Childhood Trauma & Depth Psychotherapy for Women
Feminist depth psychology for women whose childhoods are still shaping their adult lives
The wounds of childhood don’t disappear because we grow up. They go underground. They become the way we love, the way we work, the standards we hold ourselves to, the things we cannot say no to, and the parts of ourselves we learned long ago to hide.
Most women I work with don’t arrive saying “I had a difficult childhood.” They arrive saying they’re exhausted. That they don’t recognise themselves anymore. That they keep ending up in the same kind of relationships. Often, they’re somewhere in their forties when this starts to surface properly. There’s a reason for that.
If something in your past is still shaping your present, even if you can’t quite put it into words, this is the work I do.
Why work with me
I’m Cheryl Kennedy MacDonald, a registered psychotherapist (MBACP Accred, SAC Registered) specialising in childhood trauma, attachment wounds, and the long-term psychological impact of growing up with emotionally immature, absent, neglectful or narcissistic parents. My approach is integrative, trauma-informed, and rooted in feminist depth psychology, drawing on psychodynamic and attachment-based work alongside somatic practice.
This is not a quick-fix model. Depth work takes time. What it offers in return is the kind of change that actually lasts, because it works at the level where these wounds were formed.
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What we mean by childhood trauma
For many women, the deepest wounds came from what was missing rather than what happened — emotional attunement, validation, safety, the sense of being known and loved for who you actually were rather than who you needed to be to keep the peace. It can include:
- emotionally immature, narcissistic or unavailable parents
- being parentified — made responsible for a parent’s emotions or wellbeing
- chronic invalidation, criticism or conditional love
- enmeshment with a controlling or anxious mother
- absence — emotional or physical — of one or both parents
- being the “good girl,” the “easy one,” the one who didn’t cause trouble
If you grew up with a narcissistic parent or in a narcissistic family system, you may also want to read my dedicated Relationship Trauma & Narcissistic Abuse page.
The mother wound, the father wound, and what they leave behind
Some of the most significant work I do involves naming the mother wound: the unresolved pain that comes from being raised by a mother who, for whatever reason, could not fully see or validate her daughter. It’s rarely about a “bad mother.” It’s often about a mother who was herself unmothered, passing on what she was given.
The father wound operates differently — shaping how women relate to authority, to men, to their own ambition, to their sense of being protected or chosen.
We don’t work with these concepts to assign blame. We work with them because naming what happened, and what didn’t, is the first step in being free of it.
Why this surfaces in midlife
The coping strategies childhood gives us — perfectionism, people-pleasing, over-functioning, emotional suppression — tend to hold for a long time before they break. Hormonal changes, accumulated exhaustion, and the natural reckoning of midlife often strip these defences faster than we can replace them. What was buried surfaces. The grief we never let ourselves feel as children arrives, decades late, and it arrives with force.
Many women describe this as a breakdown. I tend to describe it as a long-overdue reckoning. It’s painful, but it’s also the moment where genuine, lasting change becomes possible — often for the first time.
How depth psychotherapy works
In our work together, we may explore the recurring relationship patterns you can name but can’t seem to change, the inner critic and chronic sense of not being enough, the parts of yourself you learned to hide, the grief for the childhood you didn’t have, and the body’s memory of what your mind has tried to forget.
My work draws on psychodynamic and attachment-based psychotherapy alongside somatic practice, because childhood trauma lives as much in the nervous system as in the conscious mind. We work at a pace your system can actually tolerate, with the Rewind Technique available where clinically appropriate.
Next steps
You don’t need to have your story neatly organised. You don’t need to be sure that what happened to you “counts.” If something is still shaping how you feel, how you relate, or who you can allow yourself to be, that’s enough to begin.
I offer a free 20-minute clarity call — a chance to talk briefly about what’s bringing you here and see whether working together feels right.
[Book a free clarity call] [Learn more about Cheryl]