Emotional Coaching and Trauma Informed Listening
Support services for when things go wrong and you feel stuck and would like someone to listen and understand and help you move into feeling more positive in the future.
Do you feel like your thoughts and feelings are not completely in your control? You can see that there are lots of things to be happy about and grateful for but somehow your brain just keeps returning to sad or scary memories from your pregnancy, birth or postnatal experiences? Or you can’t stop feeling anxious or heavy or worried even when you’re not always sure why? Do you avoid thinking about things that happened to you to an extent that you avoid people and places that remind you of what happened?
This may be part of a very normal response to having a traumatic experience. When something happens to us that makes us feel unsafe or out of control sometimes our brain keeps that memory in our short-term memory store and creates a neural pathway from that memory to our amygdala (the part of our brain responsible for our flight or flight response) so that when anything reminds us of that memory the fight or flight response can be triggered and we can act and feel as if we are under threat again now.
These feelings and behaviours are trauma symptoms. Sometimes people talk about having PTSD after traumatic births but not everyone has the number or level of responses that would be necessary for a PTSD diagnosis, this doesn’t mean they are not really struggling with their trauma symptoms.
If you have a PTSD diagnosis or any other mental health-related diagnosis then you should have access to appropriate treatment through your local NHS mental health service (eg EMDR which can be very effective for PTSD). If you are otherwise healthy and not eligible for treatment but are struggling with how a traumatic event that was part of your pregnancy, birth or postnatal experience is still affecting you now you don’t have to struggle on or pull yourself together. You may find that a trauma-informed listening session or using the TBR Three Step Rewind process will help you to process your memories and find a way to move forward and be able to enjoy more of the joyful moments of parenting and life.
How do these support services help?
The processes we follow in the trauma-informed listening session and in the TBR Three Step-Rewind are based on the understanding that when a traumatic event occurs your brain goes into the self-protective fight or flight mode and the memories of that event are not filed in the same way as regular memories but are still connected to the fight or flight function in your brain. So remembering the traumatic event and the events around the same time can set off trauma responses in the same way the event did.
We can’t go back and change the past but we can take some agency in our present and imagine feeling better in the future. Using your imagination to create new thoughts and feelings about the day-to-day things you are struggling with allows you to begin to build new positive associations and neural pathways. The TBR Three-Step-Rewind also allows you to access your memories of the thing that happened to you while in a very relaxed state and so not setting off your flight or flight response. This allows your brain to process and file the memories of the thing that happened to you in your long term memory and break the connection between the memory and the fight or flight reactions.
Basically, imagining yourself feeling and doing something has the same effect on your brain as feeling and doing that thing would. This makes it easier to do that and feel like that in future.
It’s important to note this will help with the trauma symptoms you’re experiencing but they will not cure any mental illness, that will require proper medical support. These sessions may help you have the confidence to reach out for that mental health support if you need to.
TBR Three-Step-Rewind Support costs £150 for three sessions and email support before and after.
Joyful Families 