Rene Tan | SAC Registered Counsellor Singapore
Rene specialises in helping adults heal attachment wounds, childhood trauma, and long-standing emotional patterns that affect relationships and self-worth. Her work focuses on inner child healing and reparenting, supporting individuals who feel stuck in repeated relationship struggles or persistent inner turmoil despite years of trying to change
Her approach is grounded in nuanced attachment understanding and somatic therapy — a method that recognises trauma is not only psychological, but also stored in the nervous system. Increasingly, research has shown that insight alone does not result in complete relief. Sustainable healing happens when the body can finally experience safety.
Drawing from both professional training and lived experience, Rene understands that trauma recovery requires more than talking about the past. Effective body-based therapy includes helping the nervous system regulate and rebuild a felt sense of calm and stability. Clients can expect an integrative experience where sessions are conducted entirely through conversation. There is no physical touch, no mat work, and no movement exercises - the somatic dimension comes through the added quality of learning to notice what arises in the body.
The goal is not just coping — but lasting emotional change and the ability to feel safe in oneself and in relationships.
Something Still Feels Unfinished.
In Singapore, we're not really taught to name what's happening inside us. We're taught to manage, to achieve, to keep going. Many people who come to Rene are high-functioning while quietly running on empty underneath.
Insight lives in the mind. But the patterns formed in early life — the guardedness, the people-pleasing, the way certain conversations make your chest tighten — These responses were often developed long before we had words for them.
Rene's approach works with both. Not just what happened, but what your body learned to do in response — and how to help it slowly learn something different.
Who Can Benefit
Her work is especially helpful for adults who:
Struggle with people-pleasing, difficulty saying no, or an inability to come back to calm after something sets them off
Experience relationship difficulties, fear of abandonment, or attachment insecurity — whether that shows up as anxious or avoidant patterns
Feel easily triggered, shut down, or emotionally numb
Carry the impact of difficult or painful childhood experiences
Want to heal their inner child but don't yet have the tools to do so
Have tried talk therapy but feel something deeper is still unresolved
Are tired of repeating the same relationship patterns and genuinely ready to understand why
Grew up being the responsible one, the peacekeeper, the one who didn't make a fuss — and are beginning to feel the cost of that
Therapy Focused on Lasting Change
Healing rarely follows a straight line. It often begins with understanding. The deeper work happens when that understanding moves from the mind into the body — when safety stops being a concept and starts being something you can actually feel.
Specialisations
• Attachment trauma
• Somatic attunement
• Inner child healing and Reparenting work
• Trauma recovery
• Childhood trauma therapy for adults
• Nervous system regulation
• Anxiety and emotional regulation
• Relationship patterns and relational healing
• Couples Therapy, Marital Counselling and premarital counselling
• Coping with Autoimmunity
Rene’s Training and Experience
Rene is a Registered Counsellor with the Singapore Association for Counselling, holding a Master of Counselling and a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours) in Guidance and Counselling.
She specialises in attachment wounds, childhood trauma therapy for adults, and the long-standing emotional patterns that quietly shape how we relate to others — and to ourselves. Her clinical training draws from relational somatic and attachment-based approaches, abandonment trauma, Gottman Method couples therapy, Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy, mindfulness through the Oxford Mindfulness Foundation, psychodynamic therapy, Acceptance Commitment Therapy, and Motivational Interviewing. Her work is also deeply influenced by Gabor Maté and Carl Jung.
Before Private Practice
Rene's clinical background is rooted in relationship work. Before establishing her own practice, she spent several years in the community providing couples and marital counselling — sitting with two people who loved each other and could not stop hurting each other, trying to find a way through.
Alongside this, she supported parents navigating divorce through co-parenting programmes and divorce support talks. What she witnessed across both settings kept pointing to the same place — beneath the conflict, the distance, the breakdown, were attachment wounds that long preceded the relationship itself. Hurt people, hurting people.
That observation became a conviction. If the wound is in the attachment, that is where the work needs to go. Because after a childhood spent aching, people deserve to enter the next chapter of their lives without carrying the same pain forward.
That is what drives her work.
Personal Journey
Rene came to this work through both rigorous training and lived experience. She understands — not just professionally but personally — what it is to hold something unnamed for years. To be functional, capable, and aware of a low hum that insight alone couldn't touch. Living with an autoimmune condition has also deepened that understanding — the body keeps its own record of what the mind has carried, and healing asks that both be attended to.