Why I do this work
This is a personal piece. It felt important to write — not as a credentials list, but as an honest account of what brought me here.
My path into this work is a personal one. As someone who is neurodivergent, my nervous system was already working hard long before anything dramatic happened — carrying the accumulated weight of growing up in a world that didn't quite fit, masking, adapting, and often not having words for what I was experiencing inside.
That baseline — already stretched — was shaped further by several difficult experiences over the years. Then a car accident became the moment my system finally collapsed. What followed was PTSD — something I lived through in my body every day, in ways that were hard to explain and harder to escape.
Learning to feel
My recovery didn't come from a single thing. It began with learning to feel my emotions and my body — which sounds straightforward, but for a long time feelings had been something to avoid. I didn't have the language for them, or the tools to process them, so they got bottled up, pushed aside, distracted from. There was something almost frightening about letting them in.
Then there was a distinct moment of realising: I was okay. The feelings came, and they passed, and I was still here. More than that — it actually felt good. That shift — from avoidance to something closer to relief — opened everything else up. Slowly I developed awareness of my interoception, the internal sense of what was happening inside me, and the more I practised, the more things began to make sense.
Art as a container
Art gave me a way in that words couldn't always reach. Through creative exploration I found a safe avenue to express what had happened, to sit with my past without being consumed by it, and to begin imagining a future. What mattered was having somewhere to put what had no other container.
Somatic Experiencing — and everything else
Later, Somatic Experiencing training changed things in a deeper way. For the first time I had a framework and a practice for actually discharging the survival energy that had been stuck in my nervous system — some of it for a very long time. Slowly, I began to find my way back to something that felt like my own baseline. Medication also played an important role in that process, helping to create enough stability for the other work to take hold.
When the nervous system has been overwhelmed, safety returns through experience — slowly, and in the body.
That journey — through collapse, and slowly back — is what brought me to this work and continues to shape how I practise. I know from the inside what it means to feel cut off from yourself, and what it takes, over time, to find your way back.