Ariana | Trauma Specialist/ Integrative Counsellor

Introduction

Growing up with trauma or difficult early relationships can make the world feel like an unsafe place. There's often a cost to that, a loneliness that's hard to explain, even to yourself. A quiet persistent sense that something is wrong with you.

Maybe you're not even sure who you are outside of what you do for others anymore. Always being the one others lean on, while your own needs stay invisible. Only that carrying everyone else's expectations is no longer sustainable.

Not just in romantic relationships. The friendships where you give everything and still feel alone. The family dynamics you can't seem to escape. The workplace where you over-explain, or brace for criticism before it even arrives.

And sometimes, the relationship with your own children, fearing you are carrying patterns forward that were never yours to begin with. The relationship with yourself, the inner voice that's never quite satisfied.

Something I've learned across more than a decade of clinical work is that trauma often doesn't live in the past. It lives in your sleep, your body, and your relationships. In the quiet belief that you are somehow the problem. And very often, it can show up as anxiety, people pleasing, conflict avoidance, codependency or low self-esteem. Patterns rooted in childhood trauma and relationships that were never quite safe enough.

Many of the adults I work with don't arrive describing themselves as someone who's been through trauma. Because sometimes trauma is one clear event. Sometimes it's the accumulation of difficult experiences over time. You don't need the perfect label for it to matter.

Alongside trauma, I work with adults carrying what's harder to name, shame, self-doubt, a sense of never quite belonging, not knowing who you are outside of what others need from you, or the weight of relationships that have always felt complicated.

I bring both professional and personal understanding to this work, alongside authentic human realness and clinical experience. I believe the therapeutic relationship is the foundation from which real change becomes possible. I believe every person has the capacity to heal and to build the relationships they deserve, to feel safe, understood, and more fully themselves. My role is to work alongside you, as you find your way back to yourself.

Over the past five years, I have worked as an integrative trauma therapist within a specialist counselling trauma service dedicated to supporting adults, developing deep expertise in complex trauma, childhood trauma, attachment difficulties, and the relational patterns, such as people pleasing, codependency, relationship anxiety, low self-worth, that so often follow early experiences of feeling unsafe.

Before that, I spent five years working across a range of counselling settings, including within the charity sector, such as Mind, building a practice rooted in genuine curiosity about each person's story.

Whatever brings you here, and however long you've been carrying it, change is possible. In over a decade of this work, I've seen it happen, and it rarely looks the way people expect.

Getting Started

If you would like to know more or book an appointment, please send me a message. I respond to all enquiries within one working day.

Ariana