Trauma counselling - Jeffreys Bay and online across South Africa
Trauma doesn’t always announce itself clearly. Sometimes it’s the dramatic, single incident – a hijacking, an accident, an assault, a robbery. Sometimes it’s something that built up slowly, over years, in ways that are harder to point to: a difficult relationship, a childhood that wasn’t safe in ways that were never named, a job that wore you down until something in you changed.
If something from your past – recent or distant, sudden or slow-building – is still shaping how you respond to situations now, how you feel in your body, or the story you carry about who you are, that’s worth exploring. This page covers how I work with trauma, including some of the situations that come up most often in my practice.
What is trauma?
Trauma is what happens when an experience is too much, too fast, or too prolonged for the mind and body to process in the ordinary way. It leaves traces – in how the nervous system responds to everyday situations, in patterns of thinking, and in how we relate to other people, including people who had nothing to do with what happened.
Those traces aren’t a sign of weakness, and they aren’t evidence that something is permanently wrong with you. They’re a normal response to an abnormal situation – and in many cases, they were an appropriate response at the time. The work of counselling is to help create enough safety and structure for that response to update, now that circumstances have changed.
The South African context - crime, safety, and the body's response
If you’re searching for trauma counselling in South Africa, there’s a good chance the search wasn’t abstract. A hijacking. A home invasion. An armed robbery. An assault. Gender-based violence, or the long aftermath of it. These aren’t rare events here, and they leave a particular kind of mark – one that doesn’t always look like what people expect “trauma” to look like.
After an incident like this, it’s common to feel functional within days or weeks. You go back to work. You deal with the insurance claims, the police statement, the practical aftermath. From the outside, it can look like you’ve coped well. But the nervous system often tells a different story – a heightened startle response, difficulty sleeping, a new wariness around situations that didn’t used to register as dangerous, an inability to relax even when you’re objectively safe.
This is not a character flaw, and it’s not “being dramatic.” It’s how a nervous system that correctly identified danger continues to behave even after the danger has passed. The work is helping it recalibrate – without judgement, and without the expectation that you should simply “get over it” because nothing was technically broken.
I work with the after-effects of:
- Hijackings and armed robbery – including the specific hypervigilance that often follows (checking mirrors obsessively, avoiding certain routes, a heightened response to being approached at traffic lights)
- Home invasions and burglaries – particularly where safety at home, the most basic expectation of refuge, has been disrupted
- Physical and sexual assault
- Gender-based violence – including the complex layering of trauma that often comes from violence within a relationship or family system, where the person who caused harm may also be someone you depended on
- Witnessing violence, even where you weren’t directly harmed
For South Africans living abroad, this context doesn’t disappear just because the geography changed. Many of my clients living abroad carry crime-related trauma from years before they left – trauma that surfaces, often for the first time, once the day-to-day demands of survival in South Africa are no longer occupying that part of the mind.
Slow-build trauma - when there was no single moment
Most people have a mental image of what trauma looks like: a single, identifiable, dramatic event. For some people, that’s accurate. But for many of the people I see, trauma didn’t arrive that way at all.
Slow-build, or complex, trauma develops through repetition rather than a single incident. It can come from:
- A childhood where things were unpredictable, frightening, or emotionally unsafe in ways that were never named at the time
- Years inside a relationship where criticism, control, or unpredictability slowly reshaped how safe you felt being yourself
- A workplace where you were consistently undermined, unsafe, or treated in ways that eroded your sense of competence and worth
- Years of low-grade but constant exposure to danger – living somewhere unsafe, working in a high-risk environment, or simply existing in a context where vigilance never fully switched off
The difficulty with this kind of trauma is that it rarely comes with a story that sounds serious enough to bring to a counsellor. “Nothing really happened” is something I hear often – describing childhoods or relationships that, on closer examination, clearly did shape the person in front of me, sometimes profoundly.
There’s also often no single date attached to it. Single-incident trauma has a “before” and “after.” Complex trauma doesn’t work that way – it’s the water you grew up swimming in, which makes it much harder to identify as the source of difficulties showing up now: in relationships, in self-worth, in how your body responds to conflict or criticism, in patterns that repeat even when you’ve consciously decided they won’t.
If you find yourself thinking “but it wasn’t that bad” while also recognising that something is clearly affecting you now – that gap is often exactly where the work needs to happen. You don’t need an event dramatic enough to justify counselling. The effect it’s having on your life now is justification enough.
Workplace trauma - after a robbery, a serious injury, or a death on site
Some of the most acute trauma I see didn’t happen at home or in a relationship – it happened at work, and it happened to a team, not just an individual.
A robbery at gunpoint during a shift. A serious injury to a colleague – an accident on a construction site, in a factory, on a farm, in a delivery vehicle. The death of a colleague, whether through an accident, an act of violence, or a medical emergency on the premises. These events don’t only affect the person most directly involved. They move through an entire team, and often through the people who manage that team, in ways that are easy to underestimate.
A few things are worth understanding about workplace trauma specifically:
It often affects more people than the obvious one. After a robbery, it’s tempting to focus support on the staff member who was held at gunpoint – understandably. But the colleague who was in the back office and heard it happen, the manager who had to call the family of someone who was injured, the team that has to keep working in the same space the next day – all of these people are also affected, often without anyone checking in on them specifically.
The expectation to “carry on” arrives very fast. Businesses need to keep operating. Shifts need covering. There’s often enormous pressure – sometimes spoken, often not – to get back to normal quickly, both from the business and from the affected staff themselves, who may feel they shouldn’t make a fuss. This pressure can push the emotional impact underground, where it tends to surface later as anxiety, irritability, absenteeism, or a slow erosion of morale that’s hard to trace back to its source.
Group debriefing and individual follow-up serve different purposes. A facilitated debrief shortly after an incident – bringing the affected team together to talk through what happened in a structured, safe way – can help normalise people’s reactions and reduce the isolation that often follows (“am I the only one still thinking about this?”). But debriefing isn’t the same as ongoing individual support. Some staff will need a handful of individual sessions in the weeks that follow; for others, the effects surface only later, once the immediate adrenaline has worn off.
I work with organisations – businesses, farms, retail operations, and teams of any size – on both fronts: structured debriefing after a specific incident, and ongoing individual counselling for staff members who need more than a single session to process what happened. Sessions can be in person in the Kouga and Gqeberha area, or online for teams and individuals elsewhere in South Africa.
If your business has experienced an incident – whether recent, or some months ago and the effects are still being felt – get in touch to discuss what kind of support would be useful. There’s no need to have a clear plan before reaching out.
Vicarious and secondary trauma - for people who carry other people's trauma at work
Some of the people I work with haven’t experienced a traumatic event directly themselves – but have spent years absorbing the trauma of others as part of their work, and it has worn them down in ways that are difficult to name or justify.
This is sometimes called vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, or compassion fatigue, and it’s a recognised occupational risk for people in roles including:
- Nurses, paramedics and other frontline medical staff
- Police officers and other emergency responders
- Social workers and child protection professionals
- Teachers, particularly those working with children who have experienced abuse, neglect, or instability at home
- Counsellors, psychologists and other helping professionals
- HR professionals and managers who regularly handle disclosures of trauma, harassment, or crisis from staff
- Anyone in a caregiving role, including unpaid caregivers for family members
Vicarious trauma can look like a gradual erosion of empathy, growing cynicism or numbness, intrusive thoughts about clients’ or patients’ experiences, difficulty sleeping, irritability, or a creeping dread about going to work that wasn’t there before. It can also show up as a loss of meaning – work that used to feel purposeful starts to feel like something you’re just getting through.
One particular difficulty with vicarious trauma is the guilt that often accompanies it. “I wasn’t the one it happened to – what right do I have to feel this way?” This guilt tends to keep people from seeking support long after they would benefit from it. But the nervous system doesn’t distinguish as cleanly as the conscious mind does between trauma experienced directly and trauma absorbed repeatedly through close exposure to others’. The effect on the body and the mind is real either way.
If you’re in a helping profession and you’ve noticed yourself becoming harder, more avoidant, or more exhausted by the human side of your work than you used to be – that’s worth taking seriously, not as a sign you’re in the wrong profession, but as a sign the cost of the work has been accumulating without anywhere to go.
How counselling helps - person-centred therapy and narrative work
There’s no single “right” way to work with trauma, and I draw on two approaches depending on what’s most useful for the person in front of me: person-centred therapy and narrative therapy. Both are well-established for trauma, and in practice they work together rather than competing.
Person-centred therapy creates the conditions trauma work depends on – a steady, non-judgemental presence that makes it possible to talk honestly about what happened, and about how you’ve coped since, without fear of being judged for either. Most people who’ve been through something traumatic have already judged themselves enough. The therapeutic relationship is built to not add to that.
Narrative therapy addresses what trauma leaves behind in the way of story. After a traumatic experience, people often absorb a story about themselves that wasn’t there before – “I’m unsafe,” “I should have seen it coming,” “I can’t trust my own judgement anymore.” These can feel like plain facts. They’re not – they’re stories, often handed to a person by the event itself or by how others responded to it. Narrative work separates you from the problem, and separates you from the story the problem has written about you: the hypervigilance is not a character trait, it’s a response your body learned for good reason, and it can be unlearned.
In practice, most people working through trauma benefit from both – the safety of a steady relationship, and the more specific work of examining and rewriting the story trauma has attached to who you are. I draw on whichever is most useful for what you need, and there’s no fixed sequence either has to follow.
How sessions work
Sessions are one hour, either in person in Jeffreys Bay or online via Zoom for clients across South Africa and internationally. Trauma work requires care and pacing – we work at a pace that feels manageable for you, and there’s no expectation to discuss anything before you’re ready to. I work primarily with individuals; in-person couples and family sessions can be discussed where relevant.
For details on session pricing, see the pricing page.
Between sessions, some people find simple grounding techniques useful for steadying an overwhelmed moment. They do not treat trauma, and they are not a substitute for this work, but they can make the space between sessions more manageable.
If you’re not sure whether what you’re experiencing relates to trauma, reach out and we can talk it through. You don’t need a diagnosis or a label to start a conversation.
Frequently asked questions
Is Storme a counsellor or a psychologist, and what's the difference?
Storme Brand is a Registered Counsellor with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA Reg. PRC0023531) – you can verify this at hpcsa.co.za. Counsellors and psychologists are both registered with the HPCSA but have different scopes: psychologists can conduct formal psychological assessment and diagnosis and typically work with more complex clinical presentations, while counsellors work with the emotional and psychological difficulties most people experience – trauma, anxiety, depression, grief, relationships, and life transitions – within a therapeutic relationship. For most people seeking support after a traumatic experience, a counsellor is an effective and appropriate first point of contact. Before opening her practice in 2012, Storme spent twelve years working alongside a psychiatrist in a specialist practice in Bedfordview, which continues to inform when and how she recommends a referral to clinical-level support, see the About page for more.
Is online trauma counselling as effective as in-person?
For many people, yes. Trauma work depends most on the quality and consistency of the relationship between counsellor and client, and that can be established and maintained over video. Online sessions also make it possible to work consistently with someone who is moving – between cities, countries, or time zones – without interrupting the relationship. See more about online counselling here. That said, some people prefer or need in-person sessions, particularly in the early stages after a recent incident – both options are available in Jeffreys Bay.
Does medical aid cover trauma counselling?
Most major South African medical aids recognise sessions with an HPCSA-registered counsellor. An invoice with the relevant ICD-10 codes is provided after each session for you to submit to your medical aid directly. For current session fees, see the pricing page.
What therapeutic approach is used for trauma?
How do I know if what I went through is "serious enough" for counselling?
There’s no threshold to meet. If something – a single event, or something that built up over years – is still affecting how you feel, think, or respond to situations now, that’s enough reason to talk to someone. You don’t need to have a name for it, and you don’t need it to sound dramatic.
My workplace recently had a traumatic incident. What kind of support is available?
Both group debriefing shortly after an incident and ongoing individual counselling for affected staff are available, in person in the Kouga and Gqeberha area or online for teams elsewhere in South Africa. Get in touch to discuss what would suit your situation – there’s no need to have a clear plan before reaching out.