Nigel Joseph, Trauma Therapist & Couples Counsellor
in Narre Warren

Perhaps it is anxiety that won't settle, or a sadness that has been with you longer than you can explain. Perhaps your relationship has become a source of pain rather than connection, or you have a quiet sense that experiences from your past are still shaping your life today. Whatever it is, you don't have to keep carrying it alone. That is exactly the kind of work I do, and it is work I genuinely care about.

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My path to becoming a trauma therapist and couples counsellor didn't start in a consulting room. After migrating to Australia in the early 1990s, I spent around ten years working as an electronics Technician, a stable career, but never quite the right fit. I have always been drawn to people, to understanding what shapes us, what wounds us, and what helps us heal. That pull eventually became impossible to ignore. I studied counselling, and in 2007 began a career that has given me a sense of purpose I never found anywhere else.

My early years were spent working across Community Health services in Melbourne, supporting people struggling with addiction and mental illness. What I noticed, almost without exception, was that most of them had been touched by early childhood trauma in some way. Some had experienced significant traumas, sexual abuse, assault, or family violence. For others it was quieter, a childhood marked by emotional neglect, by criticism, by parents who were absent or overwhelming, or simply by never quite feeling seen or safe. And yet the impact on their adult lives was profound.

I knew that if I was going to truly help people, I needed to understand trauma at a much deeper level.

That search led me to my first trauma training with Dr Bessel van der Kolk in 2011, a turning point that shaped everything that followed. Since then, I have trained extensively with leading trauma specialists, attended international trauma conferences, and continued to study the research that is transforming how we understand and treat trauma.

Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body." — Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (2014)

The work of Dr Dan Siegel and Dr Stephen Porges deepened this understanding further, helping me see how our earliest relationships become wired into our nervous systems, and giving me a clearer, more compassionate way to help clients make sense of what is happening to them.

One of the things I noticed early in my work was how painful it could be for clients to talk about their experiences. Revisiting the past often left people feeling worse, not better. EMDR offered something different, a way to process and heal from traumatic memories without needing to retell the story. I trained in EMDR in 2014 and have been practising it ever since.

During my advanced EMDR training I was introduced to Schema Therapy, and the combination of the two opened up something I hadn't anticipated. Together they reach not just the traumatic memories themselves, but the deep beliefs formed around them, that I am not enough, that I am not lovable, that the world is not safe, and many other beliefs that can quietly run a person's life for decades. The results I saw were significant enough that in 2015 I presented this work at the Victorian Alcohol and Other Drug Association conference and the Lighthouse International Trauma Conference, sharing the evidence of what becomes possible when both approaches are used together.

Throughout my career I worked with couples from time to time, and the more I did, the more I saw how the same principles applied. Each partner carries their own unresolved history into the relationship, experiences that make conflict harder to navigate and closeness harder to sustain. Since establishing my private practice, couples work has become an increasingly central part of what I do.

The work of John Gottman gave me a research-based framework for understanding what quietly erodes connection over time and what rebuilds it. Combined with Schema Therapy, I can help couples see beneath the conflict, to understand what is actually being triggered, and why. Helping couples find their way back to each other has become one of the most meaningful parts of my work.

In 2022 I completed a Masters in Social Work, which deepened my ability to see the whole person, not just what is happening inside you, but what has happened around you, the family, the environment, the circumstances that shaped you, and how inseparable those things really are from how you feel today.

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Whether you are coming for individual therapy or couples counselling, our work together begins with understanding your story, at whatever pace feels right for you. There is no pressure to share more than you are ready to share. Using approaches tailored to your specific needs, including EMDR, Schema Therapy, and Gottman-based couples work, we work together toward change that is genuinely lasting, not just better coping, but a different relationship with yourself and the people you love.