Healing from trauma is difficult. Kelly Savery is offering a safe space to help women through.

She’s a Bermudian therapist who has spent the past 12 years working in the UK.

Clients have benefited from her specialist understanding of a range of trauma treatments including eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing therapy, which is “designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories”, and somatic therapy, a way of helping “people release damaging, pent-up emotions in their body by using various mind-body techniques”.

In November she is bringing it all home for a three-day retreat for women at Cambridge Beaches Resort & Spa.

Her efforts will be aided by Latoya Bridgewater, who will provide “trauma-informed yoga sessions” and Shaydrina Hassell, who will teach a “movement workshop on embodying boundaries”.

Meanwhile Charlene Anglade will offer a “somatic workshop” to help women connect with their bodies “through the exploration of movement and play”.

“I’ve been waiting for my moment to be able to offer what I offer to the island and I was finally in a position to be able to do it,” Dr Savery said. “I come home regularly, I talk to therapists on the island, I talk to people on the island and it feels like something that Bermuda really needs,” said Dr Savery.

“I realised that it's so hard to get accessibility to the stuff that we're going to be offering on the retreat because there's not that many therapists who are able to provide it. So that's why I wanted to start to bring what I offer home.”

The programme specifically targets women who are tired of being “emotionally triggered”, women whose relationships are impacted by their response to trauma, and women who want to “learn how to deal with somatic and visual flashbacks”.

“This is specifically for women for now because I felt like it was important to have that safe space,” Dr Savery said. “It’s open to women who have experienced stress, or a difficult life event they define as a traumatic experience and they’re looking for help to kind of move past the memories.

“It could be a loss of some type, it could be a woman who has experienced domestic violence, it could be a woman who has experienced a car accident.

“We don't have a specific type of traumatic incident but if they identify as having something that they need to work through and that they feel keeps them stuck, then the retreat is probably for them.”

The practising psychologist got interested in trauma through a job placement early on in her career.

“I found that I really loved it. And so through that practice, I really became interested in mind-body healing. That started my journey of becoming a mind-body therapist in particular.”

Specialist training followed. “I specialise specifically in working with men and women who have been sexually abused [but] I just left a job where I was working with people who got in accidents.

“So they had trauma from being in a car accident, bike accident, processing what happened after … I’ve worked with people who have experienced traumatic loss, who have experienced violent attacks or domestic violence.

“I think the tricky thing about trauma and describing what it is, is that it can be different for every person.

“It's really based on how a person experiences and makes sense of what happened to them.

“Sometimes people overlook the fact that it's something really harmful or adverse – they struggle, they don't want to call it a traumatic experience – but I guess, for me, it's if it's had a lasting legacy impact on your life and continues to show up in your present. That's how I would describe it as a trauma.”

The pandemic was a “very hard” time. Dr Savery says she has “never been busier”.

“In our day to day we stopped, and we stopped distracting ourselves. We had to sit and we had to actually learn how to be with ourselves and be with our partners and be with our families and for the first time realised how difficult it was.

“But also with the pandemic we had the collective trauma; all together we had to face the pandemic not knowing what was going on [which led to] all the anxieties and everything with that. I think we’re still seeing the impact of it.”

The retreat at Cambridge Beaches will provide about 15 hours of group therapy for a cost of $2,700.

Clients receive an assessment at the beginning. Dr Savery’s hope is that she is able to find sponsors who can make the programme more affordable to more women next year.

“It is a full body of work, as if you were going for 15 weeks of therapy, but in a group setting,” she said. “And then we're going to offer a follow-up a couple of months later when the people can choose whether or not they need to continue.”

Dr Savery was born and raised in Bermuda and then headed to Canada for her undergraduate degree before moving to the UK to pursue her doctorate.

“I’ve been in the UK for about ten years now but I’ve been coming home every year for as long as I can. During the pandemic I escaped to Bermuda.

“I came to Bermuda in March and I offered training for Child & Social Services – in trauma work to practitioners.”

She believes it’s important that people get the help they need to “move past difficult life events”.

Surprising to her was the response she had from some people here as they considered the therapy she put on offer.

“Bermudians were kind of questioning whether or not it was possible to change and to heal. I thought that was very curious. And I think that that's partly the lack of resources on the island because to heal from trauma is not just talking at me, you need to have a mind-body connect.

“I guess I want people to know that it's possible to get help and sometimes it's not just about getting help it's about getting the right sort of help. And I think that that creates a stigma.

“There’s a sense of hopelessness I think, sometimes, when people talk about trauma, but I want them to know that [recovery] is possible.”

• Kelly Savery’s three-day intensive therapy trauma retreat takes place at Cambridge Beaches Resort & Spa November 2 through 5. For more information, or to register, visit kelly-savery.mykajabi.com/retreat