Benjamin Fry

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Benjamin Fry

Benjamin Fry is a psychotherapist, author, and founder of Khiron Clinics. He wrote The Invisible Lion and founded Televagal, a tech platform for therapists.

He specialises in trauma and relationships, combining lived experience and clinical training.

22/09/2025

Small, consistent shifts can create powerful changes in your nervous system. Micro-practices work because they interrupt automatic stress patterns and send signals of safety back to your body. Humming for 60 seconds stimulates the vagus nerve, while noticing 5 things you can see, smell, or hear grounds you in the present moment. Cold water on your face or wrists can reset your system, slowing down daily tasks reduces overwhelm, and scanning for tension every hour helps release stored stress before it builds up. These practices retrain your body toward calm.

Explore these and many more in The Invisible Lion 28 day workbook: https://bit.ly/45VGXzg

17/09/2025

Your nervous system is always scanning the world around you, picking up tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, and even breath. These subtle cues shape how safe or unsafe you feel, often beneath your awareness. When you learn to understand this hidden process, you gain the tools for healthier relationships, resilience, and inner calm.

In The Invisible Lion, I explain how trauma and stress live in the nervous system and how you can restore balance. Ready to begin?

Discover more at https://bit.ly/45VGXzg

16/09/2025

In emotionally intimate relationships, it is not uncommon for one partner to withdraw when faced with conflict, closeness, or strong emotion. This pattern, often referred to as “shutting down,” is often misunderstood. What appears to be emotional detachment, coldness, or condescension may, in fact, be a deeply ingrained nervous system response rooted in early relational trauma. For individuals with avoidant attachment patterns, dissociation and emotional numbness are not signs of disrespect or disinterest, but protective measures developed in response to emotional overwhelm and vulnerability.

Read more in my most recent blog: Why You Keep Shutting Down: Dissociation and the Avoidant Nervous System
🔗 https://bit.ly/4mQSzcy

15/09/2025

For just a moment, imagine your brain as a bit like the view out the window of an airplane as you take off. There’s grids of roads in different directions; some motorways and some small A-roads.

Think of the patterns of behaviour learned in childhood as those large 3-lane motorways; they are well-trodden and often go straight and direct. Now think of new patterns you are trying to form as those small A-roads, or even country tracks. They can be meandering and there's a chance of getting a bit lost. But over time, with practice and consistency, those small pathways can become well-trodden and clearly marked, offering new journeys and new destinations.

Small signals of safety (moments of calm, connection, or self-kindness) are like footsteps on those smaller tracks. Repeated often, they lay down new routes in the nervous system. What begins as unfamiliar ground becomes a familiar way home. Start taking those first steps with the Invisible Lion 28 Day workbook: a month of daily tasks to increase self-awareness and nervous system regulation.

https://bit.ly/4gf3fPY

11/09/2025

Always prioritising others can look like love, but when it comes at the cost of your own needs, it slowly drains your capacity to truly support others. Suppressed emotions don’t vanish; they gather quietly, surfacing later as resentment, burnout, or disconnection.

The people we care about feel the weight, even if we never say a word. True selflessness includes self-awareness and self-care. Sometimes the bravest, kindest act isn’t giving more, it’s allowing yourself to receive. To rest. To ask for support.

When we learn to lean on others, we create space for deeper, more sustainable connections, both with them and with ourselves.

10/09/2025

Your nervous system operates through three evolutionary layers of response: Safe, Fight/Flight, and Shutdown.

At the surface is the newest layer, where social connection and calm live. This is the Safe state. Beneath that lies the Fight/Flight response, developed for quick survival, mobilising energy to escape or confront threat. Deeper still is the oldest layer, Shutdown, where the system powers down to endure overwhelm. These settings aren’t choices, they are automatic responses to the level of perceived safety or threat.

When you understand where you are within this, you begin to meet yourself with greater understanding and compassion. Regulation is not control, but contact with the body, the moment, and the signal beneath the symptoms.

Read more in my book The Invisible Lion:
https://bit.ly/4gf3fPY

08/09/2025

So many people are told: “just relax.” But if your nervous system is braced for danger, relaxation can feel impossible, or even unsafe. After all, relaxing when your being chased by a lion isn’t a good way to survive.

Try this instead:
👀 Look around you. Let your eyes land on something steady and safe.
💨 Exhale slowly, twice as long as your inhale.
✨ Notice one small comfort (a sound, smell, or texture).

This tells your body that the danger is gone, that whatever felt so threatening you had to fight or flee has passed, and your body can return to a state of relaxation, engagement, or rest.

29/08/2025

Join us at The Masters Series Oxford 2025, Europe’s largest trauma, mental health, and wellbeing conference. This year’s theme, Healing Our Relational World, speaks to the heart of what it means to be human: our relationships shape us, break us, and, ultimately, heal us.

🗣️ From Esther Perel to Richard Schwartz and Bessel van der Kolk, we’ll hear from leading voices who remind us that transformation is possible. Transform Trauma Oxford is an annual highlight not to be missed.

📅 Join us 28–30 September, in Oxford or online.

🔗 https://bit.ly/47kiu7J

29/08/2025

Love can feel threatening when your body still believes it’s not safe. Even when someone is kind, consistent, and present, your nervous system might brace for loss, rejection, or betrayal. This isn’t because you’re broken—it’s because your body remembers what it had to survive. Safety isn’t just a thought, or an objective truth; it’s a felt sense.

Until your system learns that connection doesn’t always mean danger, love may feel confusing or overwhelming. Healing begins not by forcing trust, but by honouring the pace of your body. You’re not too much; you’re just protecting something tender. And that, too, is love.

28/08/2025

Sometimes anger is just anger, but other times, it’s a signal of something deeper. Beneath the frustration might be envy of the freedom we haven’t yet given ourselves.

The anger we feel toward others for setting boundaries, speaking up, or choosing themselves may be a reflection of the parts we’ve denied. We long to put ourselves first, to ask for what we need, to feel proud, without guilt.

Anger isn’t always a problem to fix. Sometimes, it’s an invitation to explore deeper, to listen, to reclaim the parts of us still waiting for permission and suppressing our real needs.

The Invisible Lion 28-Day workbook is a tool to build self-awareness, boundaries, and a toolbox for nervous system support that can help uncover the lessons we have learned or stories we have been told about who we need to be.

🔗 https://bit.ly/3H46Zmx

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