Some wounds don't have words.
Body-based and expressive psychotherapy in Singapore — for adults working with childhood trauma, maladaptive patterns, and questions of meaning that talk therapy hasn't been able to reach.
Who I work with
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Outside, you're high-functioning. Inside, the critic doesn't take a day off. It catches you in the shower, mid-sentence, in the long minutes before sleep — that was a stupid thing to say, why are you like this, what's wrong with you?
The feeling in your body says one thing; the rationalization in your head says another. You are at war with yourself for so long, you're not sure what you actually feel anymore.
By the time you find me, you've usually tried the cognitive routes. CBT. Affirmations. Self-help books. You've hit the wall.
It's not that you've been doing it wrong. You've been trying to heal a wound that doesn't speak the language of cognition. This is where my work begins — in the body, with the parts, in the language they actually speak. When they're met instead of silenced, they rest. The critic quiets. You stop gaslighting yourself.
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You're a competent adult, yet at home with your parents, something else takes over. You submit to demands you wouldn't accept from anyone else. You're thirty-five and you still need permission. The gap between who you've become in the world and who you're allowed to be at home is tearing something inside.
Or you're a parent now, and you swore you'd do it differently. You read the books. You know what attachment is. Then your child melts down at the worst moment and you hear your own mother's voice come out of your mouth before you can stop it. The cycle you spent years trying to break is the same one you're passing on, and the guilt is unbearable.
The template lives in the body, not in your head. Knowing the right way doesn't stop the old reflex from firing.
The same wound runs up the lineage and down. This is where my work begins — in the body, where the template was first learned and where it can finally be released. When the old reflex loosens, the freeze breaks. Your own voice returns. The cycle stops, in your generation.
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You've done it the way you were told — school, career, marriage, children — every milestone the culture said would make a life.
And lately, in the long quiet moments — driving home from work, in bed at 2am — there's a dullness you can't put your finger to. Not despair. Not yet. Just a sense of going through the motions. A restlessness in the body before the mind has language for it. The curiosity, the playfulness, the spontaneity — fading. You're not sad. You're not anything.
In Asian, driven culture, the questions weren't on the syllabus. Who am I when no one's asking me to perform? What do I actually want? What did I never get to find out about myself, because I was busy succeeding? You've tried productivity hacks, meditation apps, a passion pivot or two. The dullness comes back.
This isn't depression to be managed. It's existential anxiety — the body's way of saying the life you built is too small for the person you actually are.
This is where my work begins — not in better strategies, but in the questions you were never given permission to ask. Curiosity returns. The body wakes up. You start to live a life that's actually yours.
How I work
Many of my clients arrive after years of talk therapy that didn't reach the depth where the wound lives. That's because childhood trauma is recorded in implicit memory — in the body, in reflex, in symbol — before language arrives. The parts holding it kept doing what once helped them survive, long after those strategies became a burden. My work uses modalities that bypass the analytical mind to meet those parts directly and bring them home.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
The spine of my trauma work. EMDR processes the emotion and sensation the body has stored from a traumatic experience — even when you don't consciously remember it — so a triggering moment in the present no longer feels like reliving the original wound.
Where EMDR uses bilateral eye movement, Brainspotting uses a fixed eye position to access deeper material the body holds — including wounds laid down before you had language for them. Often used alongside EMDR for places it doesn't quite reach.
EXPRESSIVE THERAPY AND SANDPLAY
Expressive Therapy — Image-making, drawing, and symbol work that bypass the rationalising mind to surface what's pressing to be expressed.
Sandplay — You build scenes in a sand tray with miniature figures; meaning unfolds across sessions rather than in any single one. Reaches depths that words alone don't quite touch.
About Shifan
I'm a therapist of my own experience, not of qualifications.
