Why safe touch feels amazing and bad touch feels awful
Lockdown has been a massive experiment in non-touching. The stories of people isolated in hospital with only a screen to communicate to loved ones or the images of people on either side of plastic barriers, are heartbreaking. The past 12 months have reinforced the...
Why is embodiment key to healing trauma?
If it is hard to feel, it is hard to heal. Our feeling states are often hidden, rarely simple, and sometimes scary. Embodiment tools can help us develop our capacity to feel, which is incredibly useful in resolving pain, anxiety and trauma. We’re all hardwired to...
Touch Is Really Strange – New April 2021
About Touch Is Really Strange When did you start working on the book? The idea for a book on touch has been in my head since 2019, but definitely a lockdown project. The Really Strange series has been huge fun and continues to get heartwarming feedback. There have...
Exploring Body Centred Countertransference
Overview Connection to the body is the foundation of connection to self, connection to others, and connection to the natural world. Transference is when feelings, attitudes, associations originally experienced with important people from the past are transferred onto...
The Brain Can Make Mistakes When it Comes to Pain
When I teach that “pain involves the brain,” people often feel that I’m saying that it’s their fault. That’s really not what I am saying. I like to talk about the mind, the brain, and the body. The mind is our consciousness, our awareness, our sense of self. The brain...
How to recognise fight, flight or freeze
The understanding of trauma is fundamental to health. We’re all hardwired to respond to overwhelming experiences in the same way. We contract away from danger, we run, jump fight or shutdown. The control mechanisms (nervous, hormonal and immune) take us immediately...
Links between pain and trauma
Polyvagal theory developed by Dr Stephen Porges is very influential in the trauma world. The essence of polyvagal theory is that feeling safe is the fundamental drive for humans. If there is the perception of danger ('neuroception' is the term used by Porges), then we...
Can feeling your body lessen anxiety?
Understanding how anxiety is created by our nervous system trying to protect us, and how our fight-or-flight mechanisms can get stuck, can significantly lessen the fear experienced during anxiety attacks. I’m deeply curious about how minds and bodies interact. I am...
How does changing the body change how we think, feel and remember?
From my mid-20s onwards, the question ‘how do we feel?’ has been a fascination for me. How do we construct our experience? What are our beliefs and how does that affect our experience of our bodies? Volunteering with people with learning difficulties and then working...
Pain, Perception, Trauma and Safety
Why is it that two people can experience the same stressful event, but have very different outcomes? I recently joined Avni Trivedi on the Speak From the Body podcast to talk about deepening feeling, changing the narrative and addressing stress, pain and trauma. We...