JMS Wellbeing Centre

22/07/2025

𝕋𝕙𝕖𝕣𝕖 𝕒𝕣𝕖 𝕟𝕠 "𝕓𝕒𝕕" 𝕖𝕞𝕠𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕤....

When I say there are no bad emotions, people sometimes look at me like I have 3 heads... and I get it. I'm not saying I like feeling them all.

I’m not romanticising pain. I’m not pretending I welcome anxiety like an old friend, or that I dance with grief like it doesn’t rip my insides apart.

What I am saying is this:

I’ve learned to stop labelling my internal world as wrong or bad just because it’s uncomfortable.
I’ve learned that sadness isn’t weakness, anger isn’t dangerous, and fear isn’t failure.
They’re messengers, not monsters.
They're responses, not character flaws.

But no....that doesn't mean I enjoy them.
It means I allow them to exist without shame.
It means I don’t push them away, but I don’t have to love them either.

Sometimes they arrive uninvited, overstaying their welcome, breathing down my neck.
But instead of exiling them, I ask what they need.
Not because I enjoy their presence, but because fighting them only feeds them.

There are no bad emotions.
But there are hard ones.
Heavy ones.
Ones that make me question everything and want to crawl out of my own skin.

Still, I’ve come to understand their value.
Even when it’s excruciating, I trust that if I listen...truly listen, and resist the urge to suppress…
They’ll take me somewhere I couldn’t have gone without them.
They’ll deepen me, stretch me, evolve me.

They crack me open… but they also let the light in.
Not all at once.
Not without pain.
But always with a purpose.

Joy feels wonderful...of course it does.
But joy doesn’t challenge me to evolve.
Joy holds me in what is ( and thats a beautiful thing).
But Pain? Pain pushes me toward what could be.
It demands I meet myself honestly.
It asks me to face the parts of me I’d rather hide.
And in that process, I grow.

Without my pain, I wouldn’t be this version of me.
The one with depth.
The one with edges and softness all at once.
The one who sees others deeply because I’ve had to see myself that way first.
Pain made me more human.
More awake.
More me.

So no... like anyone, I don’t enjoy feeling them.
But I honour them.
I trust them.
Because every time I survive them without shame,
I rise a little higher than before.

21/07/2025

What feeling has been with you the longest....
, , , ,

20/07/2025

What True Self Awareness Looks Like....

17/07/2025

Currently in Croatia seeing family from across the pond.
I will reply and book in any requested sessions when im back home.

See you all soon ❤️

10/07/2025

The comments 🤦🏾‍♀️....It’s easy to mock what we don’t understand—but the very REAL and increasing numbers tell a sobering story.

In 2023, 1.8 million workers in the UK suffered from work-related ill health, and 875,000 of those cases were due to stress, depression, or anxiety – the highest cause of workplace absence, according to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

In sectors like teaching, healthcare, and social care, the rates are significantly higher than average. For example:

Teaching staff have a 42% higher rate of stress-related illness than other professions (NASUWT, 2023).

NHS staff sickness absences cost over £2.5 billion annually, with mental health the leading cause (NHS Digital, 2022).

Among social workers, more than half report burnout symptoms—and many consider leaving the profession every year due to stress (Community Care, 2023).

This isn’t about laziness or entitlement. It’s about a workforce buckling under emotional labour, unrealistic workloads, vicarious trauma, and the fallout of under-resourced systems.

The cost to councils like Rochdale isn’t just financial. It’s a mirror reflecting a national crisis in workforce wellbeing.

We shouldn’t be asking, "Why are they off sick?"
We should be asking, "What’s happening to make people so unwell they can’t work anymore?"

Until we take mental health as seriously as physical health, we’ll keep paying the price in people—and pounds.

— JMS Wellbeing Centre

Rochdale Council spent nearly £3 million covering staff sick leave over the last year, with stress and mental health issues topping the list of reasons behind the absences

09/07/2025

Forgiveness: Reclaiming Yourself When Their Sorry Or Closure Never Comes...

There was a time I thought healing meant forgiving the people who hurt me.

The ones who silenced me.
The ones who left me broken
The ones who looked me in the eye,
knowing they were harming me,
and still chose to commit to it for whatever reason.
The ones that live inside your mind on repeat.. trying to comprehend why and how this happened....
Can you relate?

I thought for the longest time I had to forgive them
to set myself free.

Because that’s what we’re taught, isn’t it?

“Be the bigger person.”
“Don’t hold onto anger.”
“Forgive—for your own peace.”

I tried.

I really did.

And every time I tried to force myself to forgive them,
it felt like I was betraying myself.
Like I was offering mercy to the people
who never once showed me any.

And then I heard something…
that changed everything.

“You don’t need to forgive the person.
You need to forgive the feelings they left behind in you.”

And in that moment…
something cracked open.

Because I realised—
It was the way I’d internalised what they did, that we get stuck on.

The limiting self beliefs.
The shame.
The fear.
The overthinking.
The part of me that started believing I was hard to love.
Too much.
Not enough.
Broken....

I had been trying to forgive them,
when really, I needed to forgive the parts of me
that were still living in the story that experience created.

The version of me that flinched at love.
That stayed quiet to stay safe.
That didn’t cry because crying once made it worse.

So now, this is what healing looks like:

It looks like saying—
“I forgive the part of me that carried their violence like it was my fault.”
“I forgive the part of me that learned to brace for impact.”
“I forgive the fear. The grief. The rage. The numbness.”
"I give compassion to all of me and how I learnt to survive but I've got this from here."

I’m unhooking myself from the parts of them
that still live inside my nervous system.

This kind of forgiveness?
It’s not about forgetting, minimising or avoiding.

It’s about remembering who I was before I learned to shrink.

It’s about choosing to return to myself—
again and again—
with love, compassion and grace.

So no…
Im not ever going to say things to people like "forgive them, for your own peace" and invalidate their experience further.

Instead I'll say maybe its time to forgive the way they made you feel about yourself.

And that is where you reclaim yourself when you never received their accountability, their sorry or their changed behaviour.

That way you aren't shackled to waiting for them to change.
... because you did. 💛

08/07/2025

Every day, my clients restore my faith in humanity. They’ve faced the unthinkable—yet they choose healing. They choose growth. They choose to invest in the one organ that shapes every experience: the mind.
That kind of emotional intelligence, that kind of courage, that kind of resilience isn’t spoke about or celebrated loudly enough… but it humbles me. It reminds me that even in a world that hurts, there are people who still choose to feel, to try, to love, to be the positive ripple in this world.

So here I am saying it loudly.
Whether with me or someone else-
I'd admire all the unseen work you do. 💛

08/07/2025

There comes a point in life where the familiar stops being safe
and starts being a cage.

For many of us—especially those who carry trauma—
the known becomes a survival strategy.
We cling to routines, faces, places, even pain,
because at least we know them.
We know how they hurt.
We know how to navigate them.
We’ve survived them before.

And the unknown?
The unknown often didn’t feel like freedom.
It felt like betrayal.
Like sudden grief.
Like the unravelling of the self & the world as we once knew it.

So we learned to mistrust change.
We learned to call it danger.
And over time, we confused the voice of fear with the voice of intuition.

But let me be clear—
Fear is not always intuition.
Sometimes it’s your body remembering.
Sometimes it’s your nervous system trying to protect you
from what already happened.
Not what will.

And there’s power in knowing that.

Because the unknown is not the enemy.
It just reminds your body of what hurt you before.
But the unknown is also where healing lives.
It’s where new joy waits.
It’s where freedom breathes.

We don’t reclaim the unknown by forcing ourselves into it.
We reclaim it by meeting our fear with compassion.
By saying to our inner child,
“I know this feels familiar. But we are safe now.
And not everything new is a threat.”

We start small.
One new decision.
One boundary that protects us.
One moment where we pause and ask—
“Is this fear a warning?
Or is it a wound?”

Because when we can tell the difference,
we stop abandoning ourselves every time we feel afraid.

And that’s how we begin again.
Not by becoming fearless—
but by becoming honest.
By becoming gentle.
By letting the unknown become ours again—
not as a battlefield,
but as a garden we get to grow in.

Because you, my love, were never meant to live a life
so tightly controlled
that joy couldn’t surprise you.

You were meant to live free.
And it starts with trusting
that you can handle what you don’t yet know.

07/07/2025

🤍 You don’t just “get over” survival. Your body remembers and why years of healing can sometimes not solve all (my personal experience- following on from my last post). 🤍
Even when you understand it.
Even when you can name the patterns, the trauma, the people.
Even when you've healed.
Your nervous system keeps score.
And sometimes, it keeps the cortisol too.

Research now shows that
PTSD isn’t always loud.
Sometimes it's actually low cortisol (At first, your body makes high cortisol to survive constant stress.
But over time, the system gets burnt out — and starts making less.)

It’s not that the danger is gone —
it’s that your body gave up on ever feeling safe.

So instead of fight or flight, you drop into freeze or shutdown.

because your body never got to switch off.
You weren’t in danger once. You lived in it.
Not with a bear chasing you… but with systems and dynamics that quietly chipped away at your safety.

You try to carry it with grace.
But grace doesn’t cancel biology.

When I was hospitalised with diverticulitis, it wasn’t because of poor lifestyle choices. NONE of the lifestyle factors applied to me.
I truly believe with everything I know it was because I’d lived too long swallowing things no one should have to digest.

I’m a late-diagnosed autistic brown woman.
And I have spent a lifetime being morally good.

At times out of peace. At times out of survival but at all times out of the very makeup of what makes me me.

I was the kid who stuck up for the bullied kid, I was the kids who refused to step on and kill bugs because at a very young age I knew that was morally conflicting for me.

My whole life I've struggles to marry together the words and principles of people with their actions.

I always hoped that being Good meant people would treat me with the same basic decency I always offer them.

But here’s what no one tells you:

Being good, when the world isn't always good.... hurts.

My choices, my character, my morals are constantly being weighed on this unconcious internal weighing scales of- is this net positive or net negative. No one can see it and maybe lots of people dont do it but
my nervous system clings to it —

My belief system is wired to believe that people should be kind.
That we should be wired for empathy (not just when it suits your situation),
That the truth matters,
That we should always be gently challenged whilst nurtured so we can be and do better for the greater good,
That harm should be acknowledged, not denied.

But the world isn’t wired that way.
And if you can relate youll understand,
that kind of life isn’t just exhausting.
It’s eroding.

And I can’t just choose to unsee it.
I can’t stop feeling the quiet cruelty, the unspoken double standards, the way empathy is rationed out like a reward instead of a human right.
I’ve been in abusive relationships not because I’m broken— but because I’m wired for softness in a world that rewards hardness.
Because I don’t assume bad intentions.
Because my empathy isn’t based on loyalty, it’s based on right and wrong.

People often see this as weakness — the way I feel deeply, care too much, stay soft in a hard world.

But that’s not weakness.

It’s easy to detach.
Easy to mock.
Easy to harm and justify it.
You really can get ahead if you are able to do these things with emotional detachment.

I had spent years studying trauma.
I’ve learned regulation.
I’ve sat with every emotion, traced every pattern, done the inner work a thousand times over.

But no amount of healing changes that this body is tired.
That swallowing what I can’t digest — the unfairness, the cruelty, the things no one else sees — makes me ill.

This graphic shows what that can look like.
High cortisol. Low cortisol.
Wired. Burnt out.
Two sides of the same nervous system story.

This isn’t about weakness.
It’s about the invisible cost of being wired differently in a world that doesn’t bend.

So if your body is screaming — I see you.
If you’ve been the morally good one, the kind one, the one who never gave up hope that people would do better — I feel you.

And if you’ve done everything right, and your body still aches under the weight of it all…

It’s not you.
It’s never been you.

🤍

Not medical advice. Just the truth — from someone living it, and finally naming it.
Loudly.

04/07/2025

The love and support I've received by you all, my clients, my family, friends and Yes I Fu***ng Can has honesty blown me away.
Made me feel emotional in the most supported way.

Thank you to you all ❤️ your support has meant more than you know .

03/07/2025

🤍“The cost of being ‘good’ for too long.”🤍
Your body will end up showing you what you have endured, even if thats not been acknowledged (by yourself or others)...

This isn't medical advice. This is personal experience.
I was recently hospitalised with diverticulitis.

And yet—none of the typical risk factors apply to me.

Not the age. Not the diet. Not the lifestyle.

I had previously read "When the Body Says No", "The Deepest Well", and "The Body Keeps the Score", and in that hospital bed...something clicked.

More and more research shows what many of us have felt in our bones for years:
The body keeps everything.
Our experiences. Our trauma. Our suppressed emotions. Our silence.

And for me, diverticulitis wasn’t just physical—it was emotional inflammation.
Years of being “good.”
Of putting others first.
Of staying quiet to avoid conflict.
Of holding in grief, anger, and frustration because there was never a safe place to put it.

The gut—so deeply tied to intuition and emotional processing—can only hold so much.
When we chronically ignore our needs, override our boundaries, and carry what was never ours to hold… the body starts speaking.

Mine did. Loudly.

I don’t share this for sympathy.
I share it for awareness—for anyone else whose body is screaming what their voice never got to say. Although Im stuck with this for life, I want others to understand the importance of working of what is stored in your body, it doesn't have to get to this.

Because when the body speaks… it’s not just reacting.

It’s revealing the truth of all we have been through that we've buried.