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Personal change comes in many languages; I help people find its voice. I work with people on anxiety, stress, burn-out, trauma, low energy, and physical pain or tension. We move towards self-confidence, relief, calm, power and clarity.
My version of coaching is focused on combining mind and body: I mix talking with body awareness, mindfulness, and relaxation and massage techniques, a bit like if you would cross psychotherapy with body attention. I draw on various influences for this, including especially training in the Grinberg Method, Somatic Experiencing, Non-violent Communication, the Pantarei Approach, and Tension/Trauma Releasing Exercises.
The topics I tend to work with people most on are: self-confidence and making decisions; anxiety, panic, insecurity and self-doubt; stress, burn-out and low energy; pain, tension and headaches; and processing trauma and old patterns. I find it immensely rewarding to go with people through a journey and emerge into places where they feel more of their potential, and more able to move easily towards what they want or be content with where they are.
But what does the body have to do with topics that seem psychological, and why would talking be relevant for chronic pain? There is a huge amount of feedback from the body level to the brain informing how we feel. In this “bottom-up processing”, unconscious parts of the brain monitor sensory factors like blood vessel constriction, muscle tension, and joint position. That information is a large part of what creates our sense of well-being: the feeling that things are okay. That means, for example, that when the body is in alarm-mode, you will feel uneasy, even if you can’t explain why.
A lot of our emotional processing also happens in unconscious brain areas (especially the amygdala, hypothalamus, cingulate gyrus, and insula). These deeper, evolutionarily older parts of our brains also drive and regulate our fear and stress responses by stimulating the fight-flight-or-freeze response. This can involve the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the release of adrenaline and cortisol, kicking us into an active, fight/flight mode. Usually, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) should come into play when we are in safety, allowing us to calm down again. But there is also an aspect of our fear systems that switches us into a freeze/flop mode, particularly when we perceive we are helpless. This system is designed to protect us, but being stuck in it for a prolonged period can be considered an over-activation of the PNS.
Many of our emotional response patterns are established in those brain areas in our very early years, including our reactions to conflict and emotional and physical pain. They determine whether we calmly and resiliently experience various emotions, or whether emotions like anger, sadness, or shame push us into a frightened state of alarm, anxiety, and panic: over-activation of the SNS. Conversely, if we have established passive emotional patterns when we are afraid, then experiencing those emotions might cause us to shut down and withdraw, going into a collapsed state of lethargy, numbness, and depression: over-activation of the PNS. Many people also experience an unsettling oscillation between the two.
Being easily triggered into those body-mind states has both psychological and physical effects. Not only would it manifest as states like anxiety, stress and depression, but it can also be linked to chronic pain and tension, and a whole host of other physical symptoms due to the effects on entire body systems. This can include a range of inflammatory conditions (linked to over-activation of SNS), digestive conditions like IBS, headaches and migraines, as well as low energy and tiredness. In the case of chronic pain, the brain is wired in a complicated way, so that anxiety about pain increases our sensitivity to pain, as does feeling sad. Conversely, when we feel safe, we feel less pain. Neural networks deep in the brain actually turn up or down the sensitivity of the sensory neurons. The good news is that those brain systems are quite plastic, and we can learn to change how they are working to stop over-fixating on an area.
My work with people is based around an awareness of dysregulation of the nervous system in response to particular emotions or triggers, and neural pain networks. In one sense, I want to track with a person what is going on with their nervous system, and notice the ways that they are stuck in, or being hijacked by those older responses, which are preventing them from calmly using their thinking, conscious brains (which actually only take up 30% of our brain mass!). We use techniques of body attention and movement to re-regulate your nervous system, learning how to shift out of those stuck states. We explore places of chronic pain and tension, finding out how you sense and use them, and again introducing different ways of paying attention and moving them in order to unblock them.
Before I trained in these various coaching methods, I had studied biological sciences at Cambridge University, including psychology and neurobiology. This gave me a great basis for understanding the human body, and a love of neuroscience and physiology that I bring into my current coaching work. I went on to do a Master’s and Ph.D. in the history of science, where I fine-tuned my abilities in critical thinking. I still find this useful in maintaining an overview and close-up at the same time, whether it’s with my clients in a session, or whether it’s considering how the techniques and theory of various mind-body approaches fit or contradict one another. All of this helps keep me continually developing how I approach working with people.
