All my work is trauma-informed, and I’m professionally trained and certified in multiple advanced therapeutic trauma healing methods. I’m also on the way to becoming a licensed clinical Psychotherapist.
In the course of working together, should traumatic content present itself, it can be supported. I work with somatic methods to support the resolution of “frozen tensions” – areas that the mind, body and soul are lodged in the past – to liberate stuck lifeforce back into flow and get things moving in the desired direction.
Not everyone has experienced what might be considered “capital T” trauma, but most people have some aspect of something – however small – that had a significant and lasting limiting impact in their life.
We do this work from the bottom up, which is to say; supporting your body to simply release the stories that it’s held, enabling you to open to the possibilities of life in ways you may never have thought possible.
From a neuroscience perspective, trauma is defined as anything that overwhelms the system beyond its capacity to cope. This could be a one-time event, or a longer-term experience of adverse conditions. If left unaddressed and unresolved over time, it forms a complex web of coping, compensatory and adaptive mechanisms that limit the capacity of what can expressed as a full and fruitful life.
In the words of Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing):
Trauma is any overwhelming event that is “too much, too fast, too soon” for a particular human nervous system to handle. Trauma happens to all of us.
People sometimes get confused when I say that and the confusion comes from a very narrow understanding of what trauma is. Trauma is basically a disconnect from safety. Anything that happens that makes you disconnect from yourself and from your sense of safety could be labeled as trauma.
There is argument to suggest that what registers as “trauma” has a lot to do with perception/perspective, and that it is often the perspective itself and not the event that leaves a lasting impact. Nevertheless, the experience still feels very real; and we address all levels to unbind the associated feelings.
I find that the women who come to me often have something to address in one of the following key theme areas:
- Significant negative experiences with men – anything from a challenged relationship with a father or son, to painful adult relationships, to sexual trauma. Sexual trauma could be something as simple as opening to sexual activity far too soon, setting in motion a pattern of consistent self-erosion: “giving sex for love”, giving self away, pushing beyond the limits of what is self-honouring, saying yes when you want to say no.
- Significant issues with women – sometimes referred to the “sisterhood wound”. Because of the distorted culture in which we’ve lived, women often attack, demean and undermine each other, and some level of traumatic experience around this is common. It could be with a mother, friend, peers or colleagues, or the collective experience of women in general.
- Developmental gaps – the entryway from childhood to adolescence, or from adolescence into adulthood, was not properly initiated; making it challenging for aspects of mature feminine consciousness to be accessed and actioned. It can also be that something happened during childhood, including such “normal” seeming things as the illness of a parent or parental divorce, that caused aspects of the self to not develop as they should have within a stable and consistent environment.
- Experiences related to thinking and feeling a different way to the main stream of society – perhaps being “highly sensitive”, highly intelligent or gifted, or simply going against the grain in some way that is not considered the norm.
Some of the side-effects of these types of experience can be the following:
- Difficulty to assert oneself in certain ways, or to hold and maintain boundaries
- Difficulty to relax, or surrender
- Difficulty to “presence” self fully – to take up appropriate space and radiate unapologetically the unique truth of who you are
- Difficulty to open up, to trust or accept love, or fully receive the gifts of life
Working with me in any capacity involves a deep-dive into the internal psychological, mental, emotional and somatic mechanisms to build from the ground up an infrastructure that truly supports the woman you want to be on every level.
This is far deeper than standard coaching, and does not overlook the impact of earlier experience. It is simply impossible to use mindset alone to shift a core belief when the root of it is lodged in experience that the body has never processed. It is here that we go to unlock the liberation your whole being is seeking, using a wide variety of therapeutically-oriented methods.
I’ve found in my 12 years of coaching experience that there is a whole swathe of women left out by the coaching industry due the fact that trauma is simply not considered as a factor inhibiting expansion. The coaching industry is also dominated (and in fact was created by) masculine thinking, and does not address the specific and unique needs and challenges of women. All of the above and so much more is covered in my containers.
Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood and untreated cause of human suffering
– Dr Peter Levine(Citation: https://wisdomfromnorth.com/transforming-trauma/)