Zoe Brunt Counselling

20/12/2025

❄️ Winter is a great time to rest.

20/12/2025

Most of us come to healing with a quiet expectation that one day, we’ll stop getting activated.

We imagine that progress looks like staying calm, unbothered, unaffected. That if the work is really working, we won’t snap at our partner, shut down in hard conversations, or feel our body tense in familiar moments.

So when activation shows up, it can feel like something went wrong.

For example, you might snap at your partner over something small and immediately feel confused about why it came out so strong.

Or you shut down during a conversation and can’t find your words, even though you care deeply about what’s being said.

Or a tone, a look, or a silence suddenly makes your chest tighten and your mind race.

Or you over explain, people please, withdraw, or go numb without fully choosing to.

When that happens, it’s easy to assume healing should have prevented it.

The goal of healing isn’t to eliminate activation. It’s to change what happens when activation appears. That kind of change doesn’t come from insight alone. It comes from helping the whole system learn something new, not just understand it.

Over time, that looks like noticing yourself getting flooded without immediately lashing out.

Staying in the conversation instead of disappearing from it.

Feeling intensity without your nervous system taking over.

Instead of asking, Why am I still getting activated? A more useful question becomes, What’s different about how I meet this activation now?

20/12/2025

My dad sent me this song to play to my daughter who hasn’t been able to go to school for the last half term because of Barriers to School Engagement and Attendance, due to her nervous system suffering in a mainstream environment that’s not trauma informed. Made me sob… such beautiful words.

Hope we can all get the peace we might need at home this Christmas, and hoping for you too x

Sometimes life gets heavy. We hold so much inside that we forget we deserve to rest, to breathe, to feel safe again. “Home Sweet Home” is a gentle reminder ...

19/12/2025

Make room for joy in the ordinary moments

Image: https://www.instagram.com/vicky_barone

17/12/2025

17/12/2025

Life doesn't always have to be productive to be meaningful

01/12/2025

🎄💫

01/12/2025

01/12/2025

Thriving where there’s warmth and the company feels easy 💛

20/11/2025

Richard Tice’s comments about so-called “over-diagnosis” of children with SEND are not only wrong, they are dangerous. There is no crisis of over-diagnosis in this country — there is a crisis of children being missed, misunderstood, and left without help for far too long.

Parents are not fighting for assessments because it’s fashionable. They are fighting because their children are struggling and the system is failing them. To suggest that families are part of the problem is deeply insulting to thousands of parents who have had to battle every step of the way to get even the most basic support.

As someone with dyslexia and ADHD, I know exactly how life-changing the right diagnosis and help can be. It gives children confidence, understanding, and a sense of belonging. Denying that — or belittling it — does real harm.

Reform UK’s approach would take our country backwards. It risks a return to a time when children were punished for behaviours they could not control, written off as “difficult”, or pushed out of classrooms instead of being supported. That is not the future our children deserve.

We need early screening, proper teacher training, fair funding, and compassion — not rhetoric that stokes division and undermines vulnerable children.

I will keep fighting for a system that lifts children up, recognises their strengths, and gives every young person the chance to thrive. Reform’s vision does the opposite.

18/11/2025

Softness has always been your strength 🖤