Childhood Trauma Therapy in Ontario |
Heal What You've Been Carrying

Virtual trauma therapy for adults across Ontario. Specializing in EMDR, somatic therapy, and Polyvagal-informed care for childhood trauma, emotional neglect, and complex PTSD.

Heal the wounds that still show up in

your adult life

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What Is Childhood Trauma — And Do You Have It?

Childhood trauma is one of the most misunderstood terms in mental health. When most people hear it, they picture obvious, catastrophic events — abuse, violence, disaster. And those things are absolutely traumatic.

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But childhood trauma is broader than that. It includes anything that overwhelmed your nervous system and didn't get adequately processed or supported at the time. And one of the most common — and most overlooked — forms of childhood trauma is emotional neglect: not what happened to you, but what didn't.

 

Types of Childhood Trauma Treated at Marlo Drago Therapy

 

Emotional Neglect

Growing up without consistent emotional attunement, validation, or the experience of being truly seen by a caregiver.

Childhood Emotional Abuse

Criticism, shaming, humiliation, or emotional manipulation that left you feeling fundamentally flawed or unworthy.

Physical or Sexual Abuse

Direct harm or violation that left lasting imprints on the body and nervous system.

Parentification

Having to take care of a parent's emotional needs, becoming the caretaker or peacekeeper before you were ready.

Witnessing Domestic Violence

The impact of growing up in a home where conflict, fear, or unpredictability were constant.

Childhood Loss or Abandonment

Grief, rejection, or the experience of a caregiver who was physically or emotionally unavailable.

Emotionally Immature Parents

Growing up with a parent who was self-absorbed, emotionally reactive, or unable to truly connect.

Intergenerational Trauma

Carrying the unprocessed pain of previous generations — patterns that were passed down without words.

 

You don't need a dramatic story to have real trauma.

If your nervous system learned that the world wasn't safe, that your needs weren't important, or that you had to be a certain way to be loved — that is trauma. And it deserves to be treated as such.

 

How Childhood Trauma Shows Up in Adult Life

Childhood trauma rarely announces itself by name. More often it shows up in the patterns, the reactions, the ways of relating to yourself and others that feel impossible to change no matter how much you understand them.

 

Signs of unresolved childhood trauma in adults include:

• Anxiety, hypervigilance, or a persistent sense of waiting for something to go wrong

• Emotional reactions that feel bigger than the situation — and shame about that

• Difficulty trusting people, letting people in, or feeling truly close to anyone

• Chronic people-pleasing, difficulty saying no, or putting everyone else's needs above your own

• A harsh, relentless inner critic that tells you you're not enough

• Deep shame or a sense of being fundamentally flawed or broken

• Shutting down, numbing out, or going through the motions without feeling present

• Patterns in relationships that keep repeating, no matter how hard you try to change them

• Physical symptoms — chronic pain, fatigue, digestive issues — that don't have a clear medical explanation

• Difficulty resting without guilt, or feeling like you have to earn your worth

 

If you recognize yourself in this list — you're not broken. Your nervous system learned to adapt to circumstances that were genuinely hard. Those adaptations made sense then. The work is helping them make sense now, and deciding which ones you're ready to let go of.

 

How Childhood Trauma Is Treated: My Approach

Talk therapy can take you a long way. Understanding your patterns, naming your experiences, building self-awareness — these things matter. But for many people carrying childhood trauma, insight alone isn't enough to create lasting change.

 

This is because trauma isn't stored primarily in the thinking brain. It's stored in the body, the nervous system, the implicit memory — the parts of us that respond before we can think. Healing it requires approaches that reach those places directly.

 

EMDR Therapy for Childhood Trauma

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is one of the most extensively researched trauma treatments available, recommended by the World Health Organization for PTSD and trauma. It works by helping the brain complete the processing of traumatic memories that got stuck — so they lose their emotional charge and stop intruding on the present.

 

For childhood trauma specifically, EMDR can address not just single events but the layered, complex experiences that shape our deepest beliefs about ourselves and the world. You don't need to narrate every detail of what happened. Your nervous system does the work — you just notice.

 

Polyvagal-Informed Therapy

Polyvagal theory gives us a framework for understanding why trauma survivors often feel stuck in states of anxiety, shutdown, or disconnection — even in situations that aren't objectively dangerous. Working with your nervous system directly, we build the capacity to feel safe, present, and connected more reliably. This is foundational work that makes everything else possible.

 

Somatic Therapy

Trauma lives in the body. Somatic therapy helps us work with what's held there — the tension, the bracing, the collapse, the places where old pain has settled in. Through body awareness, breathwork, and grounding, we help the body finally feel like the past is over.

Parts Work and Inner Child Healing

Many people with childhood trauma carry younger parts of themselves that are still responding to the world as if they're back in the situation that hurt them. Parts work (informed by Internal Family Systems) and inner child healing help us approach those parts with compassion — understanding what they needed, what they're protecting, and what becomes possible when they feel safe enough to rest.

 

What to Expect When Working With Me

Healing childhood trauma is not a linear process, and I won't pretend it is. But it does follow a general arc — and we move through it at your pace, never faster than your nervous system can tolerate.

 

Phase 1: Safety & Stabilization

We build the foundation — trust, nervous system regulation, and internal resources. No processing until you feel ready.

Phase 2: Processing

Using EMDR and somatic approaches, we work directly with the memories, beliefs, and body sensations connected to your trauma.

Phase 3: Integration

We consolidate what's changed, rebuild your sense of self, and prepare you to move forward with new capacity and freedom.

 

Sessions are virtual, available to adults across Ontario, and always led by where you are — not a predetermined timeline.

 

Who I Work With

I work with adults and older teens (16+) across Ontario who are:

• Ready to go beyond talk therapy and address trauma at the root

• Navigating the effects of childhood emotional neglect, abuse, or adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)

• Living with complex PTSD or trauma that spans many years or relationships

• Adult children of emotionally immature parents trying to understand and heal their past

• Mothers whose own childhood wounds have resurfaced through parenting

• People who have tried therapy before and felt like something was still missing

 

If therapy hasn't worked before, it doesn't mean you can't heal.

It may mean you haven't yet had access to an approach that goes where the trauma actually lives.