and Trauma Resolution Programs
After years of offering nervous system work, I've narrowed down what gets the best results.
Group work is the beginning of your journey because you’re already wired for connection.
Group work re-tunes your neural connection pathways to safety. Humans are wired to evolve and grow with others, and Expansion Training harnesses the safety of a contained group to strengthen these neural pathways and invite curiosity towards exploring new patterns. Then, as our nervous system capacity expands, we offer more space for our clients to grow.
After you've been through the group program, you can continue with individual sessions (discounted for alumni).
Expansion Training introduces your body to working at the level of the nervous system. The mind thinks it knows what this means, but a perspective shift is needed. Many people haven’t even considered that what the body desires might be different from the will of the mind. We have been conditioned to allow our minds to be in control. But the body wants equality!
As well as laying the foundations for change, the program covers both the theoretical and experiential components of healing the nervous system - at the individual, collective, cultural and transgenerational levels.
Expansion training will:
prime your neural connection pathways and build your capacity for co-regulation, so you handle encounters with more ease.
create a solid framework to access your internal boundaries and sense of safety, preventing burnout and vicarious trauma.
provide a trauma-informed framework for understanding your clients and yourself that can be integrated easily with any modality .
RAQUEL’S FUSION OF Modalities
Raquel draws upon a range of modalities she has studied to inform her unique approach to trauma healing and nervous system expansion.
Brainspotting
Brainspotting is a powerful, focused treatment method that works by identifying, processing and releasing core sources of emotional pain, trauma and distress. It can relieve body pain associated with unintegrated and dissociated memories from your distant or recent past.
Unlike talk therapy, Brainspotting accesses the deep brain structures where memories are held but cannot be accessed through thinking or remembering. It is deep, direct and powerful, yet also focused and containing.
Brainspotting uses activated eye positions designated as brainspots. Located through either one or both eyes, brainspots are observed by focusing on the client’s inner awareness of their body sensations or by tracking and observing the client’s outer reflexive responses (e.g., blink, eye twitches or wobbles, pupil dilation, breath changes and subtle body behaviour shifts).
Somatic Experiencing
Somatic Experiencing® is a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and stress. It is the life’s work of Dr. Peter A. Levine, resulting from his studies in psychology, human physiology, animal behaviour, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics.
SE facilitates the organic release of traumatic shock and re-organisation without forcing, pushing or efforting. It is one of only a few trauma therapies which takes into account the client's threshold so as not to cause re-traumatisation or overwhelm.
SE addresses the root cause of stress and trauma by facilitating the completion of self-protective responses and the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body. Clients are gently guided to develop tolerance for difficult bodily sensations, suppressed emotions and contracted nervous system states.
Somatic Touchwork
Somatic touchwork is a gentle, non-invasive, fully-clothed style of touch therapy to release frozen and stuck states held in the body.
Everyone’s experience is different, and it’s difficult to put into words, because 'touch' lights up the the place in the brain where there are no words.
This way of working is the most profound technique I have ever encountered. It is unbelievably sacred and deep. Touchwork supports the release of pre-verbal experiences you may not have any words for (or memory of), but feel as stuck or contracted states in your body.
Both client and practitioner work together noticing sensations in organs, joints, fluids and bones, gradually creating more opening and expansion in the nervous system through the power of energy, attention, intention and touch.