How Trauma Impacts Your Brain: The Left and Right Hemisphere Disconnect

How Trauma Impacts Your Brain: The Left and Right Hemisphere Disconnect

Traumatic events can change how your brain works, leaving you feeling broken and disconnected as though your mind and body are no longer in sync. How can you tell when this is happening to you? Have you ever had a traumatic experience, but when you talk about it, it...
Alone for Christmas: Tribal Belonging, Trauma Responses, and Practical Coping Strategies

Alone for Christmas: Tribal Belonging, Trauma Responses, and Practical Coping Strategies

The holiday season is often portrayed as a time of joyful celebration and togetherness. But for many, it can be a painful reminder of loneliness and the holidays can be an isolating time, especially if you’re spending Christmas day alone. This isn’t just a matter of...
Managing Big Life Changes at Christmas: Coping with Divorce, Family Estrangement, or Bereavement

Managing Big Life Changes at Christmas: Coping with Divorce, Family Estrangement, or Bereavement

The festive season is often portrayed as a time of joy and togetherness, but for many, it can be a time of deep emotional stress. Particularly when big changes like divorce, family relationship breakdown, or the loss of a loved one happen, the holidays can feel like a...
People Pleasing and Handling Xmas Expectations

People Pleasing and Handling Xmas Expectations

Ladies let’s face it: Christmas can feel less like a season of joy and more like a season of jobs! Between hosting, gift shopping, decorating, cooking, organising secret Santa exchanges, and making sure the dog doesn’t eat the tree ornaments, it often feels like...
Trauma: How the Freeze Response Affects Healing and Recovery

Trauma: How the Freeze Response Affects Healing and Recovery

Have you ever had a distressing experience and afterwards felt so frustrated or angry with yourself for not speaking up or taking action? Or maybe in conflict situations you tend to go quiet and shutdown. I want to reassure you that it’s not your fault. When...
Why Yoga and Meditation Could Make Trauma Symptoms Worse

Why Yoga and Meditation Could Make Trauma Symptoms Worse

You are feeling stressed and anxious so you try to “do the right thing” and go to a Yoga class or do Mindfulness meditation, but it just seems to make you feel worse and more anxious. If you’ve had this experience, please know there is nothing wrong with you.  It...
What is Trauma?

What is Trauma?

If you regularly struggle with stress, anxiety, and overwhelm, there may be an underlying issue from your past that’s causing it. Trauma may be impacting you more than you realise. What is Trauma? Trauma has been described as a highly activated, incomplete...
Trauma and Proprioception

Trauma and Proprioception

Trauma is any distressing event where you feel overwhelmed, powerless or helpless and do not fully use up or reset your instinctive fight, flight, or freeze response. It can happen to anyone. When a human experiences distress such as injury, loss, continually pushing...
Trauma and Childbirth

Trauma and Childbirth

As a Polyvagal Psychotherapist, I have supported a lot of women with trauma relating to childbirth. It can go unrecognised because there is the societal belief that giving birth is “natural” and that “women are designed to have babies”, etc. Often this is not the case...
Body-Centered Therapy for Trauma: What Is It?

Body-Centered Therapy for Trauma: What Is It?

After long periods of high stress, your nervous system goes into overdrive, and this can prevent you from being in the present moment, relaxing, enjoying life, and connecting with others. Body-centered Psychotherapy can help you to reconnect with your body and...