the other withdraws, becomes defensive, or shuts down. Over time, both people can feel misunderstood, rejected, alone, or unsafe.
For some couples, traumatic stress, attachment experiences, or earlier relational wounds may be part of what is happening. A counsellor can help explore these patterns without assuming that trauma explains every relationship difficulty.
Learn About Couples & Relationship Counselling →
Sleep, Anger and Everyday Functioning
Traumatic stress can also affect sleep, concentration, memory, work, parenting, physical tension, irritability, and the ability to regulate strong emotions.
Anger may sometimes be connected with a survival system that remains prepared to defend against danger. Sleep can become difficult when the body does not fully settle or when memories, dreams, or a sense of vulnerability become more noticeable at night.
The purpose of counselling is not simply to attach a trauma label to these experiences.
It is to understand what is happening for this particular person, what their responses may mean, how those responses may have helped them survive, and what might help them live with greater safety, connection, choice, and freedom.
Our Philosophy
Our Approach to Trauma-Informed Counselling
Trauma counselling is not simply about revisiting painful experiences or applying a particular therapeutic technique. It begins with a relationship between a person seeking help and a counsellor who takes time to listen, understand, and respond with care.
At Gentle Currents Therapy, our counsellors recognize that traumatic experiences can affect a person’s sense of safety, trust, choice, connection, and control.
You remain a person with dignity, worth, agency, strengths, relationships, and a story that is larger than what has happened to you.
Safety and Trust Come First
People sometimes worry that trauma counselling means they will immediately be expected to describe painful experiences in detail.
That is not where counselling has to begin.
Your counsellor can begin by getting to know you—what is happening in your life now, what concerns you most, what helps you feel safe, what relationships and supports are available to you, and what you hope might become different.
For someone whose experiences have involved danger, helplessness, betrayal, or loss of control, developing trust may take time.
You do not need to earn care by telling more of your story than you are ready to tell.
Regulation and Making Sense of the Story
Because traumatic stress can leave the survival system responding as though danger is still present, part of counselling may involve developing a greater capacity for safety, regulation, and connection.
Your counsellor may help you recognize patterns of activation, fight or flight, shutdown, or dissociation and explore what helps you remain present when difficult emotions, sensations, memories, or relationship experiences arise.
Counselling can also help make sense of experiences that may feel fragmented or disconnected.
The goal is not simply to “calm down,” nor is it simply to retell what happened. It can involve bringing together the story of what happened, the experience of what happened, and the person who survived it in a way that becomes more understandable and manageable over time.
Moving at a Pace That Respects You
There is no single timetable for trauma recovery.
Sometimes counselling may focus on what is happening in the present—anxiety, depression, sleep, anger, relationships, parenting, work, or everyday functioning.
At other times, when enough safety, trust, and capacity have developed, a person may choose to explore memories, emotions, meanings, and experiences connected with trauma more deeply.
Your counsellor can work collaboratively with you to decide what deserves attention, what feels possible now, and when it may be appropriate to move further.
Healing Happens in Relationship
Trauma often affects relationships, and relationships can also become part of healing.
A counsellor cannot change what happened to you. But they can seek to become a person who listens carefully, responds respectfully, honours boundaries, remains present with difficult experiences, and works collaboratively with you rather than taking control away from you.
This reflects our Statement of Care and a commitment shared by the people at Gentle Currents Therapy: skilled, evidence-informed care and genuine human connection belong together.
Our Team
Counsellors Providing Trauma-Informed Care
Finding a counsellor whose experience, therapeutic approach, and way of relating feel right for you can be an important part of beginning. Our counsellors bring different training, experience, and therapeutic approaches to their work.
Dr. Michael “Mike” Dadson
Clinical Director | RCC #1467, CCC
Michael works with trauma and PTSD, complex and developmental trauma, dissociation, attachment and relational trauma, veterans and first responders, anxiety, depression, and couples and relationship difficulties.
Carlie Dinwoodie
Clinical Supervisor & Counsellor
Carlie’s areas of focus include trauma and PTSD, anxiety, grief and reproductive loss, attachment and relationships, and children and families. Her training includes EMDR and attachment-focused therapy.
Dan Lloyd
Registered Therapeutic Counsellor
Dan works with trauma, anxiety, depression, emotional difficulties, relationships, men’s mental health, youth and young adults, drawing from relational, humanistic, and attachment-based approaches.
Other Members of Our Counselling Team
Sometimes the concern that brings a person to counselling overlaps with trauma but is primarily related to anxiety, depression, relationships, men’s mental health, workplace stress, burnout, emotional regulation, or another area of life.
Other Gentle Currents counsellors bring experience and approaches that may be relevant depending on what you are experiencing and what you hope to work toward.
Meet the People Behind the Care →
You do not need to decide which counsellor or therapeutic approach you need before contacting us.
The goal is not simply to connect you with a service. It is to help you find a person with whom you may be able to do meaningful work.
Pathways
Trauma Can Come From Different Experiences
There is no single experience of trauma and no single pathway toward recovery.
Traumatic stress can follow a particular event, such as an accident, assault, sudden loss, medical emergency, violence, or another overwhelming experience.
It can also develop through repeated experiences over time—childhood adversity, unsafe or painful relationships, abuse, neglect, occupational exposure, military service, emergency response work, or other circumstances in which the survival system has repeatedly been called upon.
Whatever brought you here, your experience deserves to be understood in the context of your life, your relationships, your strengths, and the ways you learned to survive.
If You Are a First Responder or Veteran
If you are a first responder, veteran, military member, healthcare professional, or someone who has worked in another high-stress environment, traumatic stress may not come from one event.
You may have spent years going toward situations that other people were trying to escape.
You may have witnessed injury, death, violence, suffering, or loss. You may have been responsible for other people’s safety while managing your own fear and reactions. You may have had to make difficult decisions quickly, remain composed when circumstances were anything but normal, and then return home and somehow shift back into everyday life.
Sometimes there is one call, deployment, incident, loss, or experience that stays with you. Sometimes it is the accumulation of hundreds of experiences. And sometimes what begins to concern you is not a memory of a particular event at all.
You may notice that you are more irritable, constantly on guard, sleeping poorly, withdrawing from your family, drinking more, feeling numb, struggling in your marriage, becoming anxious or depressed, or finding it increasingly difficult to leave work behind when you come home.
You may also be very good at functioning.
Being able to continue doing your job does not necessarily mean that your experiences have not affected you.
You Do Not Have to Explain the Culture Before You Can Talk About the Experience
For first responders and veterans, trust can matter enormously.
You may wonder whether a counsellor will understand the work, the culture, the responsibility you carried, or why you responded the way you did. You may not want to be treated as fragile or reduced to a diagnosis. And you may have spent much of your career being the person other people depended upon rather than the person asking for help.
A counsellor experienced in working with first responders, veterans, operational stress, and traumatic stress can begin by listening to you—not simply to the events you experienced, but to what those experiences have meant for you, your relationships, your work, and the person you have become.
Different Paths Toward Recovery
There is no single therapeutic approach that is right for every person.
You do not have to prove that what happened was bad enough to deserve care.
Our counsellors draw from different areas of training and experience, including EMDR, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, attachment-based approaches, CBT, relational therapies, couples therapy, and other evidence-informed approaches.
Dr. Michael “Mike” Dadson is also the developer of the Sequential Trauma Narrative (STN), a trauma-informed framework that emphasizes thoughtful sequencing of trauma work, including safety, regulation, relationship, processing, meaning-making, and integration.
LENS Neurofeedback as a Complementary Pathway
For some people, counselling may also be complemented by LENS Neurofeedback.
Jeanette Dadson, Founder and Co-Owner of Gentle Currents Therapy and a Certified LENS Neurofeedback Technician, brings more than a decade of experience providing neurofeedback.
For people experiencing concerns such as sleep difficulties, nightmares, stress, or nervous-system dysregulation, neurofeedback may be considered as one part of a broader, individualized approach to care.
Meet Jeanette
Learn About LENS Neurofeedback →
The question is not simply: “Which trauma treatment should I receive?”
A better place to begin may be: “What has happened to me, how is it affecting my life now, and who might have the right training and experience to help me?”
Getting Started
Beginning Trauma & PTSD Counselling in Langley
Reaching out for counselling can be difficult, especially when traumatic experiences have affected your ability to trust, feel safe with other people, or know where to begin.
You do not need to have everything figured out before you contact us.
You may be looking for help with trauma or PTSD. You may be experiencing anxiety, depression, nightmares, sleep difficulties, anger, dissociation, or emotional overwhelm. Your marriage or relationships may be suffering. Experiences from childhood may continue to affect your life today. Or you may be a first responder or veteran carrying experiences from your work or service.
Sometimes people know exactly why they are seeking counselling. Sometimes they simply know that something is not right and they do not want to keep carrying it alone.
You Can Begin Where You Are
Trauma may be part of your story, but it is not the whole of who you are.
You bring more than symptoms into counselling. You bring relationships, strengths, experiences, values, losses, accomplishments, responsibilities, hopes, and a life that matters to you.
Your counsellor can begin there—with you.
At Gentle Currents Therapy in Langley, BC, our counsellors seek to provide trauma-informed, evidence-informed care within relationships characterized by listening, respect, collaboration, and compassion.
You can ask questions. You can take time to develop trust. You can talk about what is happening now before talking about what happened then. And you and your counsellor can work together to determine what the next step should be.
Our Statement of Care expresses the commitment shared by the people who provide care at Gentle Currents:
Every person is welcomed with dignity, compassion, and hope.
Fees, Benefits and Funding
Questions about cost, insurance, benefits, or third-party funding can be an important part of deciding whether and how to begin counselling.
Some clients, including some veterans, RCMP members, first responders, and others, may have access to benefits or third-party funding for counselling services.
Take the Next Step
Talk With Us About Trauma Counselling
If traumatic stress, PTSD, anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, occupational experiences, or something from your past is affecting your life today, you are welcome to contact us.
You can begin by telling us a little about what brings you here.
From there, we can help you consider which of our counsellors may be a good fit and what a first step might look like.
