Dr Marta Paglioni - The Cosy Room Dramatherapy in Winchester

23/01/2026

“From the observations of Bessel van der Kolk, one of the most authoritative scholars in the field of psychotraumatology, a seemingly paradoxical fact emerges: many traumatized people do not only avoid the memory of the traumatic event, but also tend to seek out emotionally intense, conflictual, and even dangerous situations.
Van der Kolk recounts that, while working with veterans of the Vietnam War, he noticed that many of them seemed to come back to life precisely when they narrated the most dramatic episodes of combat—such as falling from helicopters, being wounded, or witnessing the death of fellow soldiers. Despite the horror of these memories, in those moments the patients appeared more present and more connected to themselves.
This phenomenon, however, is not limited to war veterans. In everyday clinical practice, something similar can also be observed in people who have experienced abuse, accidents, violence, early neglect, or highly dysfunctional relationships. These individuals often report a chronic sense of emptiness, boredom, and emotional detachment, which is temporarily relieved only when they are involved in highly charged situations—such as conflicts, unstable relationships, risky behaviors, or dynamics of submission and aggression.
After a trauma, the body can remain stuck in two main states:
Hyperactivation, characterized by anxiety, anger, hypervigilance, and impulsivity.
Hypoactivation, which manifests as emotional numbness, a sense of emptiness, detachment, and apathy.
Many people oscillate between these two poles. When they are in a shutdown state, the absence of emotions can be experienced as deeply distressing, even if it is less overt than fear or panic. In these moments, situations of high emotional intensity—including negative ones—can reactivate the nervous system and produce a sensation of vitality.
In other words, it feels better to feel something painful than to feel nothing at all.
Another fundamental aspect is that the traumatized brain tends to confuse what is familiar with what is safe. If early relational or life experiences were characterized by instability, fear, or unpredictability, the nervous system may learn to recognize those sensations as normal.
As a result, calm, stability, and safety can feel unfamiliar, even boring. This helps explain why some people feel uncomfortable in healthy relationships or in a peaceful daily life, and are instead drawn to emotionally turbulent contexts which, although harmful, feel unconsciously recognizable. This is an automatic emotional regulation mechanism enacted by a nervous system that struggles to regain balance.
Many people feel shame about these behaviors and do not understand why they keep finding themselves in dynamics that cause them suffering. It is important to understand that these are neurobiological consequences of trauma.
From a clinical perspective, this means that trauma therapy cannot be limited to the cognitive processing of memories. It is also necessary to work on regulating the nervous system, helping the person tolerate more neutral emotional states—such as calm and safety—without perceiving them as threatening or empty.
Approaches such as sensorimotor therapy, EMDR, trauma-oriented mindfulness, and attachment-based therapies aim precisely to gradually rebuild the capacity to remain in the present without the need for extreme stimuli in order to feel alive.
Trauma is not just a painful memory; it is a profound transformation in the way the body and mind regulate emotions. The tendency to seek intense situations is not driven by a desire to suffer, but by an attempt to emerge from emotional numbness and regain a sense of existence”

Illustration by Gerard Du Bois

22/01/2026

At the core of our being, love is the thread that unites us all. Our deepest work is to remember this truth, to allow love to guide our thoughts, words, and actions. When we do, we experience the quiet, profound sense of connection that reminds us we are never truly separate. 🌟

May your heart today remember the unifying power of love. 🤍

19/01/2026

Britain’s top doctors and medical experts have declared a “public health emergency” over the effect screen time and harmful online content is having on children’s physical and mental wellbeing.

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which represents 23 medical royal colleges and faculties, has written to ministers after a meeting revealed the scale of the damage witnessed every day in NHS clinics and A&Es.

The meeting, in October, was described as “extraordinarily moving”, with clinicians giving personal testimony about the “horrific” cases they have treated and leaving some participants close to tears. More than 20 senior medics attended, including GPs, A&E doctors, psychiatrists and paediatricians

19/01/2026

11/01/2026

Anger isn’t the problem.

It’s a disembodied, dissociative relationship with the underlying energy of anger that leads to so much pain and suffering.

Anger is a vital, sacred, embodied force—one that so many of us were never allowed, or never taught, to feel safely.

To be in mature relationship with this energy, we need direct, embodied, compassionate contact with it. Not to act it out. Not to suppress it. But to feel it—so it can help us protect ourselves, protect others, and make wise, skillful decisions.

There is something almost archetypal here—an inherited wound around anger in our culture, especially among sensitive, empathic, spiritually oriented people. The wound of having learned, very early, that our fire was dangerous.

That our “no” was unwelcome. That our vitality—our power, intensity, truth-telling, and boundary-setting—caused disruption, withdrawal, or shame in the environment around us.

For a child, this is no small thing.

Expressing anger often meant risking rupture in the bond with a primary attachment figure. And for a young nervous system, that risk is unbearable. It threatens survival itself.

So the body learns.

Long before we have language or reflection, we ask a much more primitive question—not Is my anger valid? but Do I lose connection when I express it? Does someone turn away? Freeze? Become frightened? Shame me?

If the answer is yes, the nervous system makes sense of this quickly: anger is unsafe.

From a developmental perspective, anger is one of the earliest expressions of aliveness. The infant’s reaching. Protesting. Declaring: I matter. I need. I want. I exist.

But when caregivers cannot tolerate that energy—when they themselves have no safe relationship with anger—the child’s anger becomes fused with danger. The nervous system makes a brilliant but costly adaptation: it pushes that fire underground.

It gets buried in the soft tissues of the body, where it remains as heat, tension, collapse, shame, or anxiety.

This is why so many people struggle with boundaries. Why saying “no” feels like betrayal. Why disappointing someone brings disproportionate guilt. Why asserting one’s own needs can feel selfish or threatening.

The body isn’t confused. It’s remembering.

In almost every instance, the difficulty isn’t psychological weakness or spiritual inadequacy. It’s attachment history stored somatically. The body learned that expressing anger meant risking connection—and connection is survival.

In my years of clinical work, I’ve witnessed this again and again. A journey into unlived anger and rage was not incidental—it was essential. The work was to provide sanctuary. To offer safe passage.

To allow the enraged one to be seen, heard, validated, and held.

And almost every time, in the wake of that holding, a deep well of grief revealed itself.

Entering that well together—slowly, respectfully—is where the heart was able to soften, and in many cases, be reborn.

09/12/2025

bell hooks understood a pattern that repeats across generations. When a woman thinks
critically, people often label her difficult before they ever engage with her ideas.
The label is a shortcut.
A way to dismiss her without confronting what she is actually saying.
Critical thinking is powerful because it interrupts comfort. It asks why things are the way they
are. It exposes contradictions that many would rather leave unspoken.
So instead of addressing her insight, the world questions her tone.
It reframes her clarity as attitude.
It turns her precision into a flaw.
But women who think critically are not difficult. They are necessary.
They hold up mirrors that others avoid.
They name truths that would otherwise stay buried.
To think for yourself is not an invitation for conflict. It is an act of presence.
It is choosing awareness over silence.
And every time a woman refuses to apologize for her mind, she shifts the world a little closer to
honesty.