I've been doing a lot of training recently with people working in under-funded and impossibly squeezed frontline services. These kind of jobs often attract people who care enormously and who are the first to admit that they struggle to look after themselves, so we have been exploring how practices of self compassion can be an antidote to the risks of being overly empathic.   Empathy is the relational quality that allows us to sense another's emotional landscape. Our brains ha

Listening is one of the core skills of supporting one another, building our communities, changing our behaviours and resolving our conflicts. It can also significantly contribute to our overwhelm and burnout. Given how important it is, we need to find ways of listening well, that are sustainable for the long haul. In this blog I am going to share what I have learned from decades of training and supervising crisis service teams to listen. I have also taught multi disciplinary

A regulated nervous system describes a state where we can move through stressors, stay present, engaged and relational, and have the...

A regulated nervous system describes a state where we can move through stressors, stay present and engaged and have the capacity to process our experience. A dysregulated nervous system describes a state in which we enter high levels of arousal and feel overwhelmed, becoming either aggressive or withdrawn or shut down. D o you sometimes find yourself overreacting or shutting down and feeling debilitated by stress? Me too. I've spent the last few years learning about nervous