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Psychodynamic trauma therapy for adults with a Melbourne-based registered psychologist. Sessions online, weekday mornings AEST.
Trauma can affect people in many different ways. For some, there is a clear connection between past experiences and current difficulties; for others, the impact is harder to identify but may show up in relationships, emotions, self-worth, or a sense of safety in the world.
Experiences involving fear, loss of control, betrayal, coercion, abuse, or ongoing stress can have lasting effects, particularly when they occur within important relationships. Therapy provides space to understand these experiences and how they continue to shape your life.
Alicia’s approach is trauma-informed and attachment-informed, with an understanding of how power, control, and relational experiences can contribute to psychological harm. Therapy focuses on developing greater understanding, choice, and flexibility in how you relate to yourself and others.
If you’re in immediate danger, call 000.
Lifeline: 13 11 14 (24/7)
Blue Knot Foundation (complex trauma specialist support): 1300 657 380
1800RESPECT (sexual assault, family and domestic violence): 1800 737 732 (24/7)
Alicia’s practice is not a crisis service and cannot respond to urgent matters outside session times.
The impact of trauma can often extend beyond what happened itself, shaping how people experience themselves, relationships, and the world around them. Some experiences are more closely connected to the event itself, such as intrusive memories, flashbacks, nightmares, or strong reactions to reminders. Others may be felt more broadly through emotions, relationships, a sense of safety, or how you experience yourself.
Some experiences people notice include:
Understanding these experiences often involves looking not only at what happened, but at how those experiences shaped your sense of yourself, your relationships, and the world around you. Therapy can provide space to explore these patterns and how they continue to influence your life.
People seek trauma therapy for many different reasons. Some have experienced a single overwhelming event, while others have been affected by repeated or relational experiences of harm over time. Alicia works with both single-incident and complex trauma presentations.
Single-incident trauma relates to discrete events: motor vehicle accidents, workplace accidents, medical trauma, sexual assault, physical assault, natural disasters, or other acute and distressing experiences.
A single traumatic event can have a significant and lasting impact. Trauma is not only about what happened, but also how the experience affected your sense of safety, your relationship with your sense of self, and your expectations of yourself and others. Therapy can provide space to understand what happened and how it continues to influence your life, at a pace that feels manageable.
Complex trauma relates to repeated or ongoing experiences of harm, particularly when they occur over time or within important relationships. This can include childhood abuse or neglect, grooming, sexual abuse, domestic or family violence, emotional abuse, bullying, ongoing medical trauma, involvement in high-control groups, and other prolonged traumatic circumstances.
When trauma occurs during formative years, or within relationships where safety and care were expected, it can shape a person’s developing sense of self, their expectations of others, and their ability to feel secure in relationships. This is an area often explored through the lens of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), which refers to potentially traumatic experiences occurring during childhood and their ongoing impact on wellbeing. Therapy for childhood trauma involves exploring not only what happened, but how those experiences continue to influence life in the present.
Complex PTSD is a term used when prolonged trauma has affected areas such as emotional regulation, self-concept, relationships, and trauma-related symptoms. Because complex trauma often involves experiences that have unfolded over time, therapy may involve exploring these impacts gradually and in depth, with the pace and focus shaped by each person’s circumstances and goals.
Some experiences that affect people deeply occur within relationships. Emotional abuse, neglect, coercion, betrayal, bullying, domestic and family violence, and relationships marked by fear, instability, or a lack of safety can shape how a person understands themselves, others, and what they can expect from relationships.
Relational trauma therapy explores how these experiences may continue to influence the present. This may show up as difficulty trusting, difficulty being close, difficulty leaving harmful situations, a strong fear of rejection or abandonment, or finding yourself drawn into familiar relationship dynamics you never intended to repeat. When harm has developed gradually or has been minimised over time, it can be particularly difficult to recognise its impact. Therapy can provide space to understand these patterns and the experiences that shaped them.
Experiences of trauma can influence not only the people who live through them, but also the ways families relate, communicate, and understand the world across generations. This does not happen in a simple or predetermined way, but through the ordinary processes of family life: what can and cannot be spoken about, how emotions are expressed, which ways of coping become normalised, and how safety and trust are modelled.
Exploring intergenerational trauma involves looking closely at the specific history of a family, rather than applying a single explanation. This may include the impact of family experiences such as abuse, neglect, loss, violence, displacement, discrimination, or other forms of adversity, as well as the ways these experiences shaped relationships and ways of coping across generations. Therapy involves understanding your own family history, the experiences that have shaped you, and the ways those experiences may still influence your life today.
Trauma can affect a person’s sense of safety, sometimes long after the original experience has ended. The ways we respond to threat are shaped by our experiences, and these responses can continue even when circumstances have changed. This can be exhausting and may affect daily life in ways that are not immediately apparent.
This may show up as feeling constantly on edge, struggling to fully rest, or finding that sleep does not bring the restoration you need. Some people experience emotional numbness, difficulty feeling connected to themselves or others, or reactions that feel stronger than they expect in the moment. For others, the impact may be seen in recurring patterns, particularly in relationships, that feel difficult to understand or change.
Most people have heard of fight and flight. Freeze and fawn responses are less commonly understood, but they are important because many people feel shame about how they responded during or after a traumatic experience.
Some people also experience dissociation, which may involve feeling numb, detached, unreal, or disconnected from yourself or your surroundings.
These responses can develop when a person is faced with experiences that feel threatening, overwhelming, or beyond their control. Many people judge themselves for freezing rather than fighting, or for trying to maintain safety through compliance or appeasement in situations where they were being harmed. Understanding these responses can help make sense of what happened and reduce the shame that often follows. Therapy can provide space to explore when these responses continue to arise in current relationships or situations, understand what they may be connected to, and develop greater choice in how you respond.
Trauma can be experienced physically as well as emotionally. This may include muscular tension that does not ease, disrupted sleep, an exaggerated startle response, numbness, difficulty settling, or physical sensations that arise before you consciously understand what is happening.
Research has also identified an association between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and an increased risk of chronic health conditions in adulthood. Whilst physical health difficulties cannot simply be reduced to trauma, these findings highlight the complex relationship between life experiences, physical health, and emotional wellbeing.
Therapy for trauma and the body explores how these experiences are held and expressed, providing space to notice bodily responses as they arise, understand what they may be connected to, and develop greater flexibility in responding to them.
Trauma-informed care is a term that has become widely used, but its meaning is not always clear. For Alicia, trauma-informed therapy is not a specific technique or a promise that therapy will always feel comfortable. It is an approach to understanding people’s experiences and a commitment to working in a way that is attentive to safety, trust, power, and context.
Alicia’s approach is informed by her experience working in the domestic and family violence sector, as well as her understanding of attachment, relationships, and the ways that power, control, and unsafe environments can affect a person’s sense of self and connection with others.
In practice, this means:
Trauma-informed therapy is not about pushing someone to discuss painful experiences before they are ready, and it is not about avoiding discussion of difficult experiences altogether. It is about approaching what has happened with curiosity and care, recognising the impact of a person’s history, and supporting greater understanding and choice over time.
These terms are connected, but they refer to different ways of conceptualising the impact of traumatic experiences.
Trauma refers more broadly to overwhelming threatening experiences, as well as the impact they might have on a person, such as changes to thoughts, emotions, relationships and sense of self.
PTSD is a diagnosable condition with defined criteria, typically involving intrusive memories or flashbacks, avoidance, changes in mood and thinking, and heightened arousal, persisting over a defined period and causing significant distress or impairment.
Complex PTSD is associated with prolonged or repeated trauma, often beginning in childhood or occurring within relationships. Alongside the features of PTSD, it may also affect emotional regulation, identity and sense of self, and the capacity to feel safe in relationships.
Experiencing trauma does not automatically mean someone has PTSD or Complex PTSD. Many people experience lasting effects from harmful or violent experiences without meeting the criteria for a diagnosis. A diagnosis can be helpful when it provides understanding and direction, but it is not the only way to recognise that something has had a meaningful impact on a person’s life or that support may be valuable.
Therapy can be helpful whenever experiences from the past continue to affect how you feel, relate to others, or move through daily life.
It may be worth speaking with a psychologist if:
People seek therapy at different points in their journey. Some may have spent a long time questioning or minimising the impact of what they have experienced, while others may reach out when the effects have become difficult to manage. There is no single threshold that determines whether support is warranted. If something continues to affect your life, relationships, or sense of wellbeing, therapy can provide a space to better understand and work through these experiences.
Alicia Shevlin (she/her) is a registered psychologist and clinical psychology registrar, based in Melbourne and working with adults across Australia via telehealth. She began her career in mental health in 2016 in the domestic and family violence sector, and has since worked across community, university and public health settings before entering private practice. Single-incident and complex trauma are core areas of her practice, alongside grief and loss, relationship difficulties, and identity-related concerns.
Alicia holds a Master of Applied Psychology (Clinical Psychology) from Victoria University, where her training took an integrative approach spanning both cognitive behavioural and psychodynamic traditions. In her current practice, she works psychodynamically. She works with adults aged 18 and over, and with people of all genders, sexual orientations and sex characteristics, including intersex people, and is experienced in providing therapeutic support to members of the transgender community.
AHPRA registration: PSY0002275993
Member: Australian Psychological Society
Alicia’s practice focuses exclusively on psychodynamic therapy, an approach that explores how past experiences, relationships, and patterns of coping can continue to shape a person’s emotional life, often in ways that are not immediately obvious.
Applied to trauma, this means the work is not only about managing symptoms as they arise. It is also about understanding how experiences that were overwhelming, harmful, or difficult to process continue to influence the way you see yourself, relate to others, and experience the world.
Therapy explores the meaning of these experiences as well as what happened: what conclusions you may have drawn about yourself, other people, and relationships, and how these understandings may continue to influence your life. Attachment is often an important part of this work, particularly when experiences occurred within relationships where safety, trust, or care were disrupted. Where intergenerational trauma is relevant, this is explored through the context of your own family history, including the experiences and patterns that may have been carried across generations and continue to influence your life.
Alicia’s approach is warm, thoughtful, and compassionate, while also making space to reflect on experiences that may feel uncomfortable or difficult to understand. She works collaboratively, thinking alongside you rather than providing simple answers or instructions. The focus is on understanding you as an individual with your own history, strengths, and goals, rather than reducing your experiences to a diagnosis or label.
Learn more about psychodynamic therapy.
It can be, and it’s worth explaining why, as well as being straightforward about the alternatives.
Psychodynamic therapy works through the relationship. That matters for trauma, because trauma that occurred in relationships tends to reappear in them: in difficulty trusting, in fear of closeness, in patterns that repeat without conscious intent. Within therapy, those patterns can surface too, where they can be gently noticed and explored as they happen rather than only discussed in the abstract. Being able to work with something in the room, as it occurs, is one of the distinctive features of this approach.
It also takes seriously the question of how earlier experience shaped what’s happening now. Rather than treating trauma symptoms as isolated problems to be reduced, it asks what those responses were protecting against, what they cost, and what they’ve come to mean. For people whose difficulties are longstanding — where the trauma is woven into identity and relationships rather than attached to a single memory — that depth is often what’s been missing.
And it works toward making sense of what happened, not only managing its effects. For some people, coping strategies provide important support, but difficulties continue to emerge or return in ways they want to better understand. Psychodynamic therapy is oriented toward more enduring change, through understanding, rather than symptom management alone.
Other approaches exist and help a great many people. Trauma-focused CBT, EMDR and other structured therapies have good evidence behind them, and for some people they’re exactly right. There’s no single correct path, and no approach works for everyone. What Alicia can say is that psychodynamic work suits people who want to understand their experience in depth, who have often tried other things, and who sense that something important was still missing. If that sounds like you, the free 15-minute call is a good place to talk it through, and if a different approach would serve you better, she’ll say so and can refer you on.
Psychodynamic trauma therapy may be a good fit for adults who:
Alicia works with individuals and does not provide couples therapy. Sessions are for therapeutic support and are not conducted for medico-legal purposes such as court reports or mandated legal requirements. Third-party funding via WorkCover, TAC or DVA is not currently available.
Alicia is Melbourne-based and works entirely via telehealth, with sessions held over Zoom.
For some people, online trauma therapy offers practical and personal advantages. Being able to attend from a familiar environment can support a greater sense of comfort and control, particularly when working through experiences where safety, trust, or agency have been affected.
Telehealth also allows you to create a space that feels supportive for therapy — whether that means choosing a private room, having familiar surroundings nearby, or avoiding the additional demands of travelling to and from appointments. For some people, this can make it easier to maintain consistency with therapy over time.
To participate in online trauma therapy, you will need a private space where you can speak confidentially, a reliable internet connection, and a device with a camera. Headphones may also be helpful.
Appointments are available on weekday mornings only, scheduled in Melbourne time (AEST/AEDT depending on daylight saving). This means online trauma therapy with Alicia is generally suited to people located in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, the ACT, and the Northern Territory.
Whether you are looking for a trauma therapist online in Melbourne, a PTSD psychologist offering telehealth in Victoria, or a complex trauma psychologist providing online sessions elsewhere in Australia, appointments are available within these time zones.
Trauma-informed therapy prioritises safety, choice, transparency, collaboration, and respect for your pace. In practice, this means you have a voice in what is explored, questions about the process are welcomed, and difficult experiences are approached thoughtfully and collaboratively.
Alicia works with both single-incident and complex trauma. Single-incident trauma may include motor vehicle accidents, workplace accidents, medical trauma, sexual assault, physical assault or other acute distressing experiences. Complex trauma relates to repeated or ongoing experiences, including childhood abuse or neglect, grooming, sexual abuse, domestic or family violence, emotional abuse, bullying, ongoing medical trauma, involvement in high-control groups, or other long-term traumatic circumstances.
Yes. People do not always have a complete or clear memory of traumatic experiences. Memories may be unclear, fragmented, or difficult to make sense of, particularly when experiences occurred over a long period or within important relationships. You do not need a complete account of what happened to begin therapy. The focus is on understanding how your experiences continue to affect you in the present.
No. You do not need to discuss experiences before you feel able to. Alicia will not push you to share details before you are ready, and there is space to talk about what feels manageable to explore. Pacing is an important part of trauma-informed work, allowing difficult experiences to be approached thoughtfully over time.
Psychodynamic therapy explores how trauma may continue to influence emotions, relationships, identity, and sense of safety, including in ways that are not always immediately obvious. Because it places particular emphasis on the therapeutic relationship, patterns connected to earlier experiences may emerge within therapy and can be explored as they arise. The aim is not only to manage symptoms, but also to develop a deeper understanding of what happened, its meaning, and how it continues to shape your life.
Some people find telehealth trauma therapy suitable because it’s convenient. Attending from a familiar environment may feel helpful for some people, while others may prefer face-to-face work. If you’re unsure whether telehealth feels like the right fit, this can be discussed during the free 15-minute call, and Alicia can help you consider your options.
The length of therapy varies and is difficult to predict. Alicia’s approach is generally medium to long-term, reflecting the depth of psychodynamic work and its focus on understanding patterns, relationships, and experiences over time. The pace and focus of therapy are discussed collaboratively throughout the process.
Yes. Telehealth psychology is an established way of providing therapy and can be effective when it suits your needs and circumstances. For trauma therapy, having a private space where you can speak openly is important. Some people find telehealth a good fit, while others prefer face-to-face therapy. If you feel in-person therapy would better support you, Alicia can discuss this with you and assist with considering other options.
Yes, with a valid Mental Health Treatment Plan and referral from your GP or psychiatrist. The session fee under the Medicare Better Access Program is $210, with a rebate of $101.55 per session paid into your nominated bank account by Services Australia, for up to 10 sessions per calendar year. Rebates are subject to eligibility requirements. Alicia also welcomes enquiries from victims of crime accessing therapy through the Victorian Financial Assistance Scheme (FAS, formerly VOCAT), and from self-managed and plan-managed NDIS participants — please get in touch directly to discuss funding arrangements.
No. You can book directly with Alicia without a referral or a Mental Health Treatment Plan. A referral is only needed if you want to claim a Medicare rebate. Without one, sessions are privately billed.
Reaching out for trauma therapy can feel like a significant step. You may have questions about whether therapy is right for you, what you would talk about, or whether your experiences are something that can be explored in therapy. These questions are a natural part of beginning the process.
The free 15-minute phone call is a chance to discuss these questions, learn more about Alicia’s approach, and decide whether you would like to take the next step.
The information below outlines what therapy involves, how telehealth sessions work, and practical details regarding fees and Medicare rebates.
Learn about how a range of mental health issues can be treated with psychodynamic therapy.
Access therapy without leaving home. Learn what to expect from beginning telehealth therapy.
Medicare rebates available for eligible patients. A referral from your GP or psychiatrist is required.