Online Trauma Counselling Across Ontario
Trauma Therapy in Ontario
If your body still reacts as though it is happening now, you are not broken and you are not behind. Work with a trauma-informed therapist at your own pace, online and with no waitlist.
- No waitlist
- Secure video sessions
- Reduced-fee sessions available
- Receipts for extended health benefits
Trauma Is Not Only What Happened to You
Most people who reach out to us have already spent years trying to move on. They stayed busy, kept it private, and told themselves it wasn’t that bad.
People often decide their own experience doesn’t count. It wasn’t violent enough. It was a long time ago. Other people had it worse. That comparison is the most common reason someone waits years before asking for help, and it measures the wrong thing.
Trauma isn’t measured by how severe an event looks from the outside. It’s measured by what it did to your nervous system. When something overwhelmed you, especially young or again and again, your body adapted so you could survive it, and those adaptations don’t switch off when the danger ends.
That’s also why trauma looks different from one person to the next. One person flinches at a raised voice. Another feels almost nothing, until a particular smell or a certain tone puts them straight back.
Trauma therapy gives all of that somewhere to go. You work with a therapist who recognizes trauma responses for what they are, moves at the pace you set, and helps your body learn it is no longer living in that moment.
What People Bring to Trauma Therapy
No two people carry trauma the same way, so therapy starts with what is happening now.
Complex trauma
C-PTSD
Trauma that lasted years rather than minutes, and shaped who you had to become to get through it. About C-PTSD therapy
Neurodiversity
Trauma and Neurodivergence
Years of masking leave their own marks, and being told you were too much is its own kind of injury. Affirming therapy
Sensitivity
Highly Sensitive People
You feel things at a volume other people don’t, and you learned early to apologise for it. Emotion regulation therapy
Family history
Intergenerational Trauma
Fear, silence and survival rules passed down a family line, from events you never lived through.
Systems and structures
Systemic Trauma
Racism, poverty, ableism, homophobia, a medical system that didn’t listen — harm that came from structures rather than from one person, and rarely gets named as trauma. 2SLGBTQ+ affirming therapy
Childhood
Childhood Trauma
Fear or unpredictability at home that shaped how safe you feel with people now. Emotionally immature parents
Emotional neglect
When Nothing Obviously Happened
No one hit you, no one was cruel, and no one noticed you either. It leaves a particular kind of mark: you can’t point to an event, only to a feeling you’ve had since you were small.
Relationships
Trauma Bonding
An attachment that is hard to leave because one person gave both the hurt and the comfort.
Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn
When your brain reads a situation as dangerous, it doesn’t stop to ask your opinion. It picks whichever response once kept you safest, in a fraction of a second. Survival usually takes one of four shapes, none of them a choice.
- Fight. A short fuse. Snapping at the person you love most over something small, then feeling sick about it. Bracing for an argument before anyone has raised their voice.
- Flight. Restlessness that looks like productivity. Overworking, over-planning, three tabs of apartment listings open at midnight. The urge to leave the room, the job or the relationship before anything can go wrong in it.
- Freeze. Going blank mid-sentence. Reading the same paragraph four times. Watching yourself from somewhere near the ceiling while the conversation carries on without you.
- Fawn. Managing the mood of everyone in the room. Apologising first, by reflex. Saying yes to the weekend you didn’t want, then resenting it quietly all week.
Fawning gets recognized last, because from the outside it just looks like being easy to get along with. If that sounds familiar, people pleasing and boundary setting are often part of the work.
When You Notice a Response Firing
You can’t talk yourself out of a trauma response, because the part of your brain that fired it doesn’t process arguments. What works is giving your body evidence that the moment has passed.
- Name it plainly: “that’s my fight response,” not “what is wrong with me”
- Put your feet flat on the floor and actually feel them — orientation beats reassurance
- Look slowly around and find five things that belong to now, not to then
- Breathe out for longer than you breathe in; the out-breath is the part that settles you
- Move, if you can. Fight and flight are energy that needs somewhere to go
- Afterwards, get curious rather than critical: what did my body think was about to happen?
Naming the pattern is usually a relief. What felt like a character flaw was survival — and survival responses can be updated.
Hypervigilance, Shutdown, and Why You Can’t Just Get Over It
Most people who come to us for trauma therapy were not in a war, a car crash or a single terrible night. They grew up in a house where the mood could turn without warning, or where nothing happened at all, and nobody noticed them either. Many spent years being told they were too sensitive, too much, too quiet, too odd, somewhere that wanted them to be something else.
That kind of trauma doesn’t leave a scene you can point at. It leaves a nervous system that never fully stood down.
Hypervigilance is what it’s called when your threat detection stays on. You read faces for a change in mood, sit facing the door, hear every sound at night, work out what someone needs before they ask. It can pass as being conscientious, or thoughtful, or good at your job, for twenty years.
Emotional flashbacks are the kind most people actually have. Not a scene playing in your head, but a sudden flood of old feeling with no picture attached. Shame out of nowhere. Dread when someone goes quiet. A four-year-old’s panic arriving in a grown body, in a meeting, for no reason you can name.
Shutdown is the other direction. Going flat, foggy, far away. Feeling nothing when you think you should feel something, then feeling all of it at 11pm.
Underneath all three is a nervous system running at settings it chose a long time ago, that never got told the danger passed. Emotions arrive too big, too late, or not at all. That isn’t a character defect and it isn’t a lack of effort.
This is what complex trauma, or C-PTSD, describes: not one overwhelming event, but years of adapting to something that kept happening — or to something that never happened, when it should have.
That’s the honest answer to why you can’t just get over it. It isn’t filed as a memory you can decide to put down. It lives in reflexes, in sleep, in how your chest tightens when someone walks in quietly. Willpower doesn’t reach that. The work is slower and kinder than willpower, and it does work.
What Trauma-Informed Therapy Actually Means
Trauma-informed gets used loosely, so here is what it means in our sessions. Your therapist starts from the assumption that your reactions were adaptive, not defective. The question is what happened to you, not what is wrong with you.
It also means you stay in charge. Nobody will press you for details of the worst day to prove you are serious. Going straight into the hardest memory can leave you flooded, so good trauma work is built around pacing.
- Steadiness first, so you can settle before going anywhere difficult
- You choose what to name, how much detail to give, and when to stop
- Your therapist watches for signs you are overwhelmed and slows down
- Sessions end with time to come back to the present
- Progress is measured by how you sleep and relate, not how much you disclose
Some weeks that means processing memories directly. Other weeks it means working on sleep, boundaries or emotion regulation. All of it is trauma work.
How Trauma Therapy Works With Us
Getting started is simple, and everything happens online.
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Pick a Time
Choose a free 15 to 20 minute consultation slot and tell us a little about what’s going on.
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We Match You
Behind the scenes, we pair you with a therapist based on what you’re working through, how you like to work and your background, then confirm your appointment by email or text.
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Free Meet & Greet With Your Therapist
Ask your questions and assess fit. Start sessions within days and schedule with them directly.
What Happens in Your First Session
Your first session is not an interrogation. Your therapist will ask what brought you in now, how things show up day to day, and what already helps. You can answer in broad strokes, and you can say you don’t want to go into something yet.
Every session takes place over secure video, anywhere in Ontario.
Approaches Our Trauma Therapists Draw On
Every therapist has their own style. Your sessions may draw on one or more of these.
Somatic and Nervous System Work
Works with the body’s side of trauma — the chest that tightens, the shoulders that never drop — so you catch activation early and can settle a system that is stuck on alert.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Gets to know the protective parts of you with curiosity instead of fighting them, including the ones that learned to keep you small or keep everyone else happy.
EMDR
A structured way of working with distressing memories so they lose their charge. Offered by select therapists only. If you want EMDR specifically, say so when you book and we’ll match you with someone who offers it. About EMDR therapy
Emotion-Focused Therapy
Makes room for feelings that were never safe to have, without being swamped by them.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy
Builds the skill of noticing a thought or a wave of old feeling as it arrives, rather than being pulled under by it before you realise it started.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Works with the beliefs trauma leaves behind, such as “it was my fault” or “I’m too much.”
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Builds your capacity to feel hard things and still move toward what matters.
DBT Informed Skills
Practical tools for riding out intense emotion and overwhelm without making things worse.
No idea what you need? That’s a normal starting point, and you don’t have to work it out before you get help. Book a free consultation and we’ll talk it through — working out what would suit you is part of what the call is for.
Know what you’re looking for? Tell us when you book and we’ll match you with a therapist who works that way.
Therapists Who Work With Trauma
These therapists list trauma among their areas of focus, and several list EMDR and complex PTSD work.
Our team is made up of Registered Psychotherapists and Registered Psychotherapists (Qualifying). Meet the full team.
What Trauma Therapy Costs
We offer different price points depending on your needs and your therapist’s qualifications. Every session comes with a receipt for your extended health benefits.
Affordable Care$90Sessions completed with a Masters Level Resident Intern working under supervision. Ideal for clients experiencing hardship.
Sliding Scale$100–$160Sessions completed with a Masters Level Resident Intern or Advanced Therapists offering sliding scale. Ideal for clients with limited health insurance.
Standard & Specialty$170+Sessions completed with therapists with higher levels of experience or with specialized care with different issues. Ideal for clients with health insurance coverage.
Your first 15 to 20 minute consultation is free. Fees vary by therapist, so check their profile. OHIP does not cover private psychotherapy. Read more about affordable care, our sliding scale and standard rates. Individual sessions are 50 minutes.
Using Your Benefits for Trauma Therapy
Many extended health benefit plans cover psychotherapy, but plans differ. Check whether your plan covers services provided by a psychotherapist, or psychotherapy, which provider types it covers, such as Registered Psychotherapists and Registered Psychotherapists (Qualifying), and how much coverage you have each year. We provide a receipt after every session.
Online Trauma Therapy Anywhere in Ontario
Because every session is online, you can work with a therapist who actually fits rather than whoever is nearby. For many people, doing this work from home is what makes it possible at all.
- TorontoOnline therapy
- OttawaOnline therapy
- MississaugaOnline therapy
- HamiltonOnline therapy
We see clients across the province. See all locations.
Related Services
Frequently Asked Questions About Trauma Therapy
How much does trauma therapy cost?
Sessions are $90 with our Master’s-level psychotherapy interns through Affordable Care, $100 to $160 on our sliding scale, and from $170 for standard and specialty sessions. Fees vary by therapist, and every session comes with a receipt.
Does OHIP cover trauma therapy?
OHIP does not cover private psychotherapy. Many extended health benefit plans include psychotherapy coverage, and we provide receipts after each session.
Do you offer direct billing to my insurance?
Not yet. We don’t currently offer direct billing, but we’re working on it. For now, you pay for each session and we send a receipt you can submit to your extended health plan for reimbursement.
Is there a waitlist for trauma therapy?
No. True Self Counselling has no waitlist. Most people book a free consultation and begin therapy within days.
How does online trauma therapy work?
Every session takes place over secure video, so you can attend from anywhere in Ontario. You book a free 15 to 20 minute consultation, we match you behind the scenes with a therapist who fits what you’re working through, and you meet them for a free meet & greet before starting sessions online.
Do I have to talk about the details of what happened?
No. You decide how much to say and when. Early trauma work is often about building steadiness first, so the hard parts don’t flood you.
What does trauma-informed therapy mean?
It means your therapist treats your reactions as survival responses rather than flaws, keeps you in control of the pace, and pays attention to safety and consent.
Do you offer EMDR for trauma?
Yes, with select therapists — not everyone on our team offers it. If you want EMDR specifically, say so at your free consultation and we’ll match you with someone who does.
What if nothing really bad happened to me?
This is the most common reason people wait years before reaching out. Trauma isn’t measured by how severe an event looks from the outside — it’s measured by what it did to your nervous system. Growing up with a parent whose mood could turn, or in a home where nobody was cruel and nobody noticed you either, or spending years being corrected for who you were: none of that comes with an obvious event to point at, and all of it leaves marks. You don’t need a diagnosis, or a story that sounds bad enough, to start.
I can’t remember much of my childhood. Does that matter?
No, and it’s common. Patchy memory is itself a survival adaptation. The work doesn’t depend on recovering events — it works with what your nervous system is doing now.
What is a trauma bond?
A trauma bond is the strong attachment that can form when harm and comfort come from the same person. The relief after a bad stretch feels like closeness, which makes leaving harder.
Why can’t I just get over it?
Trauma is not stored as a tidy memory you can decide to put down. Your nervous system learned a survival pattern that lives in your reflexes and your sleep, where willpower does not reach it.
Do I need a referral to start trauma therapy?
No. You do not need a doctor’s referral or a diagnosis to see one of our therapists. Some extended health benefit plans ask for a referral before they reimburse psychotherapy, so check your plan.
Ready to Start Trauma Therapy?
Book a free 15 to 20 minute video consultation with a therapist matched to you.
or call / text 289‑270‑1220
True Self Counselling is not a crisis service. If you are in crisis, call or text 9‑8‑8 any time, or call 911 in an emergency.