Childhood & Family of Origin Trauma · Ontario

The Family You Grew Up In Doesn't Stay in the Past.

The dynamics of your early home show up in your relationships, your reactions, and the patterns you keep finding yourself in, long after you've left. Individual therapy offers a space to understand where those patterns came from and change how they show up now.

Book a free 15-minute consultation

Shelby Doherty-Sirkovich, RP, MACP  ·  CRPO #12083  ·  CCTS-I  ·  Accepting new clients

What childhood trauma actually is

When the Past Keeps Showing Up in the Present

You might not think of your childhood as traumatic. Maybe things weren't obviously bad: no dramatic single event, no clear villain. But something was off. The emotional temperature at home was unpredictable. You grew up responsible for things children shouldn't be responsible for. You learned to be small, or useful, or invisible. You could read a room before you could drive a car.

Now you're an adult, and some of what you learned back then is creating problems. Not because you're broken, but because the coping strategies that protected you then are getting in the way now. You might notice it in how you respond to conflict, in the relationship dynamics you keep ending up in, or in how you manage emotions, either cutting them off or getting flooded by them.

These aren't character flaws. They're adaptations, and adaptations can change. This is certified, trauma-informed work; the CCTS-I credential means it's grounded in formal clinical trauma training, and it's paced so you're never pushed past what you can manage.

This might sound familiar

A few sentences. See if any land.

01

You grew up in a home that felt emotionally unpredictable, chaotic, or quietly tense, even if nothing obviously terrible happened.

02

You learned early to manage other people's moods, or to be the stable one in the family.

03

Conflict feels threatening in a way that's out of proportion to the actual situation.

04

You're drawn to people who need a lot from you, or you keep ending up in the same kinds of relationships with different people.

05

You manage well outwardly but find it difficult to identify or express what you're actually feeling.

06

Closeness in relationships feels about as threatening as distance does.

07

You've been betrayed in adult relationships or friendships, and you're starting to wonder if the pattern goes back further than the most recent person who let you down.

08

You carry a persistent low-level sense that something is wrong with you, even when things are objectively fine.

09

Family gatherings, certain names on your phone, or specific emotional tones still activate something you can't fully explain.

What therapy looks like

Carefully Paced. Not About Relitigating Your Childhood.

This work is paced with care. We don't move into difficult early experiences before you have the tools to manage what comes up. The process tends to move through a few areas, in an order that fits where you are:

  • Making sense of your early environment. Not to relitigate your childhood, but to understand what you learned there about relationships, about yourself, and about what to expect from people. A lot of what drives current patterns gets clearer in this context.
  • Understanding how those patterns show up now. We look at your current relationships, your reactions to conflict, and how you handle closeness and distance, with the goal of seeing the pattern clearly and without judgment.
  • Working with the nervous system. Early experience shapes how your body responds to stress, threat, and connection. Somatic work addresses what happened at a level that talking alone doesn't always reach.
  • Building a different relationship with yourself. Chronic self-criticism, shame, and the sense that your needs are a problem often have roots in early experience. We examine those beliefs directly rather than papering over them with reassurance.
  • Changing patterns in current relationships. As things shift internally, you have more options in how you relate to others, in your partnership, your family of origin, your friendships, and your relationship with yourself.

The approach is trauma-informed and integrative, drawing from psychodynamic therapy, somatic work, narrative therapy, ACT, and Gestalt, based on what is most useful for each person. Early-experience work doesn't mean spending every session talking about your parents. It means using an understanding of where your patterns came from to change how they show up now. We work at your pace.

Who this is for

Adults Whose Early Experiences are Still Shaping the Present

  • You grew up in a home that was hard to feel safe in, whether the difficulty was loud and obvious or quiet and hard to name.
  • You've noticed the same relational patterns repeating across very different people, and you're ready to understand why.
  • You function well on the outside while privately struggling with self-criticism, emotional numbness, or a sense of being fundamentally different from others.
  • You've done some therapy before, but it didn't reach this layer, or it wasn't trauma-informed and going into the material made things worse.
  • You're connecting current relationship betrayals or difficulties to something older, and you want to address the root rather than just the latest instance.

You don't need a clear memory of what happened, or a dramatic story, to begin this work. Many people start with only a sense that something from back then is still operating now. The consultation is the right place to figure out whether this is a fit.

Therapy is one form of support. If you're dealing with symptoms that may point to PTSD or complex trauma, your family doctor or a psychiatrist can provide formal assessment and consider whether medication has a role alongside therapy. If you are in crisis, the 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline is available 24/7 by call or text. In an emergency, call 911. For Ontario community and social services, call 211.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Childhood trauma includes experiences where a child's safety, emotional needs, or sense of self was significantly compromised, often within the family. This includes physical or sexual abuse, chronic neglect, witnessing violence, emotional invalidation, a parent's untreated mental illness or addiction, and more subtle patterns like parentification or consistent emotional unavailability. Not every difficult childhood involves trauma, but many do.

  • Common adult presentations include persistent difficulty trusting others, a harsh inner critic, difficulty identifying or expressing needs, patterns of choosing unavailable or unpredictable partners, and a felt sense that something is wrong without a clear present-day cause. These do not confirm a childhood trauma history, but they often invite the question.

  • Yes. The nervous system does not archive difficult experiences by age. Early experiences, particularly those that shaped the attachment system and sense of self, can continue to operate as active templates for current relationships and self-perception. Addressing them is not about relitigating the past but about understanding how the past is still present.

  • Memory gaps are common in childhood trauma, and therapy does not depend on detailed recall. The work often focuses on current patterns, somatic responses, and relational themes rather than reconstructing specific events. What is available is usually enough to begin.

  • A well-paced therapeutic approach is attentive to what a person can process at any given point. The goal is not to overwhelm but to develop enough safety in the therapeutic relationship that difficult material can be approached gradually. Some discomfort is part of the process, but destabilization is not the aim.

Further reading

More on Navigating Childhood Trauma

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Ambiguous Grief: Grieving What Was Never Fully Lost
Ambiguous Grief: Grieving What Was Never Fully Lost

There's a kind of grief that doesn't have a funeral.

It might be grief for a parent who is still alive but was never really there. Grief for a relationship that ended without a clear reason, or one that kept going without ever really working. Grief for the family you thought you'd have, or the one you thought you already did. Grief for a version of yourself you had to give up in order to survive something.

None of these losses come with rituals or casseroles or condolence cards. There's no socially recognized moment to mourn, no permission to fall apart, and often no one around who understands why you're still grieving something that isn't technically gone, or something that other people think you should be over.

This is ambiguous grief: grief without clear boundaries, and grief without social permission.

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Parentification as Betrayal: When Your Parent Made You the Adult
Parentification as Betrayal: When Your Parent Made You the Adult

There is a specific kind of child who gets described as "so mature for their age." The one who manages the household logistics, who knows not to bother Mum with that right now, who becomes the person a parent cries to after a hard day. Who mediates, translates, holds things together.

Adults who were that child often carry two things simultaneously: a sense that their childhood was basically fine, and a background hum of exhaustion, difficulty asking for help, and something that feels like resentment toward people who expect too much of them.

They are often confused about why.

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The Patterns That Follow You: How Parentification Shows Up in Adult Relationships
The Patterns That Follow You: How Parentification Shows Up in Adult Relationships

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at what parentification actually is: the two forms it takes, what it teaches children about themselves and relationships, and why it tends to go unrecognized for so long.

This post picks up where that one left off. Because understanding what happened is useful. But most people who come to therapy aren't there to understand their childhood in the abstract. They're there because something in their present-day life isn't working: a relationship that keeps breaking down, a pattern they can't seem to get out of, a version of themselves they don't entirely recognize.

So, this is about the present. Specifically, about four patterns that show up consistently in adults who took on a parentified role as kids.

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When Kids Become Caretakers: What Parentification Is and Why It Still Matters
When Kids Become Caretakers: What Parentification Is and Why It Still Matters

Part 1 of 2: The Basics. What happened, and what it taught you about yourself

 You grew up fast. Maybe faster than you should have.

You learned to make yourself useful, emotionally, practically, or both, because that's what kept things stable.

Now you're an adult, and you're good at taking care of people. But somewhere along the way, you may have noticed: it's harder to let anyone take care of you. Or you find yourself anxious when things are too calm. Or you keep ending up in relationships where you're doing most of the heavy lifting.

If any of that sounds familiar, it might be worth looking at something called parentification.

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Working with 365 Psychotherapy & Counselling

Therapy for Childhood and Family-of-Origin Trauma, Across Ontario

I work with adults across Ontario whose early family experiences are still shaping their relationships, their reactions, and how they see themselves. I hold the Certified Clinical Trauma Specialist, Individual (CCTS-I) credential from the Arizona Trauma Institute, so this work is grounded in formal trauma training rather than general therapy applied to difficult material.

Family-of-origin work often sits underneath the betrayal, relationship, and people-pleasing patterns people first come in for. My approach is integrative and trauma-informed, drawing from psychodynamic therapy, somatic work, narrative therapy, ACT, and Gestalt. We go at your pace, and we prioritize safety and capacity before processing anything difficult.

If any of this resonates, a free 15-minute consultation is the place to start. It is a low-pressure conversation to see whether what I offer is a fit.

Book a free 15-minute consultation
  • Registered Psychotherapist, CRPO #12083
  • MA Counselling Psychology, Yorkville University
  • BSc Psychology (Hons), University of Toronto
  • CCTS-I, Arizona Trauma Institute
  • Certificate in Alternative Dispute Resolution, York University