FAQ

My office is located as 31 Simpsons Rd, Elanora, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.

Sessions are available face-to-face or online (Telehealth).

(Central to Robina, Palm Beach, Burleigh Heads, Varsity Lakes, Tweed Heads, Coolangatta).

(Not currently available at Suite D, 191 Varsity  Pde, Varsity Lakes, Gold Coast Qld 4227.)

Counselling sessions with me last a full 60 minutes.

Counselling sessions with me cost $250 for a 60 min session.

If you have a Mental Health Care Plan from your GP, you can qualify for a Medicare rebate of $96.65.

Your ‘out of pocket’ expenses will then be $153.35.

As a point of reference, The Australian Psychological Society recommends a fee of $311 for sessions from 46 min to 60 min.

Note – you will need to visit your GP prior to your first session and ask for a referral to see me via a Mental Health Care Plan .

Yes.  If you are covered for Psychology sessions with your health care provider, you may claim a rebate for your sessions with me.  Check with your provider for specifics.  In most cases I can provide the rebate on the spot for a face to face session.

Counselling sessions are available Tuesday to Friday at 10am, 11.30am, 2.15pm or 3.30pm. To book a time or to discuss working together, call 0423 167 376 or email deborah@djpsych.com.au.

If you are seeing me as a privately paying client, all session content is confidential.

The rare exception to that is if your files are subpeonaed by court, in which case we discuss any options around this that best serve you and your wellbeing.

If you are seeing me via a Mental Health Care Plan, I will need to send occasional, brief progress notes to your GP.

For any other funding pathways or queries about confidentiality, please touch base with me directly.

As a general principle, the information shared in session, for adult clients is private and confidential.

One exception to this is if you should present as a risk of harm to yourself or others or in cases of abuse or neglect of children or dependent adults.  In these circumstances, I will advise you of my concerns and discuss next steps with you.

There may be occasions where you would like me to liaise with other parties or health care providers on your behalf (for example, schools, employers, doctors, allied health care providers).  In these situations, I require your permission to make contact and we will discuss in advance the nature of information to be shared.

I understand that needs and priorities can change and will work with you should you need to reschedule your session time.

Mostly I can accomodate scheduling changes with a new appointment in the next week or so.

Should you need to cancel with less than 48 hours notice, a $50 fee will be charged.  Should you need to cancel with less than 24 hours notice the full session fee is forfeited.  Thank-you for your consideration.

Trauma is a response to overwhelming demand on your nervous system, that you are unable to process at the time.  It is a response to actual or perceived threat.  Trauma does not relate so much to an event or series of events, moreso what your nervous system needed to do to keep you safe at the time.  This generally means dissociating or splitting off from some aspect of your experience, in order that you can continue functioning in life.  The split off part of you will need specific care and attention as it comes forward to be healed.

The memory of the traumatic event or dynamics and the rippling after effects stay imprinted in your body and neural pathways.  A trauma informed, mind-body process is needed to safely access these parts and meet them now with something they needed earlier, in order for the circuits to ‘re-solve’ themselves and for you to have a more coherent and connected life experience.

Many of us are familiar with single incident trauma – a dysregulated nervous system as a result of a car accident or natural disaster.

In my opinion, most of the trauma we are dealing with as a society is complex and developmental trauma.  It is complex for two reasons:

1. It happened while your nervous system was growing itself and so shaped the nervous system you had to operate in for your life going forward.
2. It happened in a scenario where caregivers who should have kept you safe either didn’t or couldn’t.

Complex and developmental trauma has a big impact on how safe we feel in the world and in relationships and how we understand and feel about ourselves – our self esteem.

Poly-vagal theory recognises that there are three primary modes that are nervous system operates in, depending on the level of safety we feel:

1. In ‘rest and digest’ or social engagement mode our nervous system can function harmoniously as we live our lives and interact with the world around us.  We can digest food, derive nutrition from what we eat, function well sexually, sleep, be open to new people and experiences.
2. In ‘fight or flight’ mode, our nervous system is hyper-activated, producing adrenaline and cortisol to assist us to manage threat or perceived threat.  These are activating threat defences, allowing us to take action to protect our boundaries and keep ourselves safe.
3. In ‘freeze or collapse’ mode, we are dealing with another autonomic body response, called the dorsal vagal brake.  It’s a blunt response activated by the lower part vagus nerve, around sensed danger. It will slow down heart rate and blood sugar to the brain and immobilise you, to conserve energy.

The vagas nerve is referred to as the 10th cranial nerve.  It winds its way from our brainstem, right down through our heart and gut.

To work effectively with body based trauma memories, you need to worked with a therapist who is sensitive to the subtle messages of each of these three modes of your nervous system and can work with you to build awareness of your inner experiences and also build bandwidth for felt sense of new states, with a greater sense of ground, safety, alignment and cohesion.

If you are finding yourself over-reacting to present day triggers in your life, it may be that these stressors relate to earlier events that occurred while your brain and nervous system were growing themselves.  And the way you had to adapt to cope in your family of origin.

For example, to be a caretaker and feel over-responsible for others, to be invisible in order not to get hurt, to play a role of a ‘good kid’ in order to receive some conditional love, to fight for what you needed or miss out.

These adaptations can save us in the short term, but cost us in the long term.

When you book a trauma informed therapy session we start to unravel these old responses and bring your nervous system and the cut off parts of you something now that they needed back then.  So they can evolve and re-integrate back into the whole of you.

You can download my Complex Trauma Impacts Checklist here.