SOMATIC TRAUMA-INFORMED COACHING

Have you done counselling? Seen a psychologist or psychotherapist? Tried various other modalities, woo-woo and otherwise, and you're still not where you'd like to be? I mean no disrespect to any of these modalities or their practitioners. I speak from my own experience as I had tried many of these - often with multiple people - and yet I still felt stuck. From time to time I'd have a longer run of "up" days and but slowly old habits would creep back and it was back to same story, different day. What I realised I'd been lacking was attunement. Attunement is being attended to, where your experience is tracked and you are deeply listened to, for both verbal and non-verbal communication. With somatic trauma-informed coaching, we practice full-body listening, which is listening at the level of the nervous system.

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Understanding our nervous system and the integral part it plays in our daily well-being is both profound and fundamental. This understanding includes looking at our fight / flight, functional freeze and people pleasing responses. There is untapped resourcefulness in being able to identify our nervous system states, as well shift ourselves in these states and create flexibility in your responses.

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Another fundamental principle is that 'The Body Keeps the Score' [Bessel van der Kolk, 2015] - quite literally. Our conscious mind holds roughly 4% of our information - the other about 96% is held in our subconscious mind and we don't have access to that, so we cannot talk about it. This can be one of the reasons talk therapy didn't do what we'd hoped. Also, some of our earliest traumatic memories may be from when we're preverbal, so we don't have the capability to put it into words. For this reason we can't talk about what we don't know or have access to- so talk therapy is left lacking.  What we need is to be able to tap into the body - the soma - and what it holds. And this modality of coaching does that - accesses the body to heal trauma stored in the body.

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An important question to answer is "what is trauma?" It's not necessarily something big or scary or horrible - it can be, but it's also, simply-put, a difficult experience where we felt powerless, lacking in resources and unable to manage. Trauma expert, Gabor Matè,  says "trauma is not the event, but rather what happens inside of us because of that event". This usually shows up as a trigger, where the size of our reaction doesn't fit the event and we feel strong, often uncomfortable, emotions. The exciting part about this is that we can heal and change what happens inside of us. And so, heal our responses to triggers and big emotions.

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When we are young, our pre-frontal cortex is not yet fully developed - so we cannot make sense of the world. We make sense of the world by making decisions about the world and the people in it, in reference to ourselves. Because we can't make sense of what's going on, we also make a decision about ourselves e.g. "I'm not good enough" or "I don't matter" or similar. Unless somebody intervenes or we have an adult present who can help us properly make sense of the situation, we will forever see the world through this mal-adaptive lens. It means we don't respond to the present moment, but our perception of the present moment through this mal-adaptive lens. With somatic trauma-informed coaching we can reset this, and literally reset how you see and operate in the world. Please read that last line again, because it's a big one, and I mean it.

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Do you have a particular behaviour that drives you a little crazy but for the life of you, you can't stop doing e.g. procrastinating? What if I told you that this is a protector part of you? It is trying to keep you safe - not cause havoc in your life. How would your life change if could stop doing this thing that makes you crazy - and with ease, not by forcing yourself? 

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These are just some of the many examples of what we can address with this gentle and beautifully deep work. This is the deepest and most robust methodology that I offer. Pair this with Brainspotting and you will literally shift to a different timeline and have a different, better life experience - and so will the people around you, as a result.