When I decided to train, I knew I wanted to work with women who had been through something. Not because I had a clinical interest in trauma. Because I was one of those women, and I knew what was missing.
What was missing was a practitioner who understood both the nervous system science and the human reality of what it means to be a woman rebuilding. Who could hold that knowledge alongside a genuine understanding of what it's like to have children, a business, a life that needs to keep going, while also trying to heal.
That second half is the part that gets left out. A great deal of this work is designed as though the person doing it has cleared her diary. In practice she has a Tuesday, and the Tuesday has a school run in it, and whatever happens in an hour has to be survivable by 3 in the afternoon. Anything that ignores that is not built for the people who most need it.
I trained in TRE, Brainspotting, IFS and breathwork. None of that means the work is all about what happened to you. It means I understand how trauma affects the nervous system, and the work is built accordingly. It means going at the pace of the person in front of me, not the pace of a programme. It means building safety before anything else.
In plain terms, those 4 do different jobs. TRE works with the body's own tremoring, so held tension can discharge. Brainspotting uses eye position to locate and stay with something that talking goes round in circles about. IFS is a way of understanding why you can want 2 opposite things at once and stop treating that as a character defect. Breathwork is the one you can take home with you and use in a car park.
I use them in combination rather than in sequence, because people do not arrive in a sequence.
Going at the pace of the person is easy to say and it has specific consequences. It means a session can be spent on something that was not the plan. It means sometimes the most useful hour is the one where we slow down and do considerably less than you had hoped. And it means nobody is behind, because there is nothing to be behind on.
That is the real difference between this and a programme. A programme has a week 3, and if week 3 is about something you are not near yet, you either pretend or you fall off. Most people fall off, and then conclude the falling off was about them.
Building safety before anything else is the other phrase worth unpacking, because it sounds like a nicety and it is actually the mechanism. A nervous system that does not feel safe will not let anything move. It will be polite, it will answer the questions, and it will keep hold of the thing you came about. So the first part of the work is almost always unglamorous. Settling. Getting your feet under you. Finding out what your own system does when it is not braced.
People often expect the opposite and are slightly disappointed. They have geared themselves up to go straight to the hardest thing, and arriving somewhere that does not require that can be disorienting.
Sessions start with what is going on for you. Not with history, not with a form, not with a model. Whatever is actually happening this week is the way in, and it is usually more than enough to work with.
It is also worth saying what this is not. It is not therapy and it does not pretend to be. Plenty of the women I work with have a therapist as well, and the 2 things sit alongside each other perfectly happily. It is not a diagnosis and I do not give one. And it is not somebody standing over you with a technique while you lie there hoping.
What it is, is a particular kind of attention, from somebody who is not alarmed by you.
That last part matters more than any of the training. A lot of women have had the experience of saying a true thing and watching the other person flinch, and after a few of those you stop saying true things. Being able to say the whole of it to somebody whose face does not change is, on its own, a great deal of what helps.
You are not a project to be completed before you begin. You are not a draft. You are not still loading.
This work is for you as you are, right now. The whole person. Not the polished, ready version.
More like this
TRE, Brainspotting and Flash EMDR, what they actually are, in plain language.
Trauma Release Exercises, what they are, what they cost, and why I trained in them.
What narcissistic abuse actually does to your inner guidance system.
If that sounds like what you need, email me at anna@annalouoflondon.com or message me on WhatsApp at https://wa.me/447738470156.