Dr Rachel M Allan

07/12/2025

Fifteen years as a Psychologist and trauma specialist shows a pattern: people carry emotional histories that shaped long-standing behaviours with real value at an earlier point in life.
For many, traits like self-reliance, silence, and constant productivity once brought order and control. And they have been established for so long they become part of your identity.

These strategies formed with purpose, yet they create friction, exhaustion, and disconnection in adult life.

Thought work creates clarity. Deeper change forms through the daily moments where old emotions take hold: the rush to fix, the tightening around a request, the flash of shame, the instinct to withdraw, the urge to keep everything contained.
Each moment is an opportunity for something new.

In therapy, the work is to step through these doorways, travel back to the earlier experiences that shaped these habits, heal the roots held in childhood, and carry new ways of responding into present relationships and responsibilities.

This process reshapes attachment patterns, softens people-pleasing, steadies hyper-independence, strengthens boundaries, and updates the emotional code the nervous system once built for protection.

Trauma recovery gathers momentum through clarity, pacing, co-regulation, and a relationship with yourself that grows warmer, more spacious, and more truthful.

If this speaks to you, my free guide “What’s Really Going On?” offers deeper insight into the patterns behind high-functioning distress. You’ll find the link in my bio, along with therapy enquiries for those ready to begin work that honours the full story the nervous system carries.

19/11/2025

Bha e na thlachd bruidhinn ri Joy Dunlop airson a’ phrògram seo. Ach saoil an robh càil eile air an telly a-raoir? 🤔 😉Ma chaill sibh e, nach fhaigh sibh air an iplayer e.

It was a pleasure to chat to Joy Dunlop for this programme. But was there something else on TV last night? 🤔 😉 If you missed it you can catch it on iplayer.

Tha Joy Dunlop a’ feuchainn ri deagh oidhche cadail fhaighinn. Joy Dunlop tries to get a good night's sleep.

13/11/2025

When life suddenly shifts, it’s easy to imagine the whole crisis began last week or last month. But the reality is that most of us carry a long history into these moments. The present unfolds against old templates for how we hold ourselves together, how we stay connected, how we cope when things feel unpredictable. These templates are learned quietly in early life, absorbed long before we knew we were learning anything at all.

This is why our emotional responses to new things can feel strangely familiar. A tone of voice that smarts more than it should. A shift in someone’s mood that leaves you unsettled for hours. The urge to step into the reliable role again, even when you are exhausted. The way your stomach drops when someone seems unhappy with you. The way you brace for impact long before anything has actually happened. These reactions have depth because they have history.

Once you see your own pattern, you can start to create even a few inches of distance from it. That is the power of context: once you can put present suffering in context of the past, the emotional charge reduces. The nervous system loves context!

This is why difficult times can become transformative. It can reveal the deeper choreography you’ve been following for a lifetime. When you see it clearly, you can choose respond from who you are now rather than who you had to be then. That is an empowering shift. It changes relationships, decisions, boundaries, and the way you carry yourself through uncertainty.

If you’re standing in one of those moments now it could means you’re closer than ever to understanding yourself honestly.

Save this for the days that feel too familiar in a way you can’t quite explain.

Share it with someone who is quietly trying to make sense of themselves in a difficult season.

Download my free guide What’s Really Going On if you want help mapping the patterns beneath your reactions. The link’s in the bio.

Enquire about therapy if you’re ready to use this moment for deeper, lasting change get in touch to enquire about therapy on info@rachelallanconsultancy.com.

12/11/2025

When you’ve spent years anticipating criticism, peace doesn’t come easily. It begins with noticing how much of your self-doubt was shaped by the absence of steady warmth, and how early relationships taught you to read every silence as threat.

When you are hyper-tuned to criticism, any kind of feedback, evaluation or disagreement feels devastating. Your emotional response ends up being disproportionate to the situation in front of you, and a reliving of past experiences.

Healing that pattern takes time. Here are some of the ways I have seen it successfully tackled in therapy. What would you add to the list?

1️⃣ Questioning the evidence: realising that someone else’s mood is not reliable proof you have done something wrong.
2️⃣ Recognising outdated inner commentary and choosing to distance from it: it is a thought, not a fact.
3️⃣ Knowing the signs that shame is rising, and sitting with it when it arrives.
4️⃣ Speaking to yourself with the fairness and respect you show others.
5️⃣ Pausing before automatically shrinking, surrendering or apologising.
6️⃣ Identifying the key memories being triggered and working through them with EMDR
7️⃣ Keeping at it. Change like this takes patience, determination and repetition!

These can be the building blocks of peace after a lifetime of monitoring, explaining, and over-correcting. Your relationship with yourself can hold its shape in the face of external forces.

If you’d like to understand that process more deeply, you can download my free guide What’s Really Going On? or enquire about therapy through the link in bio.

07/11/2025

People say “you just need better boundaries” like it’s a skill you forgot to learn. But for many high-functioning adults, that advice lands like shame, not wisdom.

If you grew up keeping everyone calm, you didn’t miss the memo on boundaries. You were trained to erase them.

When a child becomes the emotional anchor in their family, they learn too soon that safety depends on managing other people. That’s called parentification: when a child steps into a caretaker’s role because the adults around them can’t.

It might look like emotional maturity, but it’s really chronic vigilance. A nervous system wired to detect tension, fix it quickly, and never be the reason someone else is upset.

As an adult, that pattern hides under competence. You become the reliable one who holds it all together. And yet inside, you feel permanently braced. Responsible for everyone, exhausted by it, and ashamed for resenting it.

So when some tells you “just say no” your body doesn’t hear wisdom, it hears danger. Because long ago disappointing someone meant losing connection, or even total chaos.

Tougher boundaries won’t hold on their own. Their foundation needs to be safety. Safety to rest, to be authentic, to have limits. And most of all safety to be loved when you are not holding others together.

If this feels uncomfortably true for you, start here.

Download my free guide “What’s Really Going On?” - a Psychologist’s Guide to the Patterns Behind Your Pain

Follow for grounded insights into trauma, relationships and emotional repair.

And if you are ready to take the next step, get in touch on info@rachelallanconsultancy.com to enquire about therapy.

30/10/2025

Shame thrives in silence. It begins when pain is mocked, ignored, or left unspoken. It takes root in humiliation and isolation. It grows in the spaces where no one said, “That shouldn’t have happened to you.”

It lives in the body: in tension, self-consciousness, and the reflex to shrink before being seen. It convinces capable, intelligent people that it is safer to hide than be seen. That it is safer to blend in than to stand out. It appears in the mirror, in criticism, and in the echoes of voices from the past.

In therapy, we learn to name it. Together, we trace it back to where it began, and meet it with compassion.

Approaches like EMDR help release the shame that words alone can’t reach, so the body no longer braces for impact, and self-protection can give way to peace.

In my practice, we work with people who are ready to address patterns rooted in the past it and start living for the future. Therapy can help you find solid ground again, piece by piece.

🦋Reach out to enquire about working together via the link in bio
🦋 Get my FREE GUIDE What’s Really Going On? and join my e-mail community via the link in bio. ✉️
🦋 Share with anyone who needs to hear these reflections
🦋 Follow for more insight into life after trauma

27/10/2025

The aftermath of trauma can be just as devastating as the event itself. The silence, the self-blame, and the pressure to keep quiet can be suffocating. But therapy can offer a safe and confidential space to break this silence, to reclaim your story, and to work through the trauma. It’s a chance to untangle the complex emotions and relationships that have held you back, and to find a path towards healing, self-trust, and peace.

If this resonates with you, know that you don’t have to face it alone. Follow for expert guidance on trauma, recovery, and resilience, and download my free guide, What’s Really Going On?, via the link in bio.

Enquire about therapy with me or my trusted Associate Psychologist via the enquiry link in bio. 📖

26/10/2025

When life as you knew it falls apart, it can feel impossible to imagine anything beyond survival.
But often, devastation brings long-buried pain to the surface. Old patterns, self-blame, and loneliness that began long before this moment rear their heads in strangely familiar ways.

Therapy helps you begin to see how the pieces connect. From there, something steadier and more truthful can start to take shape. We all have different goals, but usually the endgame for therapy is something resembling peace and freedom (and yes, we usually get there).

Clinically, this forms part of a psychological assessment. We look at what your difficulties are, how they came to be as they are, and what keeps them going (parts of this will be obvious; parts might be subtle). Then we work out how to get you from there to where you want to be. We will discuss which psychological approach, or combination of approaches, is most likely to be most effective for you.

If you’re coming through something you never thought you’d survive, you don’t have to face the aftermath alone.

📘 Download my free guide What’s Really Going On Here? to understand the patterns beneath your pain, or enquire about therapy via the link in bio. We would love to hear from you.