trauma reorganizes a system around survival.
therapy helps that system reorganize around life.
not insight.
orientation.
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 not because something just broke,
but because something essential has been missing for a long time.
A sense of being held.
Reliable connection.
Enough steadiness to finally exhale.
This is where we begin.
Not with what is broken,
but with what your system has been longing for.
Many people sense something is wrong long before they know why.
Relational Trauma
Something beneath the surface
has never settled.
You function. Sometimes very well. But underneath, there is a constant hum: anxiety that won't quiet, a numbness you can't fully explain, relationships that never quite feel safe, or a version of yourself you keep catching glimpses of but can't 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.
Functioning. Achieving. Holding everything together.
While something underneath never quite settles.
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
- Family-of-origin wounds
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
Understanding is the first step. Repair happens differently.
How This Works
Trauma lives in the body.
Healing happens
in relationship.
This is not insight-only therapy.
We work at the level of the nervous system, the body's held memory, and the relational patterns shaped long before words.
The goal is not to manage symptoms: it is to restore coherence. So that past, present, and future feel connected rather than fragmented.
Attachment-informed practice
Lifespan Integration: body-oriented trauma processing
Interpersonal neurobiology
Somatic and relational repair
Psychodynamic formulation
The work takes many forms.
Who I Work With
Adults 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 that comes with 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. We work toward the roots, not just the symptoms.
Emotional Dysregulation & Dissociation
When feelings arrive too fast, too intensely, or feel impossible to tolerate. When you disconnect from yourself or the present moment without meaning to. Nervous system work that builds capacity from the inside out.
Relational Issues
Difficulty with intimacy, trust, conflict, or connection. The patterns that show up in relationships have roots. Understanding them is where change begins.
ADHD & Relational History
ADHD in the context of environments that required adaptation before understanding. Carrying the weight of years of being misread, chronically misunderstood, and asked to be otherwise than you are.
Betrayal Trauma
When the harm came from someone who was supposed to be safe. Infidelity, attachment ruptures, institutional betrayal. The particular wound of trust broken by the people or systems that were meant to protect.
Addiction as Adaptation
Substances, overworking, over-giving: understood not as failure but as strategies for managing distress. Explored without pathology, with care for what they have been protecting.
moy · oh
moyo
Moyo
mOYO
mo-yo
the name can take many forms.
just like the self.
versions of who you have been.
versions of who you are becoming.
some shaped by survival.
some waiting quietly beneath it.
therapy is not about becoming someone new.
it is about recognizing what has always been there
and allowing it room to live.
If something here resonates, even quietly, even uncertainly, you are welcome to reach out. I am here.
I offer therapy primarily for adults in North Vancouver and online across Canada. Initial consultations are available to explore fit. There is no obligation. Just a conversation.
North Vancouver · British Columbia · Online Across Canada
I am grateful to live and work on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xʰməθkʰəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səwx̓wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwəta̓əŁ (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 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, not overwhelm.
Interpersonal Neurobiology
Understanding how the brain and nervous system are shaped by relationship, and how they can be reshaped within one. The science of how we are wired for connection, and what happens when that wiring is disrupted.
Lifespan Integration
A protocol-based, body-oriented approach that gently helps the nervous system update its sense of time and safety. Particularly effective with developmental and complex trauma. I hold a Level 2 certification.
Attachment Theory
The relational foundation of all my work. Healing happens in relationship: it undoes the aloneness that is often at the core of trauma. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes the site of repair.
Somatic Awareness
The body holds what words cannot always reach. We listen with curiosity and respect, the anxiety, the shutdown, the places of holding, as a guide toward what needs to be seen.
Psychodynamic Formulation
Understanding the deeper patterns, histories, and relational dynamics that shape the present. Not analysis at a distance, but 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. We meet them all with curiosity and care.
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. Complex, layered, and requiring depth, steadiness, and a long view. This includes Complex PTSD, dissociation, and chronic nervous system dysregulation.
Complex Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (CPTSD)
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. This is the terrain I know most deeply, and where the depth of this work is most needed.
Suicidality
Working with people who are carrying thoughts of suicide, or who have a history of suicidal crisis. This work is approached without alarm and with genuine curiosity about the pain underneath. Suicidality is almost always relational in origin. It belongs here.
Sexual Abuse &
Domestic Violence
Experiences of violation, coercion, and harm within relationships. These are among the most complex and layered presentations in trauma work. Approached with steadiness, respect for pace, and a deep understanding of how these experiences reorganize the nervous system and sense of self.
Depression & Anxiety
Not as diagnoses to be managed, but as responses that make sense in context. Depression often signals something has been lost or suppressed. Anxiety is frequently the nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do. We work toward the roots, not just the surface.
Emotional Dysregulation
& Dissociation
When feelings arrive too fast, too intensely, or feel impossible to tolerate. When you disconnect from yourself or the present moment without meaning to. Both are nervous system responses to overwhelming experience: understood here as adaptations, not symptoms to be managed.
Relational Issues
Difficulty with intimacy, trust, conflict, boundaries, or connection. The patterns that show up in relationships have roots. Understanding them: through an attachment lens, with curiosity rather than blame: is where change begins.
Betrayal Trauma
When the harm came from someone who was supposed to be safe: a partner, a parent, an institution. Infidelity, attachment ruptures, violations of trust. The particular wound of betrayal reorganizes the nervous system in specific ways, and deserves careful, attuned attention.
Single-Incident Trauma
Accidents, medical events, assault, sudden loss. Experiences that altered the landscape of a life in a moment. These deserve the same quality of attentive, nervous-system-aware care, and often benefit from the same body-oriented processing approaches.
ADHD
ADHD in the context of trauma and relational history: including the experience of growing up in environments that required you to adapt before anyone thought to understand you. 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
Substances, overworking, over-giving, withdrawal: understood not as failure, but as strategies for managing distress or securing connection. Explored without pathology, with genuine curiosity about what they have been protecting and what else might become possible.
Couples
When the relationship has become the place where unprocessed history surfaces. Attending closely to attachment patterns, emotional safety, and the ways each person's relational past shapes present conflict, connection, and the possibility of repair.
Training & Credentials
Rigorous training in service of this work.
My training has been grounded in direct clinical work with adults and adolescents presenting with complex, layered, and high-acuity trauma, across a range of presentations and life contexts.
Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology
Yorkville University · Conferred April 2026
Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (CCTP)
International Association of Trauma Professionals (IATP)
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)
This training exists for one reason: to meet the complexity of the work people bring here.
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. I offer an initial consultation for this reason. Come with your questions. Come uncertain. Come as you are.
When the work is ready to begin.
I am grateful to live and work on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xʰməθkʰəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səwx̓wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwəta̓əŁ (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.
My Approach
Not insight.
Change.
Tracy Cairns
Certified Trauma Counsellor · Lifespan Integration Therapist
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.
trauma reorganizes a system around survival.
therapy helps that system reorganize around life.
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.
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. This is not a philosophical position: it is neuroscience. 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. And reorganizing it requires something new: a relational experience that is genuinely different from what came before.
That is what the therapeutic relationship offers. Not a simulation of care, but the actual thing. Consistent, boundaried, attuned, and honest. A relationship that repairs when it misses: because repair is itself part of what was missing. 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. Not because warmth is a stylistic preference, but because it is the clinical mechanism. The relationship is not the context for the healing. It is the healing.
Three Foundations
Everything I do rests
on three commitments.
01
Bottom-up before top-down
The nervous system cannot be talked into safety. We work from the body upward: attending to sensation, breath, activation, and shutdown: before we reach for meaning. Insight follows regulation. It does not produce it.
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. I am consistent, honest, boundaried, and present. 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 not healing: it is re-activation. We slow down enough to be thorough. There is no rush toward a finish line. 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. Trauma fragments the self: disconnecting neural networks so that past events are held in the body as if they are still happening now. LI works with the brain's innate plasticity to reconnect those networks, helping the system register, at a cellular level, that the past is actually over.
This is not talk therapy, and it does not require revisiting traumatic material in detail. It is one of the most effective approaches available for developmental trauma, early attachment wounding, and complex PTSD: and one of the gentlest.
Many clients describe feeling the past recede for the first time: not managed or reframed, but genuinely behind them. The fragmented parts of self begin to cohere.
Learn more about Lifespan Integration →
Interpersonal Neurobiology
C-IPNB Certified
The science of how relationship shapes the brain: and how the brain can be reshaped within relationship. IPNB, developed by Daniel Siegel, integrates neuroscience, attachment theory, and mindfulness to understand how early relational experience literally wires neural pathways, and how new relational experience can rewire them.
This framework informs how I understand everything from dissociation and emotional dysregulation to the logic of attachment patterns and the mechanisms of therapeutic change.
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: the tightening in the chest, the collapse in the shoulders, the sudden disconnection, the breath that won't fully arrive: and meeting it with curiosity rather than trying to move past it.
We do not use somatic techniques to bypass thought or manufacture catharsis. We use them to listen to what the body is already saying, and to offer it something different than it has known.
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
Attachment theory is not a technique: it is the relational framework beneath everything I do. How we learned to connect, seek comfort, and manage closeness in early relationships shapes how we do those things now: in partnerships, friendships, in our relationship with ourselves, and in therapy.
Understanding your attachment patterns is not about assigning blame. It 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
Psychodynamic work is about the full arc of a life: the deeper patterns, relational histories, and unconscious dynamics that shape who we are and how we move through the world. It is not analysis at a distance. It is meaning-making together, with careful attention to what emerges in the room between us as much as what you bring to it.
This includes the dynamics of transference: the ways early relational experience shows up in the therapeutic relationship itself: and how noticing that, gently and honestly, becomes a live site of understanding and repair.
Some things only become visible over time, and in relationship. Depth requires patience, but it offers something that brief interventions cannot: a genuine reorganisation of the self.
Parts-Informed Work
Internal Systems
Within each person, there 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, and some that have never had the chance to be fully known. Parts-informed work recognizes this multiplicity without pathologizing it.
Drawing on frameworks including Internal Family Systems (IFS), we approach these parts with curiosity and care: understanding what each has been protecting, what it carries, and what becomes possible when it no longer has to hold everything alone.
People often describe a profound relief in being able to say: not all of me feels this way. There is room for complexity. There is room for contradiction. 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. We do not rush through difficult material to achieve a sense of progress. Sometimes the most important thing that happens in a session is the quality of presence between us.
Structure
Sessions are 55 minutes. There is no rigid script: we follow what is alive in the room. Early sessions tend to be about establishing safety and understanding your history. Deeper work unfolds from there.
Modality
In-person at Hollyburn Support Services, North Vancouver, or online across Canada via a secure platform. Both are effective. Some people prefer the contained intimacy of in-person; others appreciate the accessibility of online. We can discuss what fits best.
What I ask of you
Nothing you're not ready for
You will never be pushed toward material before your nervous system is ready to be with it. This is not avoidance: it is the actual mechanism of trauma-informed care. Safety first is not a platitude here.
Honesty over performance
You do not need to arrive having done the work. You do not need to come prepared with insights or coherent narratives. You can come confused, ambivalent, dissociated, or simply not sure why you came. All of that is workable.
Time
This kind of work is rarely brief. Healing at the level of the nervous system and relational patterns is a longer process: usually months rather than weeks. That is not a problem. That is the depth of it.
You do not need to arrive ready. You need only arrive. The readiness tends to come in the doing of it.
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 without the right words. Come as you are.
I am grateful to live and work on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xʰməθkʰəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səwx̓wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwəta̓əŁ (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.
Fees & Getting Started
Begin with
a conversation.
Before anything begins, there is a free 20-minute consultation: a chance to meet, ask questions, and sense whether this feels like somewhere you want to return to.
Free · No obligation
Initial Consultation
20 Minutes
Let's talk.
About what brings you here, how I work, and whether this feels like the right place. You are welcome to come with questions, with uncertainty, or with nothing more than a felt sense that something needs attention. That is enough to begin.
I offer this because I believe the therapeutic relationship is the foundation of this work. It matters that it feels right before we begin.
Format
Phone or video: your choice
What to expect
A conversation: no forms, no assessment, no commitment to proceed
Book Your Free Consultation
Session Fees
Clear, straightforward,
no surprises.
Individual Session
$170
55-minute session. Payment is due at the time of each session by e-transfer or credit card. A receipt is provided for insurance purposes.
Sliding Scale
Available
If cost is a barrier, please mention it during our consultation. I will always be honest about what I can offer. There is no obligation to explain yourself beyond what feels comfortable.
Couples Session
$190 / 90 min
90-minute couples session. Couples work typically begins with an initial individual session for each partner before joint sessions begin: this allows me to understand each person's relational history.
Payment
Due at
time of session
Payment is collected at the end of each 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. Coverage varies by plan , check with your provider for "counsellor" or "psychotherapist" coverage. I do not direct bill: payment is made at time of session and a receipt is provided. Happy to discuss this during the consultation.
Cancellation Policy
24 hours notice required
If you need to cancel or reschedule, I ask for at least 24 hours notice. Sessions cancelled with less than 24 hours notice: except in the case of genuine emergency: will be charged the full session fee. This policy respects both your time and mine, and protects availability for clients on waiting lists.
Location & Format
In-person & online
In-person sessions are held at Hollyburn Support Services, Suite 109 – 267 Esplanade W, North Vancouver. Online sessions are available via a secure, PIPEDA-compliant video platform for clients anywhere in Canada. Both formats are effective: we can discuss which feels right during the consultation.
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 with questions. Come with just a felt sense that something needs to shift. That is enough.
I am grateful to live and work on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xʰməθkʰəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səwx̓wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwəta̓əŁ (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.
I am grateful to live and work on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the xʰməθkʰəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səwx̓wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwəta̓əŁ (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.