With an ever increasing number of coaches proclaiming they have the codes of abundance to unlock your highest potential or the ultimate healing-hack to help you transform your trauma into the motivation to manifest a 7-figure bussiness, I believe than more than ever, it’s vital to emphasise the importance of finding practitioner with a trauma-informed training, grounded and informed, proficient and transparent in their particular field of expertise.

To begin this share, I want to provide a personal backstory which reveals why approaching my work with this level of discrepancy has become a priority in the past few years of navigating the wellness space : In the beginning of my quest to heal from complex childhood trauma and chronic mysterious health disorders which nobody could find the root cause of, like so many vulnerable individuals desperately searching for liberation from symptoms of distress, I was willing to throw money in the direction of anyone that offered the promise of unravelling me from the perpetual cycle of suffering.

For this reason, I would advocate only working alongside trauma-informed wellness coaches and spiritual mentors, regardless as to whether your intention is to heal deeply-rooted traumas, or simply regain self-confidence. The importance of finding a trauma-informed coach of course depends on the degree to which you are suffering from trauma responses and nervous system dysfunction, but here are a few reasons as to why I’d advocate prioritising investing in a coach or mentor that understands how to safely guide you through your healing, strengthening your sense of self and helping you develop the appropriate practises so you are able to self-soothe, ground and move yourself through turbulent or difficult emotions outside of your sessions  :

Why work with a trauma informed or somatic-awareness coach?

Trauma-informed coaches have the awareness and understanding of how to safely guide you through exploring what is occurring at the level of sensation within your body, as you explore deeply rooted subconscious blocks, feelings of low-self worth, resistance, and the root of other denser difficult or overwhelming emotions. Why is this important in the context of your healing and growth? Because most, if not all of what hinders our progress - whether we’re speaking about generating increased income, learning how to better communicate with loved ones, cultivating the assertiveness and confidence to reach for specific opportunities, our capacity to call in a new reality and meet the increasing responsibility that emerges with newfound success - begins with the body : Our nervous system capacity determines pretty much every choice and decision we make in our day to day life, from the mundane to the important. When we feel rooted, grounded, and solid in our own skin, our perception of what it is possible to achieve drastically expands VS what we believe we are capable of generating when stuck in a state of dsyregulation, pouring vast amounts of energy into preserving, protecting and stabilising ourselves. When we’re in ‘shut down’, little energy is available to create new possibilities and solutions, and respond quickly and effectively to opportunity when it presents itself. We’re too consumed with merely surviving, oppose to thriving and expanding into our highest potential. Further more, when we lack a coherent and intimate relationship with our body, we spend our days in a paralysis of a haze, without a clear and embodied sense of where we’re heading. A trauma-informed practitioner will help guide you through the somatic process of re-acquainting yourself with your body, so you begin to gain a sense of what is happening beyond the initial surface imprints of anxiety or depression, and delve deeper into the root course. 

A somatic and trauma informed coach will also be trained to spot signs of resistance, avoidance, and where you hold a particularly strong block around a specific issue. We will notice this in the subtly of your body language, your eye movement, and the intonation of your voice, as well as your specific use of words. This is called ‘attunement’ : Having the capacity to attune yourself to your client’s nervous system and watch for signs of distress or resistance occurring through their own nervous system.

In the case of my personal experience, as an intuitive healer and a highly sensitive person, attunment to other people’s bio-energetic feedback comes quite naturally being a gift that I was born with (which is the case with many healers),  I often pick up on subtle thought-forms that exist in the person’s field . For example, they might be carrying a subconscious pattern that belongs to their father and originates from their grandfather, and so we would focus on removing the ancestral ties that keep feeding this pattern and preventing the client from fully embodying their own identity and personal power. Or someone might be holding an immense amount of grief from a trauma experienced many years ago which is preventing them from moving forward and finding peace.

I recently worked with a woman who suffered from severe asthma, and when I tuned into her body, I immediately felt the weight in my own body of everything she had carried for her mother in growing up in a household in which the father had been emotionally absent, and the mother had dependant on her only-child as a means of emotional survival. In feeling this through my own body and helping hold space for her unresolved pain, I watched her release huge amounts of repressed emotional distress in a single session. (It's also important to add that her nervous system was stable enough to explore the root imprint resulting in the physical manifestation of asthma. With other clients who are less regulated, I move slowly.) Sometimes it only takes one healing to set things in motion. In the context of family members and friends, I also tend to pick up strong patterns that are looping in their psyche and causing immense amounts of distress. We tend to believe that our thoughts and patterns are hidden, but when we’re in the presence of a truly qualified healer, nothing is really hidden, because we can gain access to the ‘quantum field’ and channel small or vast amounts of information which allow us to know things about you that even your closest friend or intimate partner doesn’t know. 

Unlike the charlatans the plague the spiritual space, a good trauma-informed coach will continually check up on you throughout your healing to ensure you are supported during your transition, as you begin to familiarise yourself with a new and more aligned state of being. This is not the same level of care that one can expect from a self-proclaimed coach and ‘healer’, who might use subtle or invert tactics to avoid taking full responsibility for their client’s wellbeing throughout the time that they are under your care. And to clarify, this doesn’t mean that you as a practitioner are expected to navigate their personal experienced outside of session, but there is a level of responsibility that comes with holding space for individuals that seek your specific skill-set, and unfortunately, there is a great deal of careless dismissiveness that dominates the wellness space and the intentions of those more concerned with amassing a following, than being of service.

An important thing to consider when finding a trauma-informed coach :

Do they understand that the definition ‘trauma’ falls under a wide variety of experiences which each individual responds to uniquely from a standpoint of their individual history? This matters because little feels worse than entering into a supposedly safe space with a trauma informed practitioner, healer, coach or mentor, only to find them gaslighting your painful experiences, victim-blaming (in response to a circumstance in which you were entirely helpless and indeed a victim) and bypassing your needs to fully process and integrate that experience.

Are they qualified to spot the signs of trauma? 

Repetition of above paragraph : 

"A somatic and trauma informed coach will also be trained to spot signs of resistance, avoidance, and where you hold a particularly strong block around a specific issue. We will notice this in the subtly of your body language, your eye movement, and the intonation of your voice, as well as your specific use of words. This is called ‘attunement’ : Having the capacity to attune yourself to your client’s nervous system and watch for signs of distress or resistance occurring through their own nervous system."

What's defined as trauma? :

Trauma is classified as anything that resulted in extreme nervous system overwhelm, outweighing the individual’s capacity to cope during the time that the trauma occurred. Common traumas experienced include :

-Complex childhood trauma : in which a child was subjected to on-going physical violence, emotional or verbal abuse, or witnessed extreme physical, emotional or verbal violence and abuse occurring between their parents.

-Trauma that occurred as a one-off indecent such as a sudden break up, an unexpected divorce, the loss of a loved one, an  accident that caused a physical disability injury or mental unrest.

-A chronic health issues which causes on-going distress and acute nervous system dsyregulation.

-Sexual trauma : Unwanted intercourse, inappropriate touch, unwanted attention. 

-The loss of identity, sense of self, loss of purpose.

-Experiencing racism, colourism, and any other form of blatantly derogatory and notably disrespectful treatment vs your white acquaintances, peers and colleagues.

Now these days, trauma has become a bit of an umbrella term, used to cover a very broad spectrum creating greater confusion than clarity. But in the context of each individual, what might be considered a small event to one, might be experienced as extremely destabilising and terrifying to another, and this is all a result of that person’s individual history and their capacity to self-regulate which is composed of a variety of complex variables.

To suffice, before investing ££££ in your healing, bussiness, personal expansion and spiritual growth, dilligently research potential practitoners, don't be afraid to ask them multiple questions about their coacing techniques or the course you're considering investing a couple of hundred/thousand in. And let's be honest, it isn't like information is hidden from your view : Just a brief scroll of their instagram will tell you if they're more invested in your healing and evolution, or more concerned with their reel reach (and don't get me wrong, both can stimulatenously exist), but it's not hard to spot when someone is genuinely invested in their work VS off on an ego-boosting trip. 

If you want to learn more about the work I do, click the button below to check out my latest  (trauma-informed) offering (Available for both men and women).

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