Personal information you share with me will always remain completely confidential.
Help yourself to heal is a course to aid recovery and foster resilience. Talk therapy, which uses thoughts to change the brain, is valuable but in order to deal with overwhelming stress, PTSD and residual trauma symptoms, we need to change the brain through working with the body and the autonomic nervous system.
Course outline
If you have been traumatised by specific events in your life, serious, repeated or ongoing difficulties arising from intolerable situations, and you still carry the burden of those events, this course is for you.
This course is designed to treat issues arising from trauma, such as:
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During the course, I will give you handouts to refer to each week and after the course. Participating means that you need to engage with the suggested activities on a regular basis.
Twelve weeks is a good estimate of the time it takes to produce permanent brain change through practice. If you only use a technique when you feel desperate, you may feel better at the time but are unlikely to achieve permanent change.
On the other hand, if you practice for some time each day you will benefit from permanent changes for the better.
For individual sessions, the fee is £75.
I
How to heal your brain – a
little neuroscience
II
Working within your window
of intolerance
III
Regulating your emotions through sensory awareness
IV
Body-based techniques for stabilising the autonomic
nervous system
V
Developing mindfulness
VI
Rewriting your life story to
make a difference
VII
Resilience and
post-traumatic growth
Emotional and psychological trauma is the result of unusually stressful events that may shatter your sense of security. Psychological trauma can leave you struggling with upsetting emotions, memories and anxiety that won't go away. It can also leave you feeling numb, disconnected and unable to trust people.
Traumatic experiences often involve a threat to life or safety, but any situation that leaves you feeling overwhelmed and isolated may be experienced as traumatic. It's not the circumstances that determine whether or not an event is traumatic, but your experience of the event. The more frightened and helpless you feel, the more likely you are to be traumatised.
Psychological trauma can be caused by:
People react to trauma in different ways and may experience a range of physical and emotional reactions. Your responses are normal reactions to abnormal events.
Trauma symptoms caused by single events typically last from a few days to a few months, gradually fading as you process the unsettling event. But even when you're feeling better, you may be troubled from time to time by painful memories or emotions – especially in response to triggers such as an anniversary of the event or something that reminds you of the traumatic experience.
While symptoms of emotional trauma are a normal response to highly-disturbing events, they may present as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), when your nervous system gets 'stuck' and you remain in psychological shock, unable to make sense of what happened or process your emotions.
There are several ways of mitigating the effects of traumatic experiences. Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) effectively targets specific traumatic memories. Mindfulness and body-based techniques are effective in developing a calmer state of mind and improved emotional regulation. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is a way of changing limiting beliefs formed in childhood and Internaal Family Systems Therapy helps to relinquish the pain from the past.
