.jpg)
I teach tools and practices that utilise neuroplasticity, yes, but those tools are not the primary goal of my work with people, nor were they the driving force of how I healed myself.
Due to being an HSP (highly sensitive person), I was struck from a very young age by how much pain people carried. I could see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices and feel it in their bodies. I knew my path involved working with people. I moved towards this at university, first with a BA, then a Masters and internship to train as a psychotherapist because I wanted to empower people. Instead, as I entered the profession, I found a model of mental health that often pathologised the human experience into DSM classifications; in other words, into symptoms.
Of course, diagnosis can be useful for guiding some interventions. But for me, it was inadequate for understanding the roots of suffering, appreciating the biopsychosocial, and, in my own framework, spiritual; dimensions of health, or helping an individual reconnect with their own capacity and agency.
The model I was being asked to practise within seemed focused on what was ‘wrong’ with the person. This confused me because what I had always sensed in people was an intrinsic wholeness. I believed recovery had to involve helping people reconnect with themselves. My psychotherapy internship broke my heart because so much of the emphasis was on ‘mental illness’. I could not reconcile seeing a human being who deserved support to understand their inner conflicts and pain, and to come home to their wholeness, with simply ‘treating mental illness’. Eventually I left the field, became a high-flying banker for over a decade, and left what I felt was my soul path.
Fortunately for me, my purpose was not going to be derailed forever. A course correction came in the form of devastating complex chronic illness that took my career, freedom and life as I knew it for almost a decade.
The divine comedy was that, after years of searching for the ‘right’ treatment, protocol, root cause, tool or programme that would get rid of my symptoms, I was humbled into realising that I needed to heal in much the same way I had once sensed others needed to heal. For me, healing became reconnection with my mind, heart and body. My body was the brave messenger I kept treating as the problem because I simply did not know how to listen to it. Rather than seeing every symptom as an enemy, I began asking what my whole system might be communicating and what care it needed. Neuroplasticity became much more than exercises intended to remove symptoms; it became the ongoing shaping of my mind-body relationship through self-understanding, self-acceptance and self-commitment.
“That’s the biggest gift I can give anybody: Wake up, be aware of who you are, what you’re doing, and what you can do to prevent yourself from becoming ill.” Maya Angelou
I began to see how much I had shut down the deeply vibrant, sensitive, authentic parts of myself in order to survive my own experiences and a society that can itself be traumatising. My personality had adapted brilliantly. I achieved, people pleased, helped, criticised myself, tried to get things ‘right’, controlled my environment and disconnected from my body. I had thought these defence mechanisms were simply ‘me’ without recognising what they were protecting. My nervous system had learned to operate in high gear from a young age, and decades of chronic stress had reinforced that baseline.
This is why, for me, simply ‘doing a programme’ could never have been enough, and why this is not how I work with people now. I needed a process of inner discovery. I needed to understand how my mind and body were mapping the world, where those patterns came from and what was creating dysregulation in daily life. As Maya Angelou says, I needed to wake up and become aware of who I was and what I was doing, and then gradually develop greater choice and mastery through practice. Without asking those deeper questions compassionately, I could not develop the sense of Self and self-trust I needed to heal at the depth I was being called to.
I began noticing that the way I spoke to myself and moved through the world was keeping me under enormous stress. Pressure to heal, relentless self-monitoring, criticism and perfectionism could themselves be experienced by my system as threat. So while I was working incredibly ‘hard’ to heal, I was not creating the rest, spaciousness and safety my system needed.
My protective strategies; achieving, perfectionism, helping, people pleasing and control; had once helped me manage emotional pain and discomfort. They were understandable adaptations shaped by childhood experiences alongside gendered and societal conditioning. But as an adult, some were now creating havoc. They did not need more criticism. They needed understanding, so that I, as an empowered adult, could begin choosing different ways of being.
I also became curious about whether some of my physical symptoms and my intense focus upon them could function psychologically as protection from deeper emotional pain. Avoidance of situations, people and life had grown during illness, and over time that avoidance itself made my world feel smaller and less safe. Safety behaviours intended to protect me were reinforcing the message that I was fragile.
I was hypervigilant about my physical state, yet often disconnected from actually inhabiting my body. When sensations or emotions became uncomfortable, my mind would pull me away. Healing required gradually learning that I could inhabit a body that changes, feels, moves and communicates without needing to escape every uncomfortable experience.
I began seeing uncomfortable truths about how I treated myself. I was judgemental towards myself and, inevitably, sometimes towards others. I was too focused on how other people were healing and insufficiently trusting of my own direct experience. Old wounds around shame and beliefs such as ‘there is something wrong with me’ coloured how I interpreted the world.
I could do almost any programme or protocol from my intellectual mind. I am very good at that. But committing to myself? Getting to know and love all parts of me? Accepting that I would participate in my own healing and there was no deadline? Grieving what needed grieving? Accepting that my ordinary daily life was my real medicine and neuroplasticity practice? No thanks. Another supplement and fancy skill please, haha. It took me a long time to realise, kindly, that I was my medicine.
My nervous system had become extraordinarily sensitised. Internal sensations, emotions and uncertainty could trigger danger responses, and I unknowingly perpetuated that sensitisation through conditioned patterns of thinking, believing, behaving and protecting myself, as well as through the panic and pressure with which I approached recovery.
As that sensitisation grew, my brain and nervous system also began interpreting more of the external world; smells, foods, environments, movement, people and places; through a threat lens. Symptoms generated more fear; fear generated more monitoring and avoidance; avoidance reinforced danger. I increasingly attributed every fluctuation to something outside me: it’s the food, the mould, the movement, my body, that person, the bad night’s sleep. My sense of agency became smaller and smaller.
My illness was physically real. Mind, brain, nervous, endocrine and immune systems do not exist in separate boxes; they communicate continuously. But understanding that complexity eventually became empowering rather than frightening. I could begin supporting the whole system rather than searching endlessly for one defective part.
It was a tough walk down honesty street to recognise how unhealthy my relationship with my body had become. I was intensely identified with its condition, diagnoses and symptoms. My body had become another representation of everything I believed was wrong with me. I needed to stop making illness my identity and begin relating to my body as a living system with enormous capacity for adaptation, repair and change, while also respecting its genuine limitations and needs.
My energy was depleted not only by illness itself but by the way I was living: chronic stress, self-criticism, restrictive diets, checking out, distracting myself, working ‘hard’ at recovery, suppressing feelings and needs, and organising my life around healing rather than cultivating the healthy version of me I wanted to become. I was chronically focused on what was wrong and had very little connection to feeling genuinely influential in my daily experience of life. Fight, flight, freeze and collapse had become familiar states. Over time, my resilience, faith in myself and response-ability; my ability to choose how I responded; had become smaller.
I needed radical honesty about what was happening inside me, radical responsibility for what was mine to influence, and radical permission to heal in deeper ways. That was a path only I could choose to begin. I shifted my orientation entirely. Instead of endlessly trying to fix everything ‘wrong’ with me, I began looking for what was right in me. I gradually took my hypervigilant attention off my body and started nourishing health rather than continually treating sickness. I asked myself what I actually wanted from recovery — not simply what I wanted to escape. For me, the answer was freedom.
I became familiar with my values and began trying to live from them, compassionately working with the fears and protective patterns that arose when I did. Instead of focusing all day on what frightened me, what was wrong, or whether I was ‘better’ or ‘worse’, I practised taking in small moments of good. My highly sensitive system had become exceptionally good at detecting threat while filtering out safety, beauty, pleasure and connection. I needed to broaden that lens.
I began reconnecting with the present moment, my body and my emotions in tiny, titrated ways. I learned to recognise when my system was becoming dysregulated and respond with care rather than blame or automatically believing every thought generated from that state. Understanding my nervous system began lifting shame. Psychoeducation gave me context for experiences that had previously terrified me.
I used powerful tools from my training to work with nervous-system states, beliefs, behaviours and different parts of myself, but now I understood why I was using them. I stopped practising from panic and stopped using techniques as another way of trying to force myself somewhere. Instead, I began creating a better relationship between my brain, mind, body, relationships and spiritual life, moment by moment, through practices that gradually became ways of living.
I also stopped viewing my brain as ‘broken’. The brain and psyche adapt in service of survival. Many responses that later become limiting began as intelligent attempts to protect us. I could appreciate their service while becoming curious about what my whole system needed now. I began relating to myself as I would a frightened rescue puppy that had been bruised and mistreated. How would I teach that puppy that I was safe? Would I shove 3,758 supplements down its throat while shouting, YOU NEED TO DO THIS EVERY DAY OR ELSE!? Clearly not.
I would observe it without judgement. I would learn its unique signals. I would respect when it needed rest and when it was ready to explore. I would understand that trembling, avoidance or unusual behaviours were expressions of something deeper, and that trust would be built through consistent, curious and kind attention. I would also nourish that being physically with what a stressed body needed in order to rebuild. That became my relationship with myself.
It took time, consistency and plenty of trial and error over a long period of time. The most important learning came through direct experience and becoming willing to trust my system’s feedback. And much of it was not rocket science. The foundations of health mattered: sleep, light, nature, nutrition, addressing genuine deficiencies, reducing harmful exposures, movement, mind-body connection, play, laughter, meaningful work, social connection, compassion, forgiveness and spirituality.
Different things worked for me at different stages. There were top-down influences such as beliefs, thoughts and expectations; bottom-up influences from the body, immune system, gut and nervous system; and outside-in influences such as relationships, work, environment, culture and community. Healing, for me, required respecting their interaction rather than reducing everything to one system.
I became kinder with myself. I was clumsy. I made mistakes. I failed; and discovered that I survived failure. I became curious about what genuinely helped my unique system instead of making myself wrong whenever shit hit the fan and I dipped.
I had to give myself the kind of attuned container I had not consistently experienced as a child. Healing under my own kind attention rather than intense judgemental scrutiny was a whole new world. We are wired for connection from birth. We recognise the feeling of attuned connection when we experience it with another person. Over time, we can also learn to cultivate that relationship internally; and build healthier versions of it with other people.
I cannot overemphasise the importance of psychoeducation in my own recovery and in my work. Learning about the mind-body relationship dramatically reduced my fear. During recovery I returned to postgraduate study using the last of my savings. My original academic background included social psychology and neuroscience, and two areas became particularly important to me.
The first was interpersonal neurobiology: understanding how the brain develops and continues changing through interactions between our internal and external worlds; thoughts, beliefs, emotions, relationships, culture, nature and experience. The second was depth psychology, which explores what has been pushed outside conscious awareness or has not yet been possible to know. Healing can involve allowing what has been repressed, rejected, denied or ignored to become known and integrated. Depth psychology also recognises the influence of culture upon the psyche and makes room for spirituality, which for me is a beautiful part of healing.
Understanding psychoneuroimmunology, stress physiology and neuroplasticity gave me a framework through which my body stopped feeling mysterious and terrifying. I no longer knew whether I would become ‘100%’ symptom free, but that stopped being my definition of success. I knew I could develop peace, acceptance, agency and a kinder relationship with my body and myself. That was freedom.
I could not wait for some mythical future outcome before allowing myself to feel okay. My big fat lie had been: when I get to 100% healthy, then I will feel okay about myself, life will be easy and the unicorns will slide down the rainbows. I had to stop postponing my life.
I needed to teach my system that now could also contain safety. I worked with my attention, learned to experience emotions and sensations in manageable doses, responded differently to symptoms, gradually expanded capacity, cared for my physical needs, lived increasingly from my values, cultivated healthier relationships, developed boundaries and became curious about the parts of me that found those boundaries frightening.
I also learned to genuinely appreciate being highly sensitive rather than continually trying to override it. For me, thriving meant building a life that was sometimes decidedly countercultural. In short, I learned to appreciate the unique biopsychosocial and spiritual nature of my recovery and nourish each aspect in tiny baby steps. And I really do mean tiny.
Our brains prefer familiar, energy-efficient pathways. Huge change can create overwhelm and send us straight back towards old habits, however unhelpful those habits may be. The unfamiliar requires capacity. I learned to integrate change carefully, letting each new experience settle rather than turning healing into another arena for achievement and perfectionism.
We do not have to be fully healed to experience peace, joy and freedom. Those are qualities we can begin cultivating in how we are being now.
I also had to question deeply held beliefs about illness, my body, symptoms, germs, safety and the authority I gave other people over my understanding of my health. Years of medical appointments had given me an enormous catalogue of things supposedly wrong with me and predictions about what might never improve. Those messages had understandably shaped my expectations. I absolutely supported my physical body and continue to do so as part of a consistent lifestyle. But gradually I learned to do that from care rather than terror. I could respect medicine, expertise and genuine physical pathology without handing away my own curiosity, discernment or agency.
Then there were the older beliefs. Children make meaning from experiences with the cognitive and emotional resources available to them at the time. In moments of shame, rejection, fear, neglect, chronic stress or unsupported emotional pain, we can arrive at conclusions such as I am not good enough, it is my fault, there is something wrong with me. Those beliefs can continue shaping adult perception long after the original environment has disappeared.
Discovering and unlearning those imprints can be painful because sometimes we have to acknowledge what actually happened and grieve what we did not receive. But for me, that was also part of freedom. Shame and guilt have historically been used to shape behaviour in families, schools, religious institutions and wider culture, and trauma can carry across generations through relational, social and biological pathways. Becoming a cycle breaker can therefore be enormous work. Baby steps in these cycles can represent mountains being climbed. And yet our trauma, diagnosis, sensitivity, neurotype, history or identity is never the entirety of who we are.
I also realised during recovery that I am not here to be God. I am not here to control every outcome. My growing spiritual practice brought the humility to see how desperately I had been trying to control my body and recovery because control made part of me feel safer. Ironically, the pressure created by that control was itself exhausting. Underneath it was also my difficulty accepting the existential realities our culture often avoids: uncertainty, suffering, change, ageing and death.
We do not always help children develop a relationship with these realities. Life contains suffering. There are no guarantees. We deserve dignity, care and love, but life does not promise us freedom from pain. There will be more grief in our future and more joy. We have bodies, but for me spiritually, we are also more than our bodies and known personalities.
There is also no shame whatsoever in living with physical illness, pain or limitations that require adaptation. You are not less spiritual, less worthy or less free because your body has challenges. We do not have to ‘overcome’ everything in a prescribed way to earn a full life. Acceptance and self-compassion can transform our experience at a level far deeper than symptom reduction. I had to learn to accept what I was working with while surrendering the demand to control the outcome before I could permit myself to live.
We have remarkably little certainty about what will happen in our lives, and for a human nervous system that associates control with safety, that can be difficult. But wherever you go, there you are. So I would rather learn to meet the present moment,. and myself within it, with love. For me, surrender also became easier as I developed faith within the spiritual understanding that feels true to me. It offered a depth of holding that was not dependent upon controlling everything outside me and gave me another way of connecting with inner truth, mystery and ancient wisdom.
Life contains contrast. Health and illness, joy and pain, beginnings and endings, love and loss. Healing, for me, required learning to accept reality so that I could work with it rather than spend my life fighting what already is. Human beings have extraordinary capacity to change their experience. I have seen this in myself and in hundreds of people I have worked alongside. But neuroplasticity is not simply positive thinking or repeating a brain-training exercise. It is our lifelong capacity for experience to shape neural pathways.
That means developing enough compassionate awareness to notice how our mind and body currently tend to fire and wire; understanding, where possible, why those patterns developed; accepting what is happening now; and then practising different responses where we genuinely have choice.Responsibility, to me, means response-ability = growing our ability to respond.
Acceptance also includes our history. Sometimes the past needs to be approached slowly and safely so that grief, sadness, anger, fear or other emotions can finally be experienced, understood and integrated rather than continually fought or avoided. Erich Fromm wrote powerfully about freedom from and freedom to. Freedom from can become a life organised around escape: freedom from pain, conflict, feelings, uncertainty, illness or death. But there is no ultimate freedom from reality.
There is, however, freedom to. Freedom to love. Freedom to feel. Freedom to choose. Freedom to meet reality. Freedom to be transformed by our relationship with what is here. That became one of my deepest neuroplasticity practices: teaching my brain and body, little by little, that I did not have to escape reality in order to be free. I could surrender what was outside my control and use my energy to influence what was actually mine.
Our work is to create enough safety and a robust enough inner relationship with the body and all parts of ourselves that healing and adaptation have room to occur. This is how I recovered, and it is the foundation of how I work. I start with the truth of a person's wholeness rather than the assumption that they are broken. From there, we can become curious about how and why they became disconnected from their body, emotions, needs, authenticity, relationships or present-moment experience, and begin building bridges home in ways unique to them.
We are enormously different. We have different nervous systems and neurotypes, cultures and races, bodies and ages, histories and diagnostic labels. There can never be one universal protocol for healing. Yet underneath those differences, I repeatedly see similar qualities emerge as people come to know themselves more deeply: compassion, curiosity, consistency, commitment, community, acceptance, surrender, spiritual connection, play and laughter.
Healing, to me, became less something I could force myself to do and more something I learned to create the conditions for and allow. It was a gradual coming home to my own wisdom, my body, my values, my relationships, my spirituality and my ability to meet life as it actually is. I get to witness the beauty of the human experience through my work with remarkable people. To those I will meet along the way, I am excited to meet you, see you and know you.
May you be happy.
May you be well.
May you be safe.
May you be peaceful and at ease.
With love,
Nadia
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Engel, G. L. (1977). The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine. Science, 196(4286), 129–136.
Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart.
Gilbert, P. (2009). The Compassionate Mind. Constable.
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2013). Full Catastrophe Living (revised ed.). Bantam.
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179.
Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (3rd ed.). Henry Holt.
Schore, A. N. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.
Williams, L. M. (2016). Precision psychiatry: A neural circuit taxonomy for depression and anxiety. The Lancet Psychiatry, 3(5), 472–480.
.svg)
.jpg)
