Centre for the Research of Relational & Vicarious Trauma
Arkesie Published Works
Broken Childhood
The Path to Wholeness
Most of us spent our childhoods adapting to rooms we did not choose. Broken Childhood traces the long aftermath of that adaptation — and the slow, careful work of repair. Across thirty years of clinical practice, Jimi Katsis has watched the strategies that kept children alive become the architecture of an adult life that no longer fits. This is a book about recognising what happened, understanding what it made of us, and finding the path home.
Quote: ISBN 978-1-0666457-0-1
I Look Fine
And Other Lies Trauma Taught Us
You keep the plates spinning. You answer the messages. You hold other people together. You look fine. You Look Fine is a book for the people most likely never to read about trauma — high-functioning professionals who have learned to disappear into their own competence. Drawing on more than thirty years of clinical practice and lived experience, Jimi Katsis names what hides beneath the performance: the watcher, the steel shutter, the cost of being the reliable one.
Quote: ISBN 978-1-0666457-2-5
Tasting Oranges
Survival, Absence & Coming Back To Life
There are ways of disappearing that attract concern. There are also the other ways — the high-functioning absence that hides in plain sight. Tasting Oranges is a book about that kind of disappearance, and the slow return to the life that is already here. From thirty years of clinical work and lived territory, Jimi Katsis writes about the ghost at the kitchen sink, the breath held since childhood, the ordinary moments that bring us back.
Quote: ISBN 978-1-0666457-4-9
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Author & Founder of Arkesie
Jimi Katsis is a consultant psychotherapist with more than thirty years' specialism in complex trauma and childhood developmental injury. His work draws on EMDR, Schema Therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), DBT, and Somatic Experiencing — modalities chosen to address trauma not just in thought but in the body where it is held.
The work began long before formal training. As a young man, Jimi founded and ran charities and voluntary organisations supporting young people whose lives had been shaped by parental abuse, neglect, and the chaos that follows from both. The patterns he saw in those rooms became a fascination that has never left him: how the experiences a child cannot yet name can shape the entire architecture of an adult life — the relationships chosen, the work pursued, the silences kept, the version of self the world is permitted to see.
Formal training as a social worker, and time spent within fostering teams, sharpened that early fascination into clinical capacity. He went on to qualify as a psychotherapist and to build, over decades, a consultancy practice focused on adult survivors of complex trauma — particularly the high-functioning professionals whose adaptations to early adversity have become both their armour and their cage.
ARKESIE was a dream long before it became an organisation. It took shape as an idea at the start of his journey into therapeutic work and has been quietly evolving ever since: a vision for a body of work — clinical, written, taught, and shared — devoted to one thing only, the recognition and resolution of childhood developmental trauma. Over the decades since, that idea has slowly become what it is now: an international initiative encompassing publishing, ongoing research, and the development of teaching modalities for clinicians and survivors.
The Echoes — the trilogy published under the Arkesie Publishing imprint — is the first written expression of that lifelong project. Broken Childhood, You Look Fine, and Tasting Oranges trace, between them, the architecture of childhood trauma in the adult life and the slow careful work of finding a way back. The books draw on more than thirty years of clinical practice and his own lived experience.
Jimi divides his time between Cyprus and England. He works with adult survivors across the UK and internationally. He is a registered member of the BACP and the host of The Echoes podcast — twenty-plus episodes on life after childhood trauma.