Relational Trauma Therapy
Deeply Different
Where the self begins to breathe.
I know what it is to need someone who will not look away.
The Work Begins Here
You make complete sense.
Even the parts that have never been understood.
Many people arrive here because something in their life has never quite settled. Sometimes there was a clear event. Sometimes there wasn't.
What you notice is this:
Something feels different.
Connection doesn't quite land.
Relationships feel harder than they should.
The sense of not belonging follows you,
even in places that are meant to feel safe.
Anxiety, depression, relational struggles, or a constant background tension can emerge when the nervous system has adapted to environments that were not fully safe or attuned. The body carries what the mind has learned to manage around.
This work does not focus only on insight or narrative. The pathway to repair runs through the body and the relational field, where experience can finally be processed in a way the nervous system can integrate.
Healing begins when the system can feel its way home again.
Many people sense something long before they know what it is.
Relational Trauma
Something beneath the surface
has never settled.
You function. Sometimes very well. But underneath, there is a constant hum: anxiety that will not quiet, a numbness you cannot fully explain, relationships that never quite feel safe, or a version of yourself you keep catching glimpses of but cannot seem to reach.
The body knows. It carries what the mind has learned to manage around: the hypervigilance, the shutdown, the way certain moments send you somewhere the present cannot reach.
Relational trauma refers to trauma that occurs within relationships or environments where safety, attunement, protection, or consistency were disrupted. It accumulates. It shapes the nervous system. And it takes many forms.
Some people carry the weight of a single event. Others carry something older and harder to name: the slow accumulation of not being seen, not being held, not being enough in the places that mattered most.
Trauma does not always look like trauma. Sometimes it looks like being fine.
What Relational Trauma Encompasses
A wide range of lived
experience belongs here.
Developmental & Attachment
- Inconsistent or unavailable caregiving
- Emotional neglect
- Attachment injury
- Parentification
- Chronic misattunement
- Emotional abuse
Complex Trauma & CPTSD
- Ongoing childhood trauma
- Long-term relational instability
- Family violence
- Chronic emotional threat
- Dissociation
- Nervous system dysregulation
Abuse & Betrayal
- Sexual abuse
- Physical abuse
- Coercive control
- Domestic violence
- Institutional betrayal
- Attachment ruptures
Intergenerational
- Family patterns of survival
- Shame and silence passed down
- Cultural and historical trauma
- Legacy burdens from the lineage
ADHD & Masking
- Chronic misunderstanding
- Social rejection
- Years of masking
- Punitive environments
- ADHD in relational context
Adult Relational & Coping
- Emotionally abusive relationships
- High-conflict partnerships
- Addiction as adaptation
- Overworking, over-giving
- Chronic relational instability
My Approach
Trauma lives in the body.
Healing happens
in relationship.
This is not insight-only therapy. I work at the level of the nervous system, the body's held memory, and the relational patterns that were shaped long before there were words for them.
The Work
All that you carry
belongs here.
I work with adults and adolescents whose lives have been shaped by relational, developmental, and intergenerational trauma. Complex presentations are welcome.
Who I Work With
Adults and adolescents navigating
the weight of what they've lived through.
Relational, Developmental & Attachment Trauma
The kind that accumulates over time, in attachment, in family systems, in the relationships that were supposed to be safe. Complex, layered, held deep in the nervous system.
Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD)
When the nervous system has been on guard so long it has forgotten how to rest. Hypervigilance, dissociation, shutdown, and the exhaustion of living in a body that never feels fully safe.
Sexual Abuse & Domestic Violence
Experiences of violation, coercion, and harm within relationships. Approached with care, steadiness, and a deep understanding of how these experiences live in the body and nervous system.
Suicidality
Working with people who are carrying thoughts of suicide or who have a history of suicidal crisis. Approached without alarm and with genuine curiosity about the pain beneath.
Depression & Anxiety
Understood not as disorders to be managed but as responses to experience. I work toward the roots, not just the symptoms.
Intergenerational & Ancestral Trauma
Patterns carried across generations — through bodies, through silence, through the unspoken weight of family history. Working with what was inherited before it was understood.
moy · oh
mOYO
Heart
Inner Life
Vital Centre
In several African languages, moyo refers to the heart and the inner life. The name reflects the centre of this work: a place where experience can be understood in context, and where the self has room to breathe again.
If something here resonates — quietly, uncertainly, or without words yet — you are welcome to reach out.
Sessions are offered online wherever you are, or in person in North Vancouver. The first conversation is simply a place to begin.
I am grateful to live and work on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. I recognize the ongoing impacts of colonization and am committed to reconciliation, learning, and right relationship.
trauma reorganizes a system around survival. · therapy helps that system reorganize around life.
About
Tracy
Cairns
Certified Trauma Counsellor · Lifespan Integration Therapist
I work with adults and adolescents whose lives have been shaped by trauma. Sometimes it arrived suddenly. Sometimes it accumulated slowly, through years of relationships that could not hold what you needed them to hold.
Healing is not something the mind thinks its way toward. It lives deeper than that: in the body, in the nervous system, in the places where words have never fully reached. Real change happens from the bottom up. And it happens in relationship.
On This Work
This work is not unfamiliar to me.
I came to therapy first as someone who needed it, and then as someone who understood, with complete clarity, that this was the work I was meant to do.
There is often a quiet yearning beneath the surface: for connection, for steadiness, for something that finally feels whole. Many people carry experiences they never learned to name. They adapt. They cope. They function well. And still, something remains unsettled.
I have lived inside that unsettledness. I know what it is to move through the world with something underneath that quietly waits to be met. And I know what becomes possible when it finally is — when the right relationship, the right space, offers enough safety for the nervous system to begin to trust again.
That kind of relief begins when what once felt confusing starts to make sense. When the patterns, the reactions, the ways of coping, are understood not as flaws but as adaptations. As survival.
I don't speak about my own history at length. This room is yours. But I want you to know: you are not arriving somewhere clinical and unmoved. You are arriving somewhere that understands from the inside out.
How I Work
Therapy at the level of the nervous system, the body, and relationship.
My practice is grounded in the understanding that trauma is not only a memory — it is an experience that lives in the body, shapes the nervous system, and reorganizes how we relate to ourselves and others. I work attachment-informed, somatically aware, and relationally present. We move at a pace that allows your nervous system to integrate, rather than overwhelm.
Interpersonal Neurobiology
Understanding how the brain and nervous system are shaped by relationship, and how they can be reshaped within one.
Lifespan Integration
A protocol-based, body-oriented approach that gently helps the nervous system update its sense of time and safety. I hold a Level 2 certification.
Attachment Theory
The relational foundation of all my work. Healing happens in relationship — the therapeutic relationship itself becomes the site of repair.
Somatic Awareness
The body holds what words cannot always reach. We listen to it with curiosity and respect as a guide toward what needs to be seen.
Psychodynamic Formulation
Understanding the deeper patterns, histories, and relational dynamics that shape the present. Making meaning together, with care for the full arc of a life.
Parts-Informed Work
Recognising that within one person are many parts: some that protect, some that carry pain, some that have never had the chance to be fully known.
Areas of Focus
The particular terrain
I know most deeply.
Relational, Developmental & Attachment Trauma
My primary focus. The kind that accumulates over time, in attachment relationships, family systems, and the slow erosion of safety. This includes Complex PTSD, dissociation, and chronic nervous system dysregulation.
Complex PTSD
The result of prolonged, repeated trauma — often beginning in childhood, often relational in origin. CPTSD affects the whole self: identity, relationships, the body, and the capacity to feel safe.
Intergenerational & Ancestral Trauma
Some of what a person carries may not have begun with them. Patterns, responses, and emotional weights passed through families and lineages — through bodies, through silence. I bring particular attention to mapping these inherited landscapes.
Suicidality
Working with people who are carrying thoughts of suicide, or who have a history of suicidal crisis. Approached without alarm and with genuine curiosity about the pain underneath.
Sexual Abuse & Domestic Violence
Experiences of violation, coercion, and harm within relationships. Approached with steadiness, respect for pace, and deep understanding of how these experiences reorganize the nervous system.
Depression & Anxiety
Understood as responses that make sense in context. I work toward the roots, not just the surface.
Betrayal Trauma
When the harm came from someone who was supposed to be safe. The particular wound of trust — reorganizing the nervous system in specific ways that deserve careful, attuned attention.
ADHD & Relational History
ADHD in the context of trauma and relational history. The cumulative weight of years of masking, misattunement, and being perpetually asked to be otherwise than you are is real, and it belongs here.
Addiction as Adaptation
Understood not as failure, but as a strategy for managing distress or securing connection. Explored with genuine curiosity about what it has been protecting.
Couples
When the relationship has become the place where unprocessed history surfaces. Attending closely to attachment patterns, emotional safety, and the possibility of repair.
Training & Credentials
Rigorous training in service of this work.
Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology
Yorkville University · Conferred April 2026
Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (CCTP)
International Association of Trauma Professionals
Level 2 Lifespan Integration Therapist
Certified March 2026
C-IPNB: Certified Interpersonal Neurobiology Clinician
Completing April 2026
Body-Oriented Somatic Trauma Counselling
Crisis & Trauma Resource Institute (CTRI)
Not every therapist
is right for every person.
I believe in the primacy of the therapeutic relationship, and that means taking time to explore whether we are a good match before committing to the work. Come with your questions. Come uncertain. Come as you are.
I am grateful to live and work on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
trauma reorganizes a system around survival. · therapy helps that system reorganize around life.
My Approach
Not Insight.
Change.
I know what it is to need someone who will not look away.
Something brought you here.
A body that will not settle.
A relationship that hurts.
A life that feels just out of reach.
mOYO begins with a recognition: every human system carries its own logic.
My Approach
Understanding how a nervous system organized itself around what it lived through.
Trauma changes organization. Attention. Memory. Emotion. Connection.
The body holds unfinished experience. The mind builds meaning around it. Therapy becomes careful work with both.
Making sense of what the system learned.
Bringing experiences back into sequence.
Restoring continuity across a life.
Attachment. Neurobiology. Lifespan Integration.
The goal is orientation.
When experience finds its place in time,
the system gains room to move again.
The Person Behind the Work
My style is thoughtful, direct, and collaborative. I bring curiosity, steadiness, and a deep respect for the intelligence of the human system.
Together we will gently understand how you arrived here, and begin finding the way back to yourself.
I have lived my own version of this. That shapes everything about how I show up.
In several African languages, moyo means heart. It speaks to the inner life — the part of you that is still reaching for its centre. A place where your Self can breathe again.
mOYO
Finding your way back to yourself
heart · inner life · vital centre
In several African languages,
moyo means heart.
The Foundation
Relational wounds
heal in relationship.
There is no other way.
The relationship is not the context for the healing.
It is the healing.
What happened in relationship cannot be fully healed outside of it. The nervous system is shaped by relational experience from the very beginning of life. When those early experiences were marked by rupture, inconsistency, fear, or absence, the nervous system organizes itself around that reality.
Reorganizing it requires something new: a relational experience that is genuinely different from what came before. That is what the therapeutic relationship offers. Consistent, boundaried, attuned, and honest.
The nervous system learns safety the same way it learned threat: through repeated experience, in relationship, over time. This is why I work the way I do.
Three Foundations
Everything I do rests
on three commitments.
01
Bottom-up before top-down
The nervous system cannot be talked into safety. I work from the body upward — attending to sensation, breath, activation, and shutdown — before reaching for meaning.
02
Relationship as the site of repair
Relational wounds heal in relationship. The therapeutic relationship is not incidental — it is the ground on which everything else stands. When I miss something, I say so. That repair is itself part of the healing.
03
Your pace, not mine
Trauma therapy that moves faster than the nervous system can integrate is re-activation, not healing. I slow down enough to be thorough. The work deepens because it is not forced.
The Modalities
Each approach in service
of the same thing.
Lifespan Integration
Level 2 Certified
A neuroscience-based, body-oriented approach that gently turns time back on for a nervous system that has been frozen in it. LI works with the brain's innate plasticity to reconnect neural networks, helping the system register that the past is actually over. One of the most effective approaches for developmental trauma, early attachment wounding, and complex PTSD — and one of the gentlest.
Learn more about Lifespan Integration →Many clients describe feeling the past recede for the first time — not managed or reframed, but genuinely behind them.
Interpersonal Neurobiology
C-IPNB Certified
The science of how relationship shapes the brain — and how the brain can be reshaped within relationship. IPNB integrates neuroscience, attachment theory, and mindfulness to understand how early relational experience literally wires neural pathways, and how new relational experience can rewire them.
It gives us a shared language for what is happening: not as pathology, but as biology. Understanding why the nervous system responds the way it does is itself relieving.
Somatic Awareness
Body-Oriented
The body holds what words have not been able to reach. Somatic work means slowing down enough to notice what is happening physically and meeting it with curiosity rather than trying to move past it.
For many people, this is the first time their body has felt like something to listen to rather than manage, escape, or be ashamed of. That shift is, itself, profound.
Attachment Theory
Relational Foundation
How we learned to connect, seek comfort, and manage closeness in early relationships shapes how we do those things now. Understanding your attachment patterns is about making sense of responses that have always been logical — even when they have made your life harder.
When the patterns make sense, they lose their shame. And when they lose their shame, they become available to change.
Psychodynamic Formulation
Depth & Meaning
The deeper patterns, relational histories, and unconscious dynamics that shape who we are and how we move through the world. Making meaning together, with careful attention to what emerges in the room between us.
Some things only become visible over time, and in relationship. Depth requires patience, but it offers genuine reorganisation of the self.
Parts-Informed Work
Internal Systems
Within each person are many parts — some that protect fiercely, some that carry old pain, some that adapted in ways that made sense then but create difficulty now. We meet them all with curiosity and care.
People often describe a profound relief in being able to say: not all of me feels this way. There is room for all of it.
What to Expect
What a session with me
actually feels like.
The shape of the work
Pace
Slow enough to be real. I do not rush through difficult material to achieve a sense of progress.
Structure
Sessions are 55 minutes. There is no rigid script — we follow what is alive in the room.
Format
Sessions held virtually via a secure, privacy-compliant platform, or in person in North Vancouver.
What I ask of you
Nothing you're not ready for
You will never be pushed toward material before your nervous system is ready. Safety first is not a platitude here.
Honesty over performance
You can come confused, ambivalent, dissociated, or simply not sure why you came. All of that is workable.
Time
Healing at the level of the nervous system is a longer process — usually months rather than weeks. That is the depth of it.
You do not need to arrive ready. You need only arrive.
If this way of working
resonates with you.
The initial consultation is a chance to meet, ask questions, and sense whether this is a place you might want to return to. Come uncertain. Come as you are.
I am grateful to live and work on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
trauma reorganizes a system around survival. · therapy helps that system reorganize around life.
The Work
Trauma
in all its forms.
I work with adults and adolescents whose lives have been shaped by trauma. Sometimes it arrived suddenly. Sometimes it accumulated slowly, through years of relationships that could not hold what you needed them to hold.
All of what you carry belongs here.
Healing is not something the mind thinks its way toward. It lives deeper than that: in the body, in the nervous system, in the places where words have never fully reached.
Real change happens from the bottom up. And it happens in relationship.
The work is not about diagnosing what is wrong with you. It is about understanding the intelligence of your system — how it organized itself around what it lived through, and how that organization can, gently and over time, begin to shift.
What I Work With
The full scope of
relational and complex trauma.
Developmental & Attachment Trauma
- Inconsistent or unavailable caregiving
- Emotional neglect and chronic misattunement
- Parentification
- Attachment injury and rupture
- Emotional abuse within the family constellation
- Growing up in environments of unpredictability
Complex PTSD
- Prolonged, repeated childhood trauma
- Long-term relational instability
- Chronic emotional threat
- Dissociation and nervous system dysregulation
- Identity disruption and emotional dysregulation
- Difficulty feeling safe in relationships
Abuse & Betrayal
- Sexual abuse and assault
- Physical abuse and coercive control
- Domestic violence
- Institutional betrayal
- Infidelity and attachment ruptures
- Violation of trust by those meant to protect
Depression, Anxiety & Suicidality
- Depression understood as a response to experience
- Anxiety as a nervous system in survival mode
- Suicidal ideation and suicidal history
- Emotional dysregulation
- Collapse, numbness, and disconnection
Relational & Adult Trauma
- Difficulty with intimacy, trust, and conflict
- High-conflict and emotionally abusive partnerships
- Addiction as adaptation and self-regulation
- Overworking, over-giving, self-abandonment
- Chronic relational instability
- Couples: attachment patterns and repair
ADHD, Masking & Identity
- ADHD in the context of relational history
- Years of chronic misunderstanding
- Social rejection and punitive environments
- The weight of long-term masking
- Single-incident trauma and sudden loss
A Particular Strength
Working With
Unconscious Wisdom
The Legacy Burdens
Some of what you carry may not have begun with you.
Patterns that surface without context. Grief that feels borrowed. Ways of being in relationship that seem to predate any memory you hold. A persistent sense of carrying something that was never quite yours — and yet, here it is.
Intergenerational trauma passes through families not through storytelling but through the body. Through nervous systems that learned from nervous systems. Through silences that became postures, then patterns, then a life organized around an original wound that no longer has a name.
This is not abstract. It is physiological. And it is workable.
I bring a particular attention to mapping human systems — understanding not only what a person has lived, but what their system may have inherited. What was absorbed in proximity to unspoken pain. What was organized around a family constellation's unprocessed history.
Your unique mOYO — your inner life, your vital centre — is shaped by everything that came before you. Part of finding your way back means understanding that inheritance. Witnessing it clearly. And discovering what you choose to carry forward, and what you are ready to set down.
Your unique mOYO is not only what you have lived.
It is also what you have been given to carry.
Find Your Way Back to You
This is work of unusual depth. It requires patience, curiosity, and a willingness to look at the family constellation as a living thing that shapes who we become — and who we are still becoming.
find yourmOYO
The work begins with
a single conversation.
A free 20-minute consultation — a chance to meet, get a sense of how I work, and discover whether this feels right for you.
I am grateful to live and work on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
trauma reorganizes a system around survival. · therapy helps that system reorganize around life.
Fees & Getting Started
Let's begin with
a conversation.
A free 20-minute consultation — a chance to meet, get a sense of how I work, and discover whether this feels right for you. No pressure. No commitment. Just a real conversation.
Free · No obligation
Initial Consultation20 Minutes
Let's talk.
About what's drawing you here, how I work, and whether this feels like the right fit. Come with questions, come with uncertainty, or come with nothing more than a felt sense that something needs attention. That is enough.
The therapeutic relationship is the foundation of everything. It should feel right before we go deeper. This conversation is how we find that out — together.
Session Fees
Clear, straightforward,
no surprises.
Individual Session
$170
55-minute session. Payment is due at the time of each session. A receipt is provided for insurance purposes.
Sliding Scale
Available
If cost is a barrier, please mention it during our consultation. There is no obligation to explain yourself beyond what feels comfortable.
Couples Session
$190 / 90 min
90-minute couples session. Typically begins with an individual session for each partner before joint sessions begin.
Payment
Due at
time of session
Via e-transfer or credit card. A receipt is provided after each session for insurance or tax purposes.
Practical Details
Everything else
you may want to know.
Insurance
Check your extended health plan
Many extended health benefit plans cover trauma counselling services. I provide receipts for all sessions.
Cancellation Policy
24 hours notice required
Sessions cancelled with less than 24 hours notice — except in the case of genuine emergency — will be charged the full session fee.
Format
In person or virtual
Sessions available in person in North Vancouver, or virtually via a secure, PIPEDA-compliant platform.
Money should not be the thing that stands between someone and care they genuinely need.
Ready to take
the first step?
The consultation is free, and there is no commitment. Come uncertain. Come as you are.
I am grateful to live and work on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
trauma reorganizes a system around survival. · therapy helps that system reorganize around life.
I am grateful to live and work on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
trauma reorganizes a system around survival. · therapy helps that system reorganize around life.
