CLINICAL SUPERVISION
The Relationally Responsive Therapist
The Relationally Responsive Therapist
Training and supervision pathway for therapists working with complex relational trauma
Working with complex trauma asks a lot of us as therapists.
Many of us come into this work with good training, strong clinical values, and a deep desire to help. We want to do well by our clients. We want to understand what is happening. We want to offer something that feels safe, respectful, clinically thoughtful, and genuinely useful.
And still, complex trauma work can bring us into contact with uncertainty. We may wonder if we are moving too quickly or too slowly. We may feel unsure what to do when a client becomes ashamed, shut down, activated, compliant, angry, distant, or overwhelmed. We may feel pulled to rescue, over-explain, work harder, become very careful, or quietly doubt whether we are enough.
The Relationally Responsive Therapist is a training and consultation pathway created to support therapists in this kind of work.
It offers a space to build clinical skill, deepen confidence, and reflect honestly on the lived experience of working with complex relational trauma — not from a place of needing to be perfect, but from a place of becoming more steady, attuned, thoughtful, and responsive.
This pathway offers two levels - Core Skills for CPTSD and Advanced Consultation for CPTSD, both created for therapists who want to strengthen their ability to work with complex PTSD, developmental injury, relational wounds, shame, dysregulation, attachment patterns, protective responses, and the relational complexity that so often emerges in trauma therapy.
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What is relational responsiveness?
Relational responsiveness is the therapist’s capacity to listen deeply, track carefully, and respond thoughtfully to the client’s emerging experience in the moment.
It is the ability to listen beneath the content of what is being said and notice what is happening in the client’s nervous system, body, emotional world, protective strategies, shame responses, attachment patterns, and relational expectations.
It is also the ability to notice what is happening in us as therapists.
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What do we feel pulled to do?
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Where do we lose confidence?
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Where do we become too careful, too directive, too passive, too responsible, or too far ahead?
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What is happening between us and the client that may be clinically important?
Relationally responsive therapy is not about fitting the client into a one-size-fits-all modality. It is about bringing our training, skills, and clinical wisdom into living contact with the person in front of us.
It asks us to make contact with the client’s moment-to-moment experience, listen for what is emerging, and shape the work around what is actually happening in the room.
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Why this matters in complex relational trauma
Complex relational trauma often develops in relationships where safety, attunement, protection, repair, respect, or emotional responsiveness were missing, inconsistent, frightening, or harmful.
For many clients, healing is not only about symptom reduction. It is also about slowly rebuilding trust in themselves, trust in their bodies, trust in their emotions, trust in their boundaries, and trust in relationship.
This kind of work requires more than technique.
It asks us to become therapists who can stay present with shame, fear, grief, longing, collapse, anger, protection, and uncertainty. It asks us to be able to offer steadiness without control, warmth without over-responsibility, structure without rigidity, and attunement without losing ourselves.
Relationally responsive therapy honours the client as an active participant in their own healing. It is collaborative, respectful, and deeply attentive to dignity, choice, consent, culture, power, and context.
We are not applying therapy onto the client. We are listening with them for what supports healing.
What this pathway supports you to develop
The Relationally Responsive Therapist pathway supports therapists to deepen their capacity for:
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moment-to-moment attunement
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tracking dysregulation, shame, collapse, activation, and protective responses
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understanding transference, countertransference, and relational enactments
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staying steady in the therapist role
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working with rupture, repair, dependency, avoidance, and attachment fear
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pacing trauma work with sensitivity and clinical judgment
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using therapeutic tools collaboratively rather than rigidly
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supporting client agency, dignity, and self-trust
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developing confidence when the work feels complex, slow, or unclear
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integrating trauma skills within a relationally grounded clinical stance
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honouring yourself as a human being in the work, not only as a clinician
This is for therapists who want to feel more thoughtful, steady, and clinically responsive in the room, especially when the work becomes emotionally complex or relationally charged.
A foundational way of working
Many therapists who are drawn to this pathway already have training in different therapeutic approaches. You may draw from EMDR, somatic therapy, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, parts work, psychodynamic therapy, attachment-based therapy, EFT, DBT, mindfulness, hypnosis, CBT, or other trauma-informed models.
These skills are valuable. And yet, when working with complex relational trauma, the question is often not only which technique should I use? but also:
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How do I stay attuned to what is happening in this moment?
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How do I understand what is unfolding between me and the client?
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How do I respond in a way that supports safety, dignity, agency, and integration?
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How do I stay steady when the work becomes emotionally complex or clinically unclear?
Relational responsiveness does not replace other approaches. It gives them a deeper clinical ground.
It asks:
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How do we use our tools in a way that is attuned?
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How do we track whether an intervention is landing?
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How do we stay in collaboration with the client?
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How do we support agency rather than impose an agenda?
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How do we honour the client’s pace, protective wisdom, and lived experience?
The Clinical Foundations
This way of working draws from relational, psychodynamic, attachment-based, somatic, parts-oriented, trauma-informed, and anti-oppressive perspectives. It is rooted in the understanding that for many clients with complex relational trauma, the therapeutic relationship is not just the setting where therapy happens. It is often one of the central places where healing, repair, and new experience become possible.
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A supportive space for therapists
This pathway is also built around the understanding that therapists need support too.
When we work with complex trauma, we are not machines applying interventions. We are human beings sitting with other human beings in deeply tender, painful, and often complicated territory.
This work can touch our own uncertainty, our own histories, our own longings to help, and our own fears of getting it wrong. That does not mean we are doing it badly. It means we are in the work.
The Relationally Responsive Therapist offers a supportive space to bring these questions into the open with other thoughtful, like-minded clinicians. It is a place to build community, strengthen clinical confidence, and reflect on the therapist’s experience with care and respect. The goal is not only to gather more tools, but to become more grounded in how we use ourselves in the work.
This can be transformative for clients, and it can also be transformative for us as therapists. As we deepen our own capacity to listen, to stay present, to notice our responses, and to honour our own humanity in the work, we become more available to the pain, protection, resilience, and relational wounds of the people we sit with.
ACS - BCACC Approved Clinical Supervisor
Experiential Supervision
Supportive Community
Online via Zoom for Healthcare
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Level 1: Core Skills for Complex Relational Trauma
Core Skills is a four-session training and consultation group for therapists who want to feel more grounded, confident, and relationally responsive when working with complex trauma.
Rather than teaching one specific modality, the group focuses on the foundational skills that support effective trauma therapy across approaches: therapeutic presence, moment-to-moment attunement, nervous-system tracking, pacing, collaboration, transference, countertransference, and relational case formulation. Participants learn how to stay closer to the client’s unfolding experience, recognize activation, collapse, disconnection, and appeasement, understand what may be happening in the relational field, and respond with greater clarity and intention.
The group combines teaching, guided experiential practice, reflection, and applied case discussion. It offers a supportive place to strengthen your clinical confidence while learning to use one of your greatest therapeutic resources more fully: the relationship you offer.
Led by a BCACC Approved Clinical Supervisor
Experiential Supervision
Supportive Learning Community
Online via Zoom for Healthcare
CLINICAL SUPERVISION SERVICES
Level 2: Advanced Consultation for Complex Relational Trauma
Advanced Consultation is a four-session group for therapists who already have foundational trauma training and experience, and who want more support with the complex, layered, and relationally challenging moments that arise in clinical practice.
This group is designed for the places where there is no obvious next step: when a client is highly dysregulated but does not want stabilization work, when therapy feels slow or circular, when the therapist feels pulled into rescuing, over-functioning or tip-toeing, or when rupture, mistrust, shame, and relational complexity begin to shape the work.
Through extended consultation, experiential supervision and colleague discussion, the focus is on helping therapists deepen clinical discernment, understand what is happening in the relational field, engage in repair, and feel more confident navigating difficult or unclear clinical situations.
Led by a BCACC Approved Clinical Supervisor
Clinical Discernment & Deeper Integration
Advanced Case Consultation
Online via Zoom for Healthcare
DOWNLOADABLE GUIDED EXPERIENCE AUDIO LIBRARY
Guided Somatic Practices You Can Continue to Use
Acces to my Resource Library for Trauma Therapists
Participants in both pathways will also receive access to a growing library of therapist and client resources. This includes trauma-informed somatic practices, resourcing meditations, hypnosis-based audio tracks, MP3s, scripts, reflection prompts, and e-books designed to support both your own steadiness as a therapist and the clients you work with.
These resources are created to help you bring the work into practice between sessions — offering gentle, embodied tools for grounding, regulation, reflection, and relational repair. Some resources are intended for your own personal and professional development, while others may support your clinical work with clients, where appropriate.
MEET CARLY
A warm welcome to you
A little bit about me: I have 19 years of experience as a therapist and more than 15 years of experience providing clinical supervision and consultation. I am a Registered Clinical Counsellor and Approved Clinical Supervisor with the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors, a Certified Sensorimotor Psychotherapist, and a Clinical Hypnotherapist and member of the Canadian Society of Clinical Hypnosis.
My background is grounded in psychodynamic, relational, attachment-based, somatic, and trauma-informed psychotherapy. I also integrate EMDR, ego state and parts-oriented work, and clinical hypnosis.
For much of my career, I have focused on helping people heal from complex relational trauma and developmental injury. I believe people deserve the chance to make sense of what happened to them, understand the protective strategies they developed, and experience more trust, vitality, connection, and ease in their lives and relationships.
I also know that therapists deeply want to help and to do well by their clients. Yet complex trauma work can leave even experienced clinicians feeling uncertain, overly responsible, stuck, or worried that they are not doing enough.
As a supervisor and educator, I aim to create a warm, supportive, and non-judgmental space where therapists do not need to perform or prove themselves. Supervision can be a place to land, reflect, bring the difficult moments, deepen clinical clarity, and grow in confidence. I love combining teaching with reflective and experiential learning, helping therapists not only understand new ideas but feel them become more embodied and usable in the therapy room. I also create trauma-informed somatic resources, guided practices, and music-integrated hypnosis recordings for clients and therapists.
Through The Relationally Responsive Therapist pathway, I hope to support a growing community of therapists who can meet complex relational trauma with compassion, confidence, clinical depth, and respect for both the client’s humanity and their own.
Interested in Joining?
If this approach speaks to you, and you would like to feel more confident, grounded, and skilled in relationally responsive therapy, you are warmly invited to explore either of the groups within this pathway.
You can find full details about the Core Skills and Advanced Consultation groups on their individual pages.
If you have questions, are unsure which group would be the best fit, or would simply like to talk it through, you are welcome to book a complimentary online meet-and-greet with me or send a message through the contact form.
If you already know which group you would like to join, you can register directly through the booking page.
Structure & Details
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Sessions are two hours long and take place on Thursday mornings from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. PT
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Online through Zoom for Healthcare.
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The fee is $120 per two-hour session. Registration is for the full four-session group, for a total cost of $480
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To support continuity, trust, and a cohesive group experience, these are closed four-session groups. Participants are asked to commit to attending at least three of the four sessions and to identify any dates they are unable to attend when registering.