Healing in Connection:
What's involved in our collaboration?
An Integrated ApproachÂ
Humanistic Therapy and Embodied Processing
Maintaining the ethos of therapeutic exploration, our work is tailored to your individual needs and guided by your pace. I also integrate Embodied Processing (EP), a body-centred, trauma-informed holistic approach.
We can often perceive ourselves as needing "fixing," which can lead to endless cycles of seeking solutions and answers to alleviate our suffering, grasping for external relief, keeping us focused on perceived flaws or endless goals. Whilst talking therapies and life coaching aim to foster progress, they often overlook deeper imprints stored in the body, leaving core issues that perpetuate emotional, relational and behavioural challenges unresolved.
In addition, discussing our personal adversities that have resulted in incomplete stress responses without a foundation of regulation or grounding can intensify the body's reactionary state, further embedding and deepening distress instead of alleviating it. By working from a solid base of safety and stability, we create the conditions to meet and contain these sensations without reinforcing patterns or risking re-traumatisation.
This approach may resonate with you if traditional talk-based methods haven’t fully addressed your needs or if you’re seeking a more holistic path toward healing and growth.
Why work with the body?
Our autonomic nervous system (ANS) tries to keep us safe, responding instinctively to perceived threats through the activation of survival states such as:
- Fight or Flight: Mobilizing for action.
- Freeze: Conserving energy through immobility.
- Fawn: Appeasing others to avoid conflict.
These responses are vital during moments of real danger. For example, a gazelle flees to escape a predator, then returns to calm after completing the natural survival loop. Humans, however, often carry unresolved survival responses.
This means our nervous system can react to sensory input reminders of a past event as though it is still happening, even when there is no immediate life threat, and we are safe. This can lead us to organise our life around trying to cope or avoiding the impact of the experience.
Embodied processing facilitates the capacity to respond to stressors and life challenges from a more regulated and resourced place, allowing them to become more manageable; we build a tolerance for and explore how bodily sensations, and posture can contribute to your perceptions and emotional responses.
EP creates a pathway for accessing imprints from the past and finding resolution- not through intellectual conclusions or cognitive insight alone but by going into the body, working with its stored memories, and meeting these stuck, frozen emotions directly. By engaging with the nervous system, we can bypass overanalysing, uncovering core wounds, unconscious beliefs, repressed emotions, and adaptive patterns to address root causes.
In addition, my working approach factors in the current political climate; living within this structure can at times leave us feeling a sense of unease, lost, and disconnected from others. By reconnecting with our bodies and natural surroundings, we begin to reattune to the wisdom and rhythm of the biosphere. This alignment fosters balance, harmony, and flow.
This personalized approach works with your unique strengths and sensory experiences to access and engage with the nervous system safely. We’ll work with your neuroception through a blend of personalised methods such as somatic movement, visualization, and sensory safety cues, to begin to build your window of tolerance for living and being in the present moment. Moving away from the "thinking mind" and into attunement, we continue to learn to accept and feel our emotions as part of life's journey, we cultivate the capacity to meet challenges with presence and compassion.
When we meet ourselves at a deeper somatic level, surface-level problems such as relational struggles, impulsivity, difficulty with decision-making and motivation often gradually diminish themselves. This process paves the way towards greater resilience, alignment and authenticity, allowing us to become who we truly are, rather than who we learned to be in response to what happened to us.
  “Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you”
Dr Gabor Maté
“Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present”Â
Bessel van der Kolk
“Suppressed energy doesn’t go away, and even dark or disowned energy cannot be destroyed. It needs to move, to become, to transmute; it must find an expression. In this way, unconscious material rises again and again to the surface, seeking to be met, detoxed, and clarified. Until trauma has been acknowledged, felt, and released, it will be experienced from without in the form of repetition compulsion and projection and from within as tension and contraction, reduction of life flow, illness or disease.”
Thomas HĂĽbl
How?Â
1) Establishing Safety
At your pace -Â We begin by cultivating a firm, personalised foundation of safety.
This is essential to help you connect with your body and emotions in a way that feels secure and supportive.
2)Â Observing What Emerges
Together, we’ll notice sensations in the body with curiosity, exploring areas where a heightened stress might arise.
This step gently helps us to recognise to how past experiences may still influence the present.
3)Â Â Exploration and Gaining Insight
With safety as our anchor, we’ll welcome what arises with connected awareness, increasing tolerance for difficult sensations.
By tuning into the body-mind’s innate wisdom, we can begin to understand and unravel core wounds.
As the body releases stored tension and unprocessed emotions, old patterns and triggers soften, allowing space for greater clarity, presence and an authentic connection to yourself and life
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Here’s a short video on what to expect in an EP session: Watch here.
"The body is our greatest ally in the healing process, as it holds the wisdom and resources necessary for healing"Â Peter Levine
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