HUI WEN TONG · EMDR THERAPIST & CLINICAL SUPERVISOR
The past may be over. Part of you may still be living in it.
You may understand intellectually why you react the way you do. You may know that the relationship has ended, that you are safe now, or that what happened was years ago.
And yet your body, emotions or relationships may still respond as though something is happening in the present.
My work focuses on helping people understand those reactions, work with the parts of themselves that still carry them, and gradually process what has not yet felt finished.
WHO I WORK WITH
Sometimes the reaction makes sense only when we understand what came before it.
People often come to me because they are tired of reacting in ways they do not fully understand.
They may be successful, self-aware and highly functional, yet find themselves becoming overwhelmed, numb, frightened, angry, detached or intensely affected by situations that seem small from the outside.
The question I am interested in is not simply:
“How do we stop this reaction?”
It is also:
“What happened that made this reaction necessary in the first place?”
Trauma and unresolved experiences
Past experiences may continue to show up through emotional triggers, physical reactions, hypervigilance, avoidance or a sense that part of you never really left what happened.
Dissociation and feeling disconnected
You may feel numb, unreal, detached from yourself, lose access to emotions, or notice different parts of you responding in very different ways.
Attachment and relationships
Relationships can activate old fears around abandonment, rejection, control, mistrust or not being enough — even when you know intellectually that the present relationship is different.
Depression and emotional shutdown
Sometimes depression is not simply sadness. It can look like exhaustion, numbness, disconnection or feeling as though you are simply moving through life.
Recurring patterns
You may repeatedly find yourself in similar relationships, conflicts or emotional states despite understanding the pattern very well.
Couples
I also work with couples who keep arriving at the same conflict from different directions and want to understand what is happening beneath the argument.
HOW I WORK
I am not any better than you, and I am not living your life — so I do not like to assume.
I may have training, experience and theories, but you are the one living your life. I do not want to sit across from you and decide too quickly what something means. I would rather ask, understand and make sense of it with you.
I tend to explain what I am noticing, why I am asking a particular question, and what I think may be happening underneath the reaction.
But I also want you to tell me when I have got it wrong.
Therapy is something we do together.
I do not want therapy to feel like something being done to you.
You can disagree with me.
You can tell me something does not make sense.
You can tell me when something feels too much.
The therapeutic relationship itself should be a place where you can become more honest, not another environment in which you have to perform correctly.
EMDR THERAPY
When you know the event is over, but your system still reacts as though it is happening now.
EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing — is an approach used to help people process distressing experiences that continue to carry emotional intensity in the present.
Rather than simply talking repeatedly about what happened, EMDR works with how the experience has been stored and how it continues to influence present reactions.
I am particularly interested in using EMDR thoughtfully with people who also experience dissociation, conflicting internal parts or complex trauma.
For some clients, preparation and stabilisation are important before directly processing traumatic material.
RELATIONSHIPS
Sometimes the argument is not really about what you are arguing about.
Couples may argue about messages, chores, sex, money, parenting or how quickly someone replied.
But beneath the fights, there may be much older questions:
Do I matter to you?
Can I trust you?
Will you stay when things become difficult?
Am I safe being vulnerable with you?
My work with couples looks at the emotional and attachment patterns underneath repeated conflict rather than simply deciding who is right.
ABOUT HUI WEN
Hui Wen
I have spent close to a decade working with individuals and couples, with a particular interest in trauma, dissociation, attachment and the ways unresolved experiences continue to shape the present.
I grew up in Ipoh, Malaysia, and can speak English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese. That background has made me very aware that people do not only communicate through words. Culture, family expectations, tone, silence and the things people do not say can matter just as much.
I also have a twin, which may explain why I have always been fascinated by the question of nature versus nurture. Two people can grow up in the same family, share many of the same experiences, and still develop very differently. That curiosity eventually became part of the way I think about therapy: I try not to assume that the same experience means the same thing to every person.
I have two rabbits as well, and they have been unexpectedly good teachers. Rabbits are prey animals, so their fight, flight and freeze responses are incredibly visible. Watching them reminds me that fight, flight and freeze are not character flaws. They are protective responses designed to keep us safe.
That idea sits at the heart of much of my work.
I am not any better than the person sitting across from me, and I am not living their life. I may have training, experience and theories, but I do not like to assume. I would rather stay curious, ask questions and understand what a reaction, behaviour or part of the self may have been trying to do.
I believe therapy is one of the few places where people are allowed to be fully human.
We do not have to arrive polished, certain or emotionally tidy. We can bring the parts of ourselves we are proud of, and the parts we wish would disappear.
Very often, the parts we reject most strongly are the parts that once worked hardest to protect us. When we begin to understand them instead of fighting them, something shifts. We become less ashamed of who we are, more appreciative of what we have survived, and more able to see just how far we have come.
For me, therapy is not about becoming a completely different person. It is about developing a kinder relationship with the person you already are.