Hi, my name is Julie and I have been supporting people recovering from childhood emotional wounds for 20+ years and during that time I have been healing my own wounds too.

My parents couldn’t give me what they hadn’t experienced themselves. Sadly, my parents were born in the East End of London during the Second World war, their early years were filled with terror and fear. I think they may have been able to recover from the trauma, if they had not continued to be in a state of deprivation with rationing, very few basic resources, needing to move to new locations and establish new communities, most of whom were probably suffering from undiagnosed PTSD.

By the time I was born, basic facilities were back, homes, schools, hospitals, shops etc. But what about the people, what about all the lost years of learning how to be relational and respectful and the many years of not feeling internally safe? As a child I had no concept of war, no concept that my parents had missed out on a natural childhood, no idea they had been traumatised, along with many of the other adults in my community. I had no clue their lack of affection, their criticism, frequent rejection, emotional abandonment and cruel sense of humour were due to their childhood trauma. They did not get anything like a secure childhood and without knowing, they passed on their disorganisation and emotional instability to me. Their trauma re-experiencing and emotional flashbacks became my childhood trauma. We were all unaware and choiceless.

This lack of knowledge and understanding kept me in a cycle of limitation that I wasn’t aware of. Once I started my therapeutic learning journey, I started to understand things differently and I was able to free myself from these unhelpful limitations and start healing and repairing instead.

I found my stability and trust in numbers and started my career in a bank, which I loved. I used my trauma treasures to hunt down missing credits, recognising this money could be the difference between this person paying their bills that week or sliding into unnecessary debt. Very few of my colleagues viewed the work this way, so yet again I was different to others, only I often thought I was wrong rather than different. 

This negative view of myself contributed to the cycle of limitation. Without knowing at that time, I experienced a multitude of emotional flashbacks, which also contributed to my difficulties socialising and forming healthy relationships. For many years I repeatedly changed many things in my life, only to end up in the same familiar pattern, bemused, confused and bewildered, with no idea how much my childhood was influencing my adult life.

After making yet another change of living location, to escape workplace bullying, it was when I signed up to run a LighterLife franchise in 2005 that my passion for learning was reignited. My wonderful trainers had created a learning programme using CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and TA (Transactional Analysis) to help support people with weight management issues (mine started at 13 years old), providing experiential psychological education in groups, to help understand the ‘why’ not just the ‘what’. At this point I had already restarted my avid reading passion, the first one being Paul Gilbert’s book on Depression, as my latest depression bout had lasted 18 months.

My curiosity, of why I had done so well on the programme and others struggled so much, led to a search for additional knowledge, along with some painful experiences with therapists which I felt didn’t truly get me. I started studying with Human Givens in 2008 and achieved the Post Graduate Diploma with Nottingham Trent University in 2011, with the hopes of being able to be my own therapist for my Adverse Childhood Experiences and start supporting others one to one. 

Whilst my work and learning was really helping, the environmental challenges over those next few years were activating way too many trauma memories, so to cut many soap opera-like experiences short, my husband and I took a sabbatical to travel and allow space for more learning and deep healing.

Whilst COVID was an incredibly heartbreaking experience, it also provided an opportunity for me to return to my therapeutic calling and I restarted my career in 2020.

I have a passion for understanding childhood trauma and the effects on adults’ abilities to meet needs. This has led to a wealth of Continued Personal Development including;

• Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, 
• Gabor Mate’s Compassionate Enquiry, 
• Bessel Van Der Kolk’s work on how the Body Keeps the Score, 
• Dr Bruce Perry’s work on Neuro Sequencing, 
• Dick Schwartz’s work with the Internal Family system and Janina Fisher’s work on integrating this with Somatic Experiencing, 
• Diane Poole Heller’s work on attachment theory, 
• Deb Dana’s work on integrating Polyvagal theory into practice to name just a few.

In 2022, I also qualified as a Resonant Healing Practitioner with Sarah Peyton. Sarah uses her foundational work with Non Violent Communication and Constellations, to integrate her passion for trauma focused Neuroscience, which focuses on developing the relational abilities of the right hemisphere, to allow hemisphere integration. 

I continue to assist at many of Sarah’s trainings, including the latest year long cohort of Resonant Healing Practitioners, which allows many hours of continued practice and learning.

I also teach others about the effects of trauma and how it can create unnecessary limitations.

Human Givens is an integrative therapeutic model which starts from the premise of what it is to be human. Focusing on our ‘human’ needs and the resources ‘given’ to us at birth, plus those we develop and acquire to meet those needs.

I am a member of the Human Givens Institute (HGI) which is one of six psychotherapy and counselling registers, accredited by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA), which have taken the lead in creating guidelines for safe practice and training in psychotherapy and counselling – known as the Scope of Practice and Education (SCoPEd) framework.

Excessive stress and trauma and our response to these, can create barriers to meeting needs in a healthy way.

Resonance is a deeper level of accompaniment, allowing our nervous systems to truly know you have been seen, heard and you matter. Resonant processes allow us to revisit together what your mind often repetitively revists alone, allowing your body to know the trauma has passed, reopening the possibility of healthy change. 

More and more people are starting to recognise how it is ‘not’ the event that defines trauma, it is the accompaniment through and after the event that helps our body move from emergency (survive) mode, back into thrive mode.

If my story resonates with you and you would like to work with the cause of your symptoms as well as managing them, then contact me to book a one to one session or sign up to my email list to receive notifications of articles and workshops.