I work with people who have a felt sense that what might be causing them difficulties, lies not just in the mind but in the body.
Trauma for instance, doesn’t always lend itself to mental interventions. It’s not always helpful to be reminded or even talk about painful memories in detail: times when we became very frightened. The body has a way of remembering and will re-enact panic and fight flight responses even though the frightening event is now over. We need a different approach if we’re working in the area of post-traumatic stress disorder, one that works with the autonomic nervous system and the body’s fight flight responses. We need to be able to calm down and self-regulate in the here and now before we start to properly process overwhelming feelings from our past.
I am used to working with trauma, and not just trauma that can be remembered. A lot of my work with people focuses on what they cannot remember because it was never part of conscious memory. I’m talking about the very early period in our lives when we are non-verbal, the first months and years of life. Here the body is our first language and if our energy and feelings were constantly overwhelmed in that early period, our development is arrested and this overwhelm becomes fixed in our nervous systems. It is another form of trauma and I believe, can lead to identified psychological symptoms later in life: anxiety, depression, PTSD, for example.
The core of my approach is to reach you and help you connect with parts of you that might be struggling in this way. We do this by talking, but talking in a different way that allows what isn’t ‘spoken’ to be felt and expressed nevertheless. Our bodies contain our frozen histories. It is all there but it is important that someone skilled in trauma can support you in this delicate and often slow ‘re-wiring’ of the body mind connectivity.