Dr. Andrey Laugman

08/01/2026

08/01/2026

It starts with a reasonable plan: remove the obvious triggers and breathe easier for once.

So you stop going certain places, mute certain chats, and avoid films that hit too close.
Then the list spreads into routes, smells, songs, and suddenly your week is built around avoidance.

The problem is not your intention to feel safe; the problem is what the system learns.

Every time you dodge a cue, your brain files it as proof that danger is still active.
That keeps the alarm network jumpy, and your body stays primed instead of settling back.

The more you control, the more your nervous system ties calm to perfect conditions today. And because you never stay with reminders long enough, the brain never updates them as safe. So triggers do not shrink, they multiply, because avoidance trains the fastest and strongest pathway.

It is like running a power grid by switching off neighbourhoods whenever the voltage spikes. You prevent one blackout, but you also weaken the grid until it cannot handle ordinary demand.

Real life does not respect your blacklist, so a new cue appears and the alarm restarts.
Your world gets smaller, and confidence drops, because you practise escape more than recovery daily.
This strategy does not just fail, it makes the next trigger hit harder, because tolerance stays untrained. Over time you need stricter rules to feel okay, which is the opposite of freedom.

Real repair means widening your operating range: stabilised baseline, then planned, supported contact with reminders. The goal is not a trigger-free life, but a system that can absorb reminders and stay online.

If you recognise your safe zone shrinking, take it as data, not a verdict about you.
If you want a clear protocol to rebuild tolerance, you can message me directly for a consultation.

08/01/2026

07/01/2026

THE QUIET DISCIPLINE OF HEALING

Throughout years of working with trauma survivors, I've observed something consistent in those who actually transform rather than endlessly manage: they possess what I call steady engagement. It's the capacity to do what recovery requires - not frantically, not heroically, but with calm persistence - even when every protective mechanism in your system screams to avoid it.

Trauma teaches avoidance brilliantly. Your nervous system learned that engaging with pain, vulnerability, or the work itself feels dangerous. So you postpone. Delay. Hope it resolves without your active participation. This operates exactly like the child who ignores a scraped knee, believing that not looking at the wound means it isn't there. We all did this once - pressed a hand over a cut, kept playing, pretended the sting would vanish if we simply refused to acknowledge it. Sometimes it worked for small injuries. For deep wounds, ignoring them guaranteed infection.

Trauma survivors carry a particular version of this childhood logic into adulthood. The things that need doing for recovery - setting boundaries, addressing triggers, working with the root mechanism - get perpetually postponed. Not because you're weak. Because your system coded engagement as threat. Each year that passes, you become more sophisticated at explaining why now isn't the time, why this approach won't work for you specifically, why your situation differs from everyone else's.
The accumulated tasks of healing pile up silently: the therapy you know you need but haven't started, the boundaries you haven't set, the relationships requiring honest conversation, the patterns you recognise but haven't addressed, the work with someone who actually knows how to dismantle trauma architecture rather than indefinitely manage its expressions.

Here's what shifts everything: steady engagement with what recovery requires produces a specific kind of satisfaction trauma survivors rarely experience. Not the adrenaline of crisis. Not the numbness of avoidance. Something quieter - the knowledge that you're building rather than maintaining, transforming rather than surviving.

This doesn't require courage you don't have. It requires recognising that the discomfort of engaging with healing is temporary and productive, whilst the discomfort of avoiding it is permanent and compounding. One moves you toward resolution. The other keeps you indefinitely managing what could be dismantled.
Success in trauma recovery operates through practice, not revelation. Each time you choose engagement over avoidance - even in small ways - you train your nervous system that the work itself won't destroy you. The mechanism that makes healing feel dangerous is precisely what needs addressing. When you work with someone who understands that architecture and knows how to dismantle it structurally, steady engagement becomes possible because the barrier to it dissolves at its source.

If you've spent years in the avoidance cycle - explaining, delaying, hoping it resolves without your full participation - that pattern has logic. Your system built it for protection. What also has logic: the specific work that changes the coding requiring that protection. The route from avoidance to engagement exists. It operates through addressing why your system treats healing as threat, not through forcing yourself past that interpretation repeatedly. When you're ready to explore what makes steady engagement possible rather than endlessly fighting your resistance to it, the conversation is available. Transformation isn't about becoming someone different. It's about removing what makes being yourself feel impossible.

07/01/2026

Some ideas about therapy sound so reasonable that questioning them feels almost ungrateful. These beliefs circulate through self-help culture, therapy waiting rooms, and well-meaning friends who want you healed. The problem is they describe symptom management dressed up as transformation language. Years pass, sessions accumulate, and the core architecture of the wound remains perfectly intact underneath.

The beliefs that keep you stuck are not character flaws but inherited assumptions from a culture that confuses insight with change. Letting them go does not mean your previous therapy was worthless; it means you are ready for something different. The wound is not eternal, and neither is the search for what finally works on your particular system. When you find an approach that addresses structure rather than story, the years of circling can finally end. That shift is available, and it begins with recognising what has not been working and why it could never.

07/01/2026

You noticed the pattern. When you were using, they controlled, rescued, compensated. Built their entire routine around managing your chaos. Now you're in recovery, doing the work, holding boundaries. And suddenly they're uncomfortable. They question your therapist. They bring alcohol to family dinners. They remind you of past failures at precise moments. You think they want you to fail. It confuses you.

Codependency isn't malice. It's architecture. The family system organised itself around your addiction. Roles crystallised: the rescuer, the enabler, the compensator. Each person found their function. When you change, the entire structure destabilises. Their resistance isn't conscious sabotage. It's the system's attempt to restore equilibrium. They don't want you sick. They want the familiar pattern back, because unknown territory feels dangerous. The system will always pull towards homeostasis, even when homeostasis is dysfunctional.

Recovery disrupts more than your own nervous system. It reconfigures the relational field. When you shift, everyone connected to you must recalibrate. Those who can adapt will. Those who can't will resist. Your job isn't to manage their discomfort. Your job is to hold the new structure until it becomes stable.

If your progress triggers chaos in your closest relationships – this requires careful navigation, not surrender. Family systems that formed around addiction need deliberate restructuring, and I work specifically with these dynamics.

06/01/2026

A PILL INSTEAD OF A REGIMEN

Many people want "a pill instead of a regimen." A quick fix instead of a systemic overhaul.

This is not about laziness. It is about how a brain under load seeks the shortest path to relief.

In a traumatic circuit, this logic becomes especially convincing. Symptoms press hard: sleep is torn, irritation flares, the body holds tension, attention disintegrates. Against this background, any external button promising "stop this now" sounds like a lifeline.

Advertising promises, loud techniques, magic formulas—all can provide brief discharge. But discharge does not equal system reconfiguration.

Trauma often operates as a hidden program: Trigger → Spike → Behavioural Narrowing → Avoidance → Temporary Relief → Increased Sensitivity.

External fixes often feed into this loop because they nourish the key mechanism: the drive to not feel at any cost. The problem then looks like a "lack of motivation," though essentially it is a question of how defences are configured.

In therapy, the point is not endless "support," but precise engineering: To recognise the circuit, distinguish between stress and traumatic reactivity, locate where the system breaks, and identify what actually changes its behaviour.

Rapid relief is possible. But sustainable results appear only where there is a clear model and verifiable markers of change.

06/01/2026

I remember a client realising her "personality" was actually survival strategies crystallised into identity. The hypervigilance she called anxiety, the emotional numbing she called introversion, the people-pleasing she called empathy - all trauma adaptations she'd mistaken for who she is. Decades of therapy addressing personality traits whilst the underlying trauma architecture remained untouched.

Trauma responses that develop early enough integrate into identity formation, becoming indistinguishable from innate personality characteristics. You can't remember who you were before these adaptations because they formed whilst you were still becoming yourself. This makes them particularly resistant to change - you're not modifying behaviour, you're questioning fundamental self-concept.

Approaches treating these patterns as personality flaws or cognitive distortions miss that they're neurological architecture, not thoughts or choices. The strategies made sense when they formed; they saved you. The problem is their continued ex*****on in contexts where they create exactly what they were designed to prevent. Insight about their origins doesn't automatically restructure the neural patterns maintaining them.

What you think is personality may be alterable architecture when addressed at the structural level where it was formed. This distinction matters. If conventional approaches haven't worked because they've been treating architecture as choice, there's a different method. Let's discuss what that looks like for your specific patterns.

06/01/2026

THE IMAGE IS THE INSTRUCTION

Your client describes depression as quicksand. Another calls it a glass wall. These are not creative flourishes. These are precise descriptions of how their nervous system has structured the problem. Quicksand requires a different intervention than glass. The metaphor is already telling you what to do.

When we work with the image the client provides, we work with the architecture of their experience. Change the architecture, change the experience. This is not poetry. This is neurology expressed in the only language the unco

05/01/2026

The body signals without asking permission. Muscle tightness. Head pressure. Tremor in the hands. Heart rate spikes. Your attention locks onto the sensation, scanning for malfunction. The more you monitor, the louder the signal becomes. Recognise this?

This is not necessarily physical breakdown. The nervous system translates internal stress into somatic markers because physiological signals register faster than cognitive processing. Notice what shifts first when pressure builds: breathing pattern, muscle tension, temperature, pulse. The system converts what it cannot process into visible output. It functions like an alarm without a control panel - loud, crude, but effective at getting attention.

Alarm systems can be recalibrated to distinguish genuine threat from background noise. When the body gains precise feedback mechanisms, it stops amplifying every fluctuation into emergency broadcast. The question is not whether recalibration is possible, but which specific signals activate your somatic circuit and why they bypass cognitive filtering. This configuration appears frequently in my clinical work - the mechanics are understood, the method exists.

05/01/2026

You track every sensation. Each new pain sparks the question: is this progression? Doctors offer maintenance plans, not recovery protocols. The word "chronic" sits heavy. You scan articles for breakthroughs, find management strategies instead. Every flare-up feeds the calculation: if this is baseline now, what happens in five years? Ten? The future collapses into a single image: you, but worse. Does this feel familiar?

Fear of deterioration is logical when the framework is "progressive condition". The medical model presents fibromyalgia as a trajectory - symptoms appear, spread, persist. Management becomes the ceiling. This framing misses a fundamental point: fibromyalgia symptoms often reflect a nervous system locked in threat mode, not tissue degeneration. The fear itself becomes part of the loop. Anticipatory anxiety keeps the system primed. Scanning for worsening trains the brain to detect danger signals. The worsening you fear feeds the mechanism producing symptoms. Not because you're creating pain through thought, but because chronic threat-state burns through regulatory capacity.

Systems locked in defence patterns can be recalibrated. The question is not whether deterioration is inevitable. The question is whether your nervous system still operates from trauma architecture. When that architecture shifts, symptom progression often reverses rather than continues. Not through positive thinking. Through precise intervention at the level where threat-responses are encoded.

If the prospect of living like this permanently feels unbearable, there may be value in examining what maintains the threat-state in your specific case. I work with this presentation regularly - the structure is addressable when approached correctly.