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Our articles are designed to educate and empower you and are rooted in our biopsychosocialspiritual approach to health. We teach about biology and neurology, the psychology of growth and change, the power of community, and the importance of meaning, purpose. All of these combine to create our shared experience of being human. Psychoeducation is an evidence-based part of recovery from mental health challenges, trauma, and chronic illness.

Nadia Georgiou - Somatic Therapist & Educator

Overfunctioning, Attachment & Chronic Illness

10

Min read

November 9, 2025

Discover how overfunctioning begins as an attachment survival strategy and fuels chronic stress, pain, anxiety, and fatigue. Learn to heal chronic illness through safety, rest, and reconnection

Nadia Georgiou - Somatic Therapist

How To Support A Loved One In Recovery

November 4, 2025

A gentle guide for friends and family to understand neuroplastic conditions; what happens when the body’s alarm system stays stuck in protection, and how to support a loved one’s healing through safety, trust, and connection rather than pressure or control.

Nadia Georgiou - Somatic Therapist

How Brain Retraining and Somatic Tracking Heal Chronic Symptoms

November 1, 2025

Learn how to retrain your brain to heal chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and other chronic symptoms; through neuroplasticity and somatic tracking. Befriend your body’s signals to calm symptoms and restore safety. No prescriptive nervous system regulation needed!

Nadia Georgiou - Somatic Therapist

When Trauma and Nervous System Language Starts to Dehumanise

October 23, 2025

Trauma-informed language can heal or harm. Learn how over-focusing on the nervous system and trauma identity can dehumanise, and how depth, psyche, and soul restore wholeness.

Nadia Georgiou - Somatic Therapist

Why ChatGPT Can’t Coach You Through Chronic Illness Recovery

October 22, 2025

Here’s the truth: AI can’t help you rewire your brain.Because rewiring doesn’t happen in your head; it happens in your life. In this age of instant answers, it’s easy to mistake information for transformation.

Nadia Georgiou - Somatic Therapist

Bridging The Gap Between Understanding And Embodying Recovery From Chronic Illness

October 18, 2025

You can spend years learning the language of self-awareness, trauma, or mindset, and still not see real change. That’s because insight alone doesn’t rewire the brain.

Are Your Wellness Treatments Making You Sicker and More Anxious In Chronic Illness Recovery?

October 14, 2025

Endlessly seeking recovery can be counterproductive and halt progress.

A Quiz To Know - Do I Have A Nervous System, Stress Related Illness (PPD)

October 13, 2025

A quick quiz to see if the practices in Befriend would be able to help you recover from chronic illness. These conditions involve real physiological changes in the brain that cause symptoms

The Dangers Of Detox And The Wellness World For People With Trauma

Nourishment is needed to heal trauma; physical, emotional and social nurture. The wellness world often instead encourages punishment, earning recovery, and increases fear.

How We Heal From Chronic Fatigue, Chronic Pain And Other Psychophysiological Conditions (PPD)

December 20, 2024

Psychophysiologic disorders (PPD) are stress-related, brain-generated pain or illness. The resulting symptoms are completely real. That is why the term we use is a blend of Psychology (the processes of the mind) and Physiology (the processes of the body). It is why we support both in Befriend.

Signs You Are Healing Trauma (and it is not about trauma release)

September 24, 2024

Signs I see in my clients over months and years that their mind, body and nervous system are more at peace, flexible, resilient. With this comes greater health, compassionate self relationship and better relationships with others.

Trauma And CFS/ME, Chronic Pain and Environmental Illness

Memories, stress, emotions and unmet needs can take physical form via your nervous system in ongoing waves of disquieting sensations, fatigue discomfort, or pain. Learning how to stop and reverse this cycle is a life changing and affordable way to heal.

A Simple Snapshot Of Brain Retraining, Nervous System Healing and Mind-Body Skills

The return to our natural homeostasis of health can and does happen, no matter how stuck our nervous system is in a chronic stress response. Often it takes a lot, like illness or tremendous difficulty, for us to start paying attention to our physical, emotional and spiritual health.

What The Adverse Childhood Experience Studies Teach Us About Trauma And Chronic Illness And What They Leave Out.

The adverse childhood experiences (ACE) studies show the link between childhood stress and trauma, and later life illness and challenge, but they miss out how we have the innate capability to heal and flourish.

Self Compassion vs Self Abandonment

Caring for ourselves instead of judging, shaming and blaming ourselves - allows pain to go down, both physical and emotional, and allows us to grow under the guiding light of kindness.

Lessons From My Recovery

Lessons from my own recovery

Boundaries After Growing Up In A Dysfunctional Family

When parents disrespect a child's boundaries, the child's sense of self—his or her autonomy, self-respect, feelings of effectiveness and of making a difference—are compromised. They will disconnect from their true Self, the present moment and their body in order to self protect their vulnerability.

Why Children of Narcissistic Parents Get Chronic Illness

Understanding the impact of a narcissistic caregiver, and the path home to health. Unlike social media therapy that tells us to just regulate our nervous system or release trauma, the path home to wellbeing for many is much deeper, richer, and more powerful because it is the path home to authenticity.

Intrinsic Motivation and Discipline - the dream team!

Humans are creatures of habit, and habit formation takes discipline. What helps us start something and stick to it, is intrinsic motivation, which is motivation that comes from inside of us, from our values, authentic wishes and hopes for our life.

CFS/ME, Chronic Pain, and Chronic Infections. The Cell Danger Response

The biological basis of environmental illnesses. Understand how a long term state of protection in the mind and body leads to illness, and how we can heal.

Post Exertion Pain and Symptoms - Breaking The Cycle

The pain flare that comes after physical exertion but not during is a response to the stress chemicals during the exertion and not the physical exertion. It's a very subtle but important difference to understand.

How I Healed And What Healing Means To Me

I teach tools and practices that utilise neuroplasticity yes, but those tools are not my primary goal of working with people nor the driving force of how I healed myself.

Lessons From My Recovery

Take what serves you, leave what does not. I am hoping that some or all of the suggestions will become second nature and that your life will thereby become lighter. Then perhaps the light in ourselves may become a light for others.

Normalising Dissociation - There Is No Shame In Successfully Surviving

I am incredibly passionate about helping people celebrate their survival and stop demonising the parts of them that helped them do this, even if those parts are now not able to keep up with the needs and demands of the current reality of life.

The choice to heal

“To make free from injury or disease; to make sound or whole; to patch up or correct; to restore to original purity or integrity.“ People can get very defensive about the idea of choosing to heal, or of choosing to be happy after having suffered from trauma or adversity or chronic illness (which is traumatic in itself)