Shannon Bowman

Most people who come to see Shannon don’t arrive thinking they have trauma. They arrive with something more specific: a fear that feels out of proportion, a pattern in their relationships they can’t seem to break, or a quiet feeling that despite everything they’ve achieved, something is still missing.

What Shannon has found, across thousands of hours of clinical work, is that most of these experiences trace back to the same place. A parent who struggled with alcohol or drugs, a family shaped by divorce or mental illness, a childhood where the adults around you were dealing with their own pain and you quietly absorbed the cost of it. Experiences that did not look like trauma at the time, but shaped everything.

That past does not stay in the past. It shows up in sleep that won’t come, in relationships that repeat familiar pain, in a body that stays on high alert long after the danger has passed. It shows up in the boardroom as an inability to slow down, in social situations as a dread you can’t explain, in moments of real success as a voice that says it still isn’t enough.

Shannon is a psychotherapist and Accredited Mental Health Social Worker whose clinical work centres on EMDR. He founded Create Balance in Geelong in 2017 and has worked with EMDR clients every day since 2019. His clients include professionals, business leaders, entrepreneurs, and people who’ve spent years managing rather than healing.

What makes EMDR different, and what Shannon finds most meaningful about the work, is that change often happens in real time. A person comes in carrying a memory that has weighed on them for years. By the end of a session, something has shifted. They look lighter. The tension in their body releases. And they’ll often say something like, “that’s strange, that memory doesn’t bother me anymore.” Not because the memory is gone, but because it no longer has the same hold.

He is collaborative and genuinely curious about the people he works with. He asks questions that tend to land somewhere true. And he is deeply invested in whether the work produces something meaningful, not just in the session, but in the life someone goes home to.