The thing I keep thinking about after the Transform Trauma conference in Oxford is how much my field has shifted since I was a student.
When I was at university, many of my professors were deeply dedicated to academia. They were factual, rigorous and often maintained the kind of clinical distance that was considered appropriate at the time. Education was largely about transferring knowledge: there were things they knew and things we were there to learn.
There was much less engagement with us around ideas themselves and almost no personal connection to the people we looked up to. Less invitation to question, challenge, wonder, disagree or follow our curiosity somewhere unexpected.
Looking back, I find myself wondering how much of that model of education I may have unknowingly carried into my own work as an educator. How easily we reproduce the ways in which we ourselves were taught, even when we have consciously chosen to do things differently.
Perhaps that was also why I arrived in Oxford expecting a certain kind of experience, a familiar one, cold and heavy on facts and knowledge.
A Different Way of Engaging With the Field
Instead, I encountered something quite different. A way more enriched way of engaging with the latest developments in my field.
The learning this time felt more experiential, more alive. I watched experts in trauma, psychotherapy and the human mind gather not simply as authorities delivering information through PowerPoint presentations and research citations, but as people deeply passionate about their field, sharing ideas they have spent years exploring and still remain curious about. People who opened up in vulnerability about their own trauma history, their own challenges as practitioners when pursuing an idea brought them defiance and discreditation only to regain authority later as the field progressed in its scientific robustness.
And for a conference that explicitly made room for conversations about spirituality and trauma, I was struck by something I hadn’t expected:
How much uncertainty still exists at the frontier of what we know.
The Comfort of Not Knowing
And perhaps even more importantly, how comfortable some of the people who have spent their lives advancing our knowledge seemed to be with that uncertainty. There is something surprisingly close to faith at the beginning of inquiry. Not faith that an idea must be true, but enough trust in curiosity to follow a question before knowing where it will lead.
Science is what gives that curiosity discipline. When we develop hypotheses, we test them, we look at what happens, we challenge our assumptions and we change our minds when the evidence asks us to.
But before any of that can happen, someone has to be willing to wonder.
Dr. Dan Siegel spoke about spending countless hours immersed in research, drawing inspiration not only from psychology and neuroscience but from mathematics and physics, trying to understand the mind and the nature of integration for the purpose of wellbeing.
And during a panel on the future of trauma therapy, clinical psychologist Janina Fisher reflected on the early years of trauma work, when practitioners were still figuring out what they were doing. They experimented, observed, learned what seemed to help and what didn’t. And I found that strangely moving and very inspiring.
We sometimes encounter established therapeutic modalities as if they arrived fully formed, supported by manuals, research papers and training programmes. We forget that emerging fields are built by people who, at some point, stood at the edge of what was known and decided to explore further without any guarantee of their findings.
To be a pioneer carries an enormous responsibility. But it also requires the capacity to trust one’s observations and intuition enough to investigate them without confusing intuition with certainty. And perhaps that becomes possible when we remember that therapy, for all its theories, modalities and evidence base, is also an extraordinarily human act.
Where Embodiment Kept Returning
To accompany another person through pain, vulnerability and fear as they explore their inner world is to remain in contact with some of the most fundamental parts of being human. And this is where embodiment kept returning throughout the conference.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk spoke about the importance of therapists cultivating an embodied presence. It reminded me that connection isn’t something we merely understand cognitively, but something we experience physiologically: through breath, tension, proximity, rhythm, safety and the subtle ways in which one nervous system responds to another.
Walking through the halls and courtyards of the Oxford colleges that hosted us, I found myself thinking about how differently I now relate to learning. As a student, I didn’t have fifteen years of therapeutic practice against which to test what I was hearing. I had knowledge, curiosity and a fairly stubborn gut instinct. Fortunately, I also had a critical mind.
I remember debating professors when something didn’t quite make sense to me, when the evidence didn’t seem convincing enough, or when I sensed there might be more to the story than what was being presented. Fifteen years of practice and continuous professional development have refined that instinct. I don’t need to accept an idea because an impressive person says it. Nor do I need to reject an unfamiliar idea because it doesn’t fit neatly inside what I already know. I can become curious.
A Sense of Relief and Belonging
And I experienced something else in Oxford that I hadn’t expected: a sense of relief and belonging.
Some of the directions in which I have been moving in my own therapeutic practice, occasionally wondering whether I was venturing too far from the clinical traditions in which I was trained, were being echoed in conversations happening throughout the conference.
So yes, I will allow myself a small moment of professional pride here. Perhaps I’ve learned to trust my compass rather well. Not because I have somehow arrived at the answers, but because after fifteen years of sitting with people, studying, questioning, getting things wrong, learning more and continuing to work on myself, I have become better at recognizing the questions worth following. And some of those questions have increasingly been about the body.
I left Oxford more convinced than ever that one of the most important responsibilities we have as therapists is to attend seriously to our own inner world. Because our presence enters the therapeutic field where we encounter our clients. Our capacity to notice ourselves, regulate ourselves, recognize our own wounds and boundaries and remain genuinely present with another person inevitably shapes the therapeutic relationship we create.
And I was particularly happy to see embodiment moving closer to the centre of conversations about clinical practice rather than remaining something associated primarily with somatic approaches at the edges of the field.
Despite running an online practice, learning to become a better somatic practitioner through my professional Somawise training has brought a different depth to the way I experience therapeutic connection. It has also reinforced something that sounds obvious until we actually try to live it: there are experiences we cannot think ourselves into. We can understand regulation intellectually without feeling regulated. We can explain boundaries beautifully without being able to sense one in our own body. We can know everything about presence and still spend most of our lives somewhere other than being in the present moment.
Understanding Is a Beginning, Not an Arrival
And perhaps this matters particularly nowadays, when we are so thirsty for certainty.
We seek it through our minds. Through books and podcasts and courses and experts and the endless knowledge hubs we consume through our earbuds, sometimes at twice the normal speaking speed. More information, faster. Another explanation, another framework, another answer that might finally make everything fall into place.
And we often don’t notice the irony: the things we consume in our attempt to become more whole can sometimes end up consuming us instead.
Yes, understanding is important. I have built much of my professional life around helping people understand themselves better. But understanding is a beginning, an opening of doors. At some point, what we know has to become something we can experience, walking through those doors not just with our minds.
In a world that seems to be constantly accelerating around us and asking us to keep up, deliberately slowing down can feel almost countercultural. It requires intention and repeated practice. It means becoming aware of a window of tolerance that, for many of us, has become increasingly narrow, and resisting the temptation to aggressively push ourselves beyond it in the name of growth.
Instead, we expand capacity by practicing holding that capacity. To breathe, to notice, to stay. To (re)learn the sensations of yes and no in our own bodies. To become curious about what we need rather than immediately overriding it. To discover what happens when our internal rhythm is allowed to come back into contact with the rhythm of the life we’re actually trying to live.
No amount of knowledge can fully replace that.
There is a wealth of information available to us through our bodies that cannot be accessed solely through analysis, and perhaps there is something quietly radical about learning to inhabit ourselves again while living in a culture constantly inviting us to leave ourselves in pursuit of the next thing.
To become present enough to actually experience this life, with its uncertainty, its limitations and its endless plane of possibilities. A life which, at least in the Newtonian realm we all currently share, is finite.
On Love, Connection, and Recovery
There was another idea circulating through the conference that I am still sitting with.
Love.
I am usually cautious around words like healing. They can become vague very quickly, particularly when we’re talking about trauma.
And yet I don’t want to sterilise an idea simply because its language makes my clinical mind slightly uncomfortable.
Because when we translate love into something we can recognize, such as care, attunement, compassion, belonging, being seen, allowing ourselves to be known, it becomes difficult to separate it entirely from recovery.
Trauma can profoundly shape our relationship with ourselves, with our bodies and with other people. So we learn to protect ourselves, sometimes brilliantly adapting to adverse conditions we had to overcome.
We learn to withdraw, to anticipate and control. We become hyper-independent. And we have a system designed to disconnect us from sensations that once felt unbearable. We develop ways of surviving relationships that can eventually make connection itself feel dangerous. And still, we crave for a healthy connection.
Perhaps this is one of the paradoxes of being human: we can become extraordinarily skilled at protecting ourselves from precisely what we continue to long for.
So perhaps love does belong in conversations about healing after all. At least not as a mystical cure, or as a replacement for evidence-based therapeutic work. But rather as a recognition that recovery doesn’t happen only through acquiring insight inside an isolated mind. It also happens through relationship. Through learning to relate differently to ourselves. Through becoming more able to inhabit our bodies. Through experiencing boundaries that don’t require complete disconnection. Through discovering that connection and autonomy can coexist.
Through communities in which we can belong without disappearing, and through encounters with other human beings in which we gradually learn that being known does not always have to be dangerous.
We come into existence through connection and we develop through connection. And however fiercely independent we become, none of us experiences this life entirely alone.
Where This Leaves Me
I went to Transform Trauma Oxford wanting the conference to do what its title promised.
I wanted it to transform something about how I think, feel and experience the work I do as a trauma therapist, and it did. But perhaps not by giving me the answers I expected to find.
Instead, Oxford seems to have expanded my capacity to remain interested in the questions.
So I am leaving more willing to explore the territory where science, spirituality and embodiment encounter one another without requiring any of them to provide me with absolute certainty.
More comfortable admitting what I don’t know still. More trusting of the professional intuition I have spent fifteen years refining. More convinced of the importance of remaining connected to my own body while accompanying other people into theirs. And perhaps a little more open to that realm of endless possibilities Dr. Dan Siegel kept inviting us to consider.
I am still distilling much of what happened here, and most likely I will be for some time. But this is what I know today: I want to know what I know while remaining curious about what I don’t. I want to listen to the body without forgetting the mind. I want us to take our histories seriously without allowing them to dictate our futures, to become capable of connection without abandoning ourselves to achieve it. And I want us to become increasingly able to stand on the steady ground of the present while remaining willing, occasionally, to step toward an edge we have never crossed before.
Trauma can teach us to organize our lives around avoiding another fall, but recovery can give us something different. Not the promise that we will never fall again.
But a deeper relationship with the ground beneath our feet, the body that carries us, the people who walk beside us, and perhaps, when the moment asks for it, enough trust in ourselves to discover that we still have wings.
We spend so much of our lives trying to understand ourselves well enough to finally feel safe enough to live. Perhaps, somewhere along the way, we also have to begin fully living.