Trauma healing that begins where it is actually stored
The patterns that keep you stuck rarely live in your thoughts alone. They live in your body, your nervous system, and the survival responses that learned to protect you long before you had any conscious say in them.
Using advanced integrative brain-body therapies including Relational Integrative EMDR, Brainspotting, Root Cause Therapy, and Resource Therapy, I work with women to gently release what has been held for too long, so that safety, self-worth, and enoughness stop feeling like things to earn and start feeling like things to inhabit.
Does this sound familiar?
You’re the one people lean on. You hold space for everyone around you, professionally and personally, and you do it with such care. But somewhere in the middle of all that holding, you stopped being held yourself.
You might notice it in the way certain money moments catch you off guard, in the tiredness that doesn’t lift no matter how much you rest, in the gentle but persistent wondering whether you are truly safe enough, good enough, worthy enough just as you are.
However you arrived here, and whatever has shaped your story along the way, you don’t have to have it all figured out before you begin. Healing rarely looks like a straight line, and it rarely starts when we feel completely ready.
I offer gentle, evidence-based brain-body therapy, compassionate and practical, free from judgment, and paced in a way your nervous system can truly receive. There is no pressure to perform, no expectation to have the words, and no timeline but your own.
Your system already knows how to heal. Sometimes it just needs the right support to feel safe enough to begin.
What you can expect
Therapy with me is grounded, relational, and deeply attuned to your nervous system. There is no clinical distance here, just genuine presence and a pace that follows your lead.
Together we’ll work toward:
Releasing the hypervigilance, overwhelm, or emotional shutdown that has become your baseline.
Feeling more present and steady in your body rather than braced for what comes next.
Rebuilding trust in your own instincts and inner guidance.
Untangling people-pleasing, guilt around receiving, and the exhaustion of carrying more than your share.
Creating a relationship with yourself and with money that feels safe enough, grounded in sufficiency rather than scarcity.
This is not about pushing through. It is about softening into something steadier, one breath, one shift, one small choice at a time.
How I Work
Whether we’re meeting online or in my in-person space in Penguin, Tasmania, you can expect a pace that checks in with you as we go, always following your nervous system’s lead rather than pushing ahead of it.
Rather than relying on talking alone, I draw on advanced brain-body therapies including Relational Integrative EMDR, Brainspotting, Root Cause Therapy, and Resource Therapy to reach what words cannot always access, helping us gently process stored stress, emotional overwhelm, and trauma responses without forcing or retraumatising.
You’ll take home practical tools for nervous system safety that you can carry into your everyday life between sessions.
I bring gentle curiosity rather than clinical distance, and I create a space where all parts of you are welcome.
I work in bite-sized steps your whole system can receive, because big breakthroughs often come from steady shifts, not dramatic moments.
Brainspotting
A gentle yet powerful modality that uses eye positioning to access the body’s stored emotional responses.
Rather than needing to talk through every detail, Brainspotting allows your brain and nervous system to process what has been held beneath conscious awareness.
It is particularly helpful for anxiety, overwhelm, chronic tension and experiences that feel “stuck.”
Relational Integrative EMDR
RI-EMDR is a compassionate, flexible approach that moves at the pace of your nervous system. It focuses on safety and trust between you and your therapist, creating space for real, lasting healing.
By gently reprocessing painful memories, RI-EMDR helps reduce emotional distress and restore balance.
It also acknowledges the importance of culture, ancestry, and connection, recognising that healing happens in relationships, with yourself, others, and the world around you.
Root Cause Therapy
This approach brings somatic awareness to unconscious beliefs and emotional imprints that play out as recurring patterns in daily life.
Through a guided process, we gently trace reactions back to their origin, identify limiting beliefs and trapped emotions through Somatic testing, release the emotional hold they have had on the body, making way for more grounded, authentic choice.
Deep Healing Packages
Some things can’t be reached quickly. They need time, consistency, and a space your nervous system learns to trust before it feels safe enough to let anything go.
These packages are for the woman who is ready to commit to something steadier, a held therapeutic rhythm where your system can settle, process, and integrate at a pace that honours the depth of what you’re carrying.
We begin by building safety, because nothing lasting happens before that. From there, we work gradually and gently, releasing stored patterns and supporting you to embody the shifts that actually last.
Who this work is best suited to:
Women who sense there is more beneath the surface and are open to exploring it through brain-body approaches, including nervous system awareness, guided imagery, and sensory-based processing, rather than talking alone.
Those who recognise themselves in patterns of self-doubt, people-pleasing, perfectionism, over-responsibility, or the quiet exhaustion of never quite feeling enough.
Anyone experiencing chronic stress, anxiety, disrupted sleep, or emotional fatigue, particularly when connected to grief, big life transitions, inherited family patterns, or a long-held sense that money, safety, and self-worth have always felt complicated.
Who this therapy may not be the right fit for:
Anyone currently involved in an active legal case related to the issues being treated.
Those who are currently using self-harm as their primary way of survival, as a higher level of support would be more appropriate right now.
People in active substance addiction or currently taking benzodiazepine medications, commonly recognised as medications ending in “pam,” as these can affect how the therapies work.
Anyone seeking a quick resolution who is not yet ready to invest time and gentleness in their own healing process.
FAQs
What is Money Trauma ~ is it just mine?
Money trauma is what happens when your nervous system learns to associate money with stress, danger, scarcity, or survival, and that learning becomes a pattern that shapes how you think, feel, and behave around finances long after the original experience has passed. It can show up as a felt sense of never being safe enough, good enough, or worthy enough, with money or without it.
It rarely starts with you. Most money trauma is inherited, absorbed from the financial stress of a household, the unspoken rules around money in your family, a parent’s anxiety, a period of instability, or a culture that tied worth to productivity and never questioned it. Your nervous system was simply doing its job, learning what money meant in your environment and building responses designed to keep you safe enough, in survival mode.
Which means the patterns you’re carrying, the avoidance, the over-control, the guilt, the freeze when you open your banking app, the ceiling you keep bumping up against no matter how hard you work, are not character flaws. They are survival adaptations that made sense once, and now no longer serve you.
Money trauma is also not reserved for people who grew up in poverty or experienced financial crisis. It shows up just as often in high-functioning, over-responsible and hyper-independent professionals who appear financially stable on the outside while silently screaming on the inside.
Why is Money Trauma so important to get therapy for?
Because money touches everything.
It shapes how you work, how you rest, how you relate to the people you love, and how much of yourself you believe you’re allowed to have. When money carries a nervous system charge, it doesn’t stay contained to your bank account. It bleeds into your relationships, your health, your capacity to receive, and your sense of worth.
Most people try to solve money problems with better systems, more discipline, or another strategy. And for a while, those things can help. But if the underlying nervous system pattern hasn’t shifted, the ceiling comes back. The avoidance returns. The freeze before opening the banking app, the guilt after spending, the overworking that never quite feels like enough, these don’t resolve through information alone.
Money trauma therapy gets underneath the behaviour to the nervous system response driving it. It asks not just what you’re doing with money, but what money means to your body, where that meaning came from, and whether it still belongs to you.
For healthcare professionals and those in caring roles especially, this work carries an added layer of urgency. You spend your days holding space for other people’s healing while quietly carrying patterns of over-responsibility, self-erasure, and financial shame that nobody in your training ever named. You deserve the same quality of attention you give everyone else.
Getting support for money trauma isn’t a luxury or a last resort. For many people, it’s the missing piece that makes everything else finally work.
What will I notice is different, after working together?
The first thing most people notice is that they can breathe again, not metaphorically, but actually. There’s a quality of presence that returns, a capacity to notice what’s happening in your body and around you rather than moving through life braced for the next thing.
The deeper shifts tend to unfold gradually, and how quickly they happen depends on where you’re starting from. Think of it like a backpack, we all carry a load, and money trauma is no different. For some people that load is a well-organised, precision-packed hiking pack, compact and manageable, the kind you could take around Cradle Mountain for days without your body giving out. For others it’s closer to the size of a shipping container that needs to be loaded onto the Spirit of Tasmania just to move it from one place to another.
Neither is a character flaw, and both are real. Both can shift, just at different paces and through different depths of work.
What changes as the load lightens is less reaction and more choice. Money conversations that used to trigger a full nervous system response start to feel navigable. The ceiling you kept bumping up against begins to have more give. You stop bracing before you open your banking app, and the weight you assumed was just yours to carry starts to feel like it belongs to the generation it actually came from.
Are there any concessions or rebates available?
This is a fee-for-service private practice. Mental Health Care Plans, Medicare rebates, and private health care rebates are not offered.
Payment plans are available for packages and Intensives, making it possible to spread the investment over time. If a payment plan would make working together more accessible, simply mention this when you book your 30-minute Exploration Call and we can work something out together.
Should I choose a package or an Intensive?
Both pathways offer genuine depth, and the right choice depends on where you are and what your nervous system is ready for.
Packages create a consistent, held space for exploration and integration over time. They suit people who value a steady relational rhythm, want to build capacity gradually, and have the space in their life to let the work unfold at a natural pace.
Integrative Intensives take the work further by removing the gap between sessions entirely. Rather than waiting weeks between appointments, an Intensive creates an immersive, concentrated experience where you can uncover and explore the patterns that have shaped your life without constantly rebuilding context from scratch.
The extended format allows the nervous system to move through material more completely, building stabilising resources, momentum, and continuity in a way that weekly sessions simply cannot replicate. Core issues can be addressed more efficiently, and meaningful resolution becomes possible at a pace that feels both accelerated and genuinely safe- enough.
If you’re unsure which is the right fit, the 30-minute Exploration Call is the perfect place to think it through together.
What is the process to get started?
Getting started is straightforward and moves at your pace.
- Explore the Services page to get a feel for the different packages and Intensives available and find what resonates with where you are right now.
- Reach out when you’re ready, either by booking a 30-minute Exploration Call or contacting Sonia directly through the Reach Out page.
- Choose and purchase your package once you’ve had a chance to ask any questions and find the right fit for your situation.
- Complete your intake forms which will be sent to you automatically during the scheduling process, so everything is in place before your first session.
There’s no pressure to have it all figured out before you reach out. The Exploration Call exists exactly for that — to help you find your footing before you commit to anything.
If you're holding a lot, I'm here to hold it with you.
You don't have to have it figured out before you reach out. You don't have to know what you need or have the right words to describe it. You just have to feel safe enough to take one small step toward yourself.
When you're ready, and even if you're not quite sure yet, I'm here.