The TRC came about as the result of a dream from our Founding Director Betsy de Thierry, who is now our Chair of Trustees. The dream was of a trauma recovery centre helping many families who had no one to support them in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. 14 years on, 5 TRC’s have operated across the UK and the Channel Islands and their data shows that the average length of time a family comes to TRC is one year (40 sessions), with many children coming for over 100 sessions.  

It has been quite a unique journey to get here and it was a very challenging start, but we are so proud of what we have achieved over the past 14 years.

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Our First Centre - TRC Bath

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Trauma Recovery UK's first centre is located in Bath in the UK, and has a purpose-designed building for therapy.

Hosted and seed-funded by a brilliant and generous church who got behind the vision of the charity, Sound Church renovated their Kids and Community building to be able to host the TRC Therapy Centre.  We will always be so very grateful to them for how they seed-funded our charity from day one, as well as committing a building for us to use for as long as we need.  

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A Challenging Start

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In May 2011, the TRC opened its doors to their first clients. The TRC then had a very challenging few years, as the Founding Director, Betsy de Thierry, was victim to a horrific death threat, cyberstalking and harassment over four years by one man and two of his friends, who tried to close the TRC down. The thousands of emails slandering Betsy and the TRC sent to the local authority and other professionals, alongside the main perpetrator buying thousands of domains in Betsy's name, led to the police saying Betsy needed to take her name back.  We were grateful for the private investigators at The Big Lottery who were a large enough organisation to finally identify one of the key harassers, a man who was then arrested.

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We are also so grateful for Bill McKitterick. He was the TRC's Organisational Supervisor who supported us in this difficult period. Bill came to us as the retired Director of Children's Services in Bristol and brought his wisdom and experience of the statutory system to us as he supported us during the police investigation into the attacks and slander against Betsy. He had a bright yellow van and sometimes accompanied the senior team of the TRC to help the police uncover who was behind the harassment. We are forever thankful to him although sadly he passed away a few years ago.

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Our Motivation and the Evidence our Approach Works

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Testimonials of lives transformed are our motivation to continue to do this work over the years. We have continued despite the huge challenges and opposition because we believe families can recover from the devastating long term impacts of trauma and complex trauma. It was the reason the charity was created and the reason we still exist today. We know first hand that recovery is possible and that there is always hope. It's a privilege to do this work and support families as they piece their lives back together until a wholeness can be found.

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The TRC team are all passionate about working with with complex trauma effectively, and have trained in a pioneering trauma recovery focused approach that was created by Betsy de Thierry, and underpinned by neuroscientific research.

In 2019, we partnered with Canterbury Christ Church University's Salomons Institute for Applied Psychology to evaluate our developing evidence base of clinical assessments; they evaluated our work and reported a significant clinical reduction in trauma symptoms in 98.8% of the children and young people (across a sample of 248 clients).

We are an approved provider of specialist trauma recovery focused creative therapy and parenting support to a number of local authorities and organisations, and we work closely with other organisations supporting the wider needs of the families in our local communities. It’s our privilege to do this work.

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Across the last 14 years we have had 5 Centres.