Why I Write: What you will find here.

(A White Paper, of sorts)

I’ve been struggling to allow time for writing lately. I can feel it slipping away, disappearing into the ether.

I mentioned this to my husband this morning and said, “I think there’s something I do, something that allows writing to slowly dissolve from my week.” Almost like stardust leaving my hands. I can’t quite grab it anymore. And then, all of a sudden, my days feel thinner, less rewarding. And I find myself wondering why.

We talked about how it can feel hard to do something that doesn’t have a clear outcome or goal. That so often we expect our efforts to produce something measurable. But writing, for me, is different. It’s a journey of exploration. I like it because I don’t know where it’s taking me.

He asked me, “So why do you write?”

Because it makes me feel whole.
Because I hear myself again.
Because I can tune in to my inner world.
Because it soothes me.

I’ve wanted to write for decades—not to teach, not to fix, but to offer something to whoever might need it. A way of being with what it means to be human. A way of holding both the mess and the beauty.

I want to write to say: you are not broken.

That if we could just begin to shift into the right hemisphere—into the part of us that knows poetry and presence—we might be able to live with more compassion, care, and heart.

And so, I sat with what the threads of my writing might be.

Here is what emerged:

Presence / Absence of Presence — Nothing is Something

Presence is more than attention. It’s a kind of listening that extends beyond words — a deep attunement that creates safety in the nervous system and resonance between two people. As Bonnie Badenoch teaches, presence is a relational field that allows the hidden, exiled, or wounded parts of us to emerge gently into awareness. In its absence, we are fragmented. 

Presence is the ability to stay open with a bare heart, even in the face of pain. It is being able to notice when we shut down and begin to shield ourselves. Not to make that wrong or bad, but to be able to bring a sense of curiosity to it, a wondering of what is happening in my internal landscape right now. 

We learn to keep things tucked away, to numb and sometimes we don’t even know what is there. But when presence is offered, true, felt, embodied presence, something shifts. Mirror neurons begin to fire. Our nervous systems begin to sync. We co-regulate, not by doing anything dramatic, but simply by being with one another in a grounded way.

Rachel Naomi Remen reminds us that “listening is an act of love.” And what she’s pointing to is not just a cognitive act of paying attention, but the deeper kind of listening that lets someone feel seen into being. Most of us have lived without that kind of listening. We’ve lived in environments where presence was partial, distracted, conditional or not there at all. The absence of presence becomes the soil in which numbness, self-doubt, and protective parts grow. We adapt by turning inward, dimming our aliveness, or mistrusting our own experience.

But the body hold it all and waits to be received.

Presence lights up the pathways that go dark in trauma. It signals to the nervous system: It’s safe to come out now.  This does not happen quickly and sometimes we cannot recognise safety in our nervous system, because we have not had the experience of it and sometimes someone being present with is, can in actual fact feel dangerous. But if we keep showing up this way again and again, there may be small ways in which our system can begin to test the water of trust and safety. 

This is the invitation of the present moment, not to fix or even to understand, but to accompany what has been too long alone. From the perspective of polyvagal theory, this is where healing begins: in the shift from isolation into connection, from protection into receptivity. 

In this space, nothing is no longer nothing. It is something waiting to be met. And in the light of presence, that ‘nothing’ begins to take form, take shape, and speak its story often for the first time.

Every Part Has a Story to Tell

So when we begin to offer our wholehearted presence, we can begin to hear the streams of stories told by so different parts of us. Every part will have a story to tell. At any given moment there are many different parts of us that are activated inside. A rich inner landscape that is layered, complex, often contradictory, made up of parts that have been shaped by everything we’ve survived, longed for, and lost.

In the language of internal community of parts, we come to know that the critic isn’t just cruel it’s protective. The avoidant one isn’t lazy, it’s scared. The numb part isn’t empty, it’s wise enough to know that sometimes feeling is too much. The addict isn’t just impulsive, it’s medicating. Though we don’t want our protectors to lead and be so powerful, our job is to befriend them all, to stay present as much as we can hearing what they are sharing with us. They carry the imprint of our experiences, our adaptive survival strategies, and the burdens we’ve carried alone.

Elif Şafak wrote that “The whole universe is contained within a single human being…If you get to know yourself fully, facing with honesty and hardness both your dark and bright sides, you will arrive at a supreme form of consciousness. When a person knows himself or herself, he or she knows God.” Each part within us, even the ones in exile, is a stream, a poem, a memory, a truth. Some speak loudly. Others whisper from the cracks. Often, the most tender ones have been silenced the longest, waiting for moments of stillness no carefully make themselves known and we can only hear them, if we listen quietly. 

When presence showers our being the body softens, breath comes and perhaps wisdom can unfold. As Bonnie Badenoch teaches, healing isn’t about doing something to a part; it’s about sitting with it long enough that it starts to feel seen.

This is the work of remembering. Not inventing wholeness, but recovering it by allowing every voice within us to speak, and to be met with compassion. Because every part has a story. And every story, when honoured, becomes a thread back home.

Integration of Right & Left Hemisphere Brain.

When we begin to listen we can also begin to allow for both parts of our brain to begin to integrate. We live in a world that often privileges the left hemisphere, the linear, the logical, the measurable. We’re taught to value thinking over feeling, answers over curiosity, productivity over presence. But healing doesn’t happen through thinking our way to it. It happens when we are able to be with the felt sense of our experience in our body in a non-judgemental, compassion and present way. We cannot will ourselves to just feel better, if you could you would have already. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be thinking, we need that too. 

In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist writes about how the two hemispheres of the brain offer us very different ways of experiencing the world. The left hemisphere focuses, narrows, categorises. It’s the part that gets things done, makes plans, solves problems. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, sees the whole. It feels, senses, and connects. It holds nuance, ambiguity, poetry. It doesn’t rush to fix, it listens.

Bonnie Badenoch describes this dance as relational not just between the hemispheres of our brain, but between people. She reminds us that the right brain develops first, in relationship. It’s where our earliest sense of self forms, through attunement, mirroring, and presence. When those early connections are fractured, we learn to over-rely on our left brain as a kind of emotional survival strategy. We become very good at thinking, analysing, over-functioning and often, we forget how to feel. Or we become afraid of it.

But healing invites us to return. To slowly reawaken the right hemisphere and allow it to rejoin the conversation. Not by silencing the left brain we need it, but by softening its leadership position. By inviting the body, emotion, imagination, and resonance back into our experience of being alive.

Many of us are right brained shifted, in a left brained world. Like body based thinkers, being able to feel and notice what is happening around us, but we are often overlooked, denied, dismissed of or even punished for expressing what we experience. So we are left with the sense that we are defective and wrong in some ways. Like I said to my therapist a long time ago, “you don’t get good marks for that depth of feeling and thinking.” 

When our right hemisphere can regain its rightful place in the order of things, the left brain can begin begin to take its cue from the right, and the two can work together create a sense of wholeness.

How to Reconnect with Your Body After Years of Disconnection

There are reasons we leave our bodies.

When we were shamed for being who we are.
When feelings were too much, and no one was there.
When no one accompanied us us how to stay with discomfort without shame.
When we had to stay alert to a any changes in our enviornment.
When the silence and loneliness was deafning.

Disconnection from the body is wisdom. A protective brilliance. Something in you once said, “This is too much,” and gently or suddenly you drifted away. Into or out of the mind. Into numbness. Into survival.

But the thing is, the body remembers.
And eventually, we hear its quiet call to come back.

Reconnection is not a performance. It’s not about perfect yoga poses or eating intuitively or breathing deeply on command. It's about learning to listen again in the smallest kindest of ways. A moment of warmth in your chest. The pull of gravity in your feet.

As Bonnie Badenoch reminds us, the body thrives not in command, but in co-regulation. So often, we need the presence of another someone attuned, someone safe, to begin to feel what’s been frozen. The nervous system unthaws in connection. It stretches open slowly, like a seed in spring.

This process is rarely linear. Some days you'll feel rooted, alive, pulsing. Other days you'll float again, forget to eat, feel the numbness creeping in. That’s okay. That’s part of the dance. The goal is not to be “embodied” all the time — the goal is to develop a relationship with your body that feels honest, gentle, and attuned.

Reconnecting with your body is not about fixing what’s broken. It’s about remembering what’s whole. Listening for the whispers. Following the thread of sensation. And honouring that coming home may take time — but it is entirely possible.

Adaptive Instead of Disordered: You Don’t Need to Be Fixed

There is so much pathologising in the world of psychology. And I don’t take issue with that this can be a helpful way of understanding ourselves.

But what if the very things we label as symptoms like shutdown, overthinking, anxiety, emotional numbing are actually adaptations? What if your system isn’t broken at all, but exquisitely intelligent?

This is a shift I make often with clients: from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What did I need to survive?”

When we begin to view our inner experiences through the lens of adaptation, the shame starts to loosen. What once looked like dysfunction starts to look like resilience.

You don’t need to be fixed.
You need to be understood.
And then gently, supported to move toward safety and choice.

Everything You Need Is Inside

Healing isn’t something you acquire. It’s something you uncover.

The answers you’re looking for like clarity, strength, direction aren’t outside of you. They live within. Beneath the noise. Beneath the coping. Beneath the stories you’ve had to tell to survive.

You are not empty. You are layered, alive, and wise.

This work isn’t here to give you something new. It’s here to remind you of what you’ve always known: You are the one you’ve been waiting for.

The Hidden Impact of Implicit Memories. Time Travelling of sorts

“What happened, happened. Talking about it won’t change anything.”

She looked at me, defiant and weary. “I don’t see how we can heal what happened to me as a little girl unless we time travel.”

Fair point, I said.
But we do time travel.
You time travel every day. So do I.

Every time that tightness in your chest appears for no reason. Every time your heart races at the sound of footsteps. Every time you flinch, brace, or disappear. That’s the past arriving in the present.

Implicit memories are not stored in words, but they live in the body. They are time capsules of sensation and emotion, waiting for safety and presence to be released.

Healing is not about changing the past. It’s about freeing the present from its grip.

Why Healing Happens in Connection

We do not heal in isolation.
We may survive alone. Cope alone. Carry on alone, but the kind of healing that softens the armour and rewires the nervous system happens in relationship.

From the very beginning, we are wired for connection. Our earliest sense of self was shaped not in a vacuum, but in the gaze, voice, and presence of another. When those early relationships were attuned, our nervous systems learned safety. When they were misattuned or absent, we learned to guard, to withdraw, to numb.

And so many of us arrive in adulthood having learned that self-reliance is strength, that needing others is weakness. But the truth is — we are not meant to hold it all alone. The nervous system, as Bonnie Badenoch and Stephen Porges teach us, is relational at its core. Safety isn’t an idea; it’s a felt experience, co-created with another.

In the presence of someone safe, warm, and regulated, parts of us that have long been exiled can begin to surface. The shame, the terror, the grief we thought we had to bury. These wounds begin to soften, not because someone has “fixed” us, but because they have sat with us. Witnessed us. Stayed.

This is the paradox of relational healing: we often expect we must change before we can be loved but in truth, it is being loved that allows us to change.

Whether in therapy, in friendship, in partnership, or in the tender way we begin to speak to ourselves healing grows in the soil of connection. It’s not about being dependent. It’s about being interdependent. Letting others hold us while we learn to hold ourselves.

You do not need to do this alone. Not anymore.

A Closing Invitation

If you find yourself nodding quietly while reading this, or even just feeling a slight exhale somewhere inside, I hope you’ll stay a while.

This space isn’t here to fix you.
It’s here to reflect you back to yourself.

To offer you rhythm in the chaos.
Warmth in the numbness.
And words that feel like a soft hand on your back.

You don’t need to become someone new.
You’re already enough.

Let’s keep listening inward—together.

With warmth,
Louise