When the Body Speaks
A compassionate, evidence-informed approach to persistent symptoms, emotional disconnection and learning to feel at home in your body again
Your symptoms are real. They are not your fault. And they can get better.
You may have arrived here because you are living with persistent pain, fatigue, FND, migraine, dizziness or other symptoms that have not been fully explained or resolved.
Or perhaps you appear to be functioning well, but feel numb, disconnected or far away from yourself. You may know what you think, but struggle to know what you feel.
These experiences can look very different, but both can be shaped by a brain and body that have learned that disconnection, suppression or constant protection is the safest way to survive.
I spent years living with multiple chronic symptoms, disconnected from myself and searching for answers after the medical options had run out. I know how difficult it can be to find a pathway forward when you’ve been searching for one for a long time.
I know this terrain, and I’m here to help you find your way through it.
My own recovery led me to train with SIRPA and Dr Howard Schubiner in Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET), alongside further training in somatic, mindfulness and emotional approaches.
Over the past six years, I’ve spent thousands of hours working one-to-one with people living with persistent symptoms and disconnection. That experience has given me a deep understanding of what we need—not only to understand what is happening in our body, but to feel safe enough to change it and begin moving forward in life.
At the heart of my work is Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET), alongside mindfulness, movement and deep embodiment to help you move from overthinking towards greater presence and ease in your body.
I’ll work alongside you as you learn to understand what your body is communicating, reconnect with your emotions and needs, and meet what is here rather than constantly trying to fix, manage or get rid of it. Together, we’ll build the confidence, resilience and self-trust that allows you to move forward in your life with greater freedom and independence.
My role isn’t to become another person you depend on, but to help you find your way back to trusting yourself—so your body no longer has to do all the speaking for you.
When you can think about everything but struggle to feel it
It is difficult to live in survival mode- always striving, anticipating, adapting or holding everything together- and many of us learn to disconnect.
We overthink instead of feeling.
We numb and distract instead of being present.
We hold everything inside because it feels safer than letting it out.
We may feel detached from our bodies, our needs or even our own lives.
These are not personal failings. They are intelligent ways of protecting ourselves, often learned long before we realise what they are costing us.
Learn to speak the language of your body
Protection does not look the same in everyone.
For some people, it may show up through persistent fatigue, pain, dizziness or other physical symptoms. For others, it may look like numbness, shutdown, dissociation, chronic tension or feeling as though they are watching life from a distance.
These experiences are real, and they can have many contributing factors. My work explores how the brain, nervous system, emotions and the life we have lived may interact - without reducing everything to a single cause or suggesting that symptoms are imagined.
I help people connect differently with their bodies, create the conditions for protective responses to soften and open to living with more ease.
New to this way of understanding your body?
In my TEDx talk, What Your Pain Is Trying to Tell You, I share how I came to understand my own symptoms differently—and introduce the approach that now shapes my work with individuals, groups and healthcare professionals.
I explore the connections between protective brain processes, emotional suppression and physical symptoms, the role of Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy, and why I am working to bring this understanding into NHS settings.
I have walked this path
You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, but I was once so disconnected from myself that I felt as though I were standing outside my body, watching my life like a character on television.
Fatigue and shutdown kept me largely housebound for eight years. Rejection sensitivity and other survival adaptations had taken me so far away from who I really was that I no longer knew how to hear myself.
In the end, it was my body that guided me back.
It wasn’t an easy way back to connection. But if you have also lost touch with your body and your feelings and are ready to find a new way to be, you do not have to find your way back alone.
“Louise, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. When we started working together about a year ago I was struggling to recover from chronic fatigue and understand what I needed to be well. Your support over the last year has helped me rediscover what being in my body feels like, how to regulate my nervous system and most vitally understanding that the symptoms I had were signals of emotions I'd unconsciously been suppressing all my life. Allowing those out and being more emotionally free has been at times challenging, but you've taught me how to be grounded and teach my body that I'm safe. My health has transformed and my symptoms almost fully gone, and I'm finally starting to imagine and experience a life I can really live.”
Scott, resolved chronic fatigue and gastric discomfort