Trauma Therapist in Naples, FL
For trauma that happened inside a relationship rather than on a battlefield — betrayal, coercion, years of being managed — and for the childhood patterns still running the responses you cannot explain.
The short answer
Individual sessions are $125, in person at the Naples office or by secure video anywhere in Florida, with Kellie Hatch, MA, RMHCI.
The trauma work here draws on three approaches and only three: Rapid Transformational Therapy, psychodynamic therapy and Solution Focused therapy. RTT packages start at $750 for one to three sessions. Begin with a free 15-minute Discovery Call: book online or call (239) 526-8526.
Relationship trauma
Trauma is still widely imagined as a single catastrophic event. A great deal of what walks through the door is neither single nor obviously catastrophic: years inside a relationship where reality was routinely contradicted, where anger arrived without warning, where affection was the reward for compliance. No one incident would sound serious recounted at a dinner party. The cumulative effect is a nervous system that never fully stood down.
What people notice afterwards is not memories so much as calibration. Scanning a room for mood before you take your coat off. Apologising pre-emptively. Being unable to identify what you want, because wanting things was once expensive. Those are trauma responses, and they persist long after the relationship ends because they were the correct adaptation at the time.
If you are trying to work out whether what you experienced qualifies, signs you are in an unhealthy relationship and dating a narcissist are useful reference points. The threshold is not severity relative to other people's stories; it is whether it changed how you operate.
Betrayal trauma
Betrayal trauma is distinctive because the source of the injury was the source of safety. That combination produces something that looks like anxiety, grief and dissociation simultaneously, plus a symptom people rarely expect: the loss of confidence in your own perception. If you were that wrong about something this large, what else are you wrong about?
The intrusive part is often the worst of it — involuntary reconstruction of timelines, the compulsion to know details that provide no relief once known, months spent re-reading the same messages. That is not weakness or obsession; it is a mind attempting to rebuild a model of reality that was invalidated without warning.
Work in this area is sequenced deliberately: stabilising the acute intrusion first, then addressing the meaning that got attached — "I cannot trust my own judgement", "I was a fool" — and only then the question of what comes next with the relationship or without it. Healing after betrayal covers the early stage. Where the couple is attempting repair together, couples therapy at $150 per session runs alongside the individual work rather than replacing it.
Childhood patterns that became adult trauma responses
A significant proportion of clients came in for something current and discover the current thing is a re-run. A child in an unpredictable household develops accurate, expensive skills: reading micro-expressions, keeping the peace, needing nothing, taking responsibility for adults' feelings. Those skills work. They are also why, twenty-five years later, you cannot relax around a partner who is merely quiet.
Sitting underneath the behaviour is usually a small number of beliefs formed early and never revisited — I am too much, I am not safe, love is conditional on usefulness. They do not respond to logic, because they were not built out of logic. Psychodynamic work traces how they were formed and how they operate now; it is slower, and it produces understanding that holds.
Overcoming toxic relationship patterns and breaking the cycle describe the adult end of the same mechanism.
Why RTT is often the fast route to a root cause
Rapid Transformational Therapy combines hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, NLP and CBT to locate the moment a belief was formed and reframe it directly, rather than managing its consequences week after week. For trauma held together by one founding conviction, that directness is why change can happen in one to three sessions where weekly talk therapy would take considerably longer.
It is not universally the right first move. Where there is active safety risk, severe psychiatric instability, ongoing abuse, or a need for stabilisation before anything else, slower and more containing work comes first — and sometimes a referral into a higher level of local care is the honest recommendation. Which of those applies is precisely what the Discovery Call is for.
The three approaches used here are RTT, psychodynamic and Solution Focused. Solution Focused work carries the practical layer: sleep, boundaries, function at work, getting through the next fortnight while the deeper work proceeds. Modalities this practice does not offer are not listed here, and a referral is the right answer when a different approach is genuinely indicated.
Formats and fees
Individual sessions are $125 in the Naples office or by secure video statewide. RTT packages start at $750 for one to three sessions. Walk & Talk Beach Therapy is $140 and is worth considering for trauma work specifically, since walking side by side without sustained eye contact is easier for many clients than a consulting room. Superbills, HSA and FSA payment are covered on the cost page.
This page is education, not a diagnosis. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 or dial 911. If you are currently unsafe with a partner, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best therapy for trauma?
The one matched to how the trauma is actually held, which is why this practice uses three approaches rather than one. Rapid Transformational Therapy is often the most direct route where the trauma rests on a single founding belief, because it goes at that belief rather than at the symptoms. Psychodynamic work is the better fit for trauma laid down over years in childhood, where the task is understanding a pattern rather than resolving one event. Solution Focused work carries the practical layer — sleep, boundaries, functioning — while the deeper work proceeds. Where a modality this practice does not offer is genuinely indicated, the right answer is a referral, and that is said plainly.
How long does trauma therapy take?
It varies more than for almost anything else, and honest estimates depend on whether the trauma is one event or a long accumulation. A single identifiable incident with a clear belief attached can shift inside an RTT package of one to three sessions. Relationship trauma spanning years, or childhood patterns that shaped how you operate, is generally months rather than weeks — the pattern is structural rather than situational. Where stabilisation is needed first, that phase is counted as part of the work and not as a delay to it. The Discovery Call is the point at which you should get a realistic range for your own situation.
What is the difference between trauma and PTSD?
Trauma describes the experience; PTSD is a specific psychiatric diagnosis with defined criteria — intrusive re-experiencing, avoidance, changes in mood and belief, and heightened arousal, persisting beyond a month and interfering with functioning. Plenty of people are genuinely traumatised without meeting those criteria, and their difficulties are no less real or less treatable. The distinction matters clinically for how work is sequenced, but it does not gatekeep therapy: you do not need a diagnosis to start, and a formal diagnostic evaluation is a separate process from what happens in a first session here.
You can put this down
A free 15-minute Discovery Call is a low-commitment way to describe what happened and hear which approach is likely to fit — including if the honest answer is a referral elsewhere.
Book Your Free Discovery CallClinical note: This page is general education, not a diagnosis, treatment plan, or a substitute for individual clinical care. Kellie Hatch is a Registered Mental Health Counselor Intern (RMHCI #31091) in Florida, practicing under the supervision of Dr. April Brown, LMHC, QS, NCC. Therapy outcomes vary from person to person and no result is guaranteed. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or dial 911.