We know this to be true, because otherwise, we would be living in a very different world by now!

​

I would love to support you on your journey to live your big life, and explore political strategies which are both realistic and transformative! I've spent the better part of two decades focused on exploring skills, resources and tools that support personal liberation and strategic radicalism, and would love the opportunity to share them with you - to help speed up your journey and our collective ability to change the world. There are strategies for both healing and political change which work. It shouldn't need to take so long to figure this stuff out! 

​

Liberation coaching sessions are about holding space for your healing process to unfold and sharing relevant tools and insights. I'll help you identify what's blocking you, resource you with psychoeducation and tools, and help you problem solve your way out of self-sabotage. 

 

I won't give you advice in the sense of thinking I know what's best for you, because there's just way too much unknowable information involved in other people's lives for me to know what you should do. However I can share ideas around tools you could use to process your issue, offer advice-like information which you might find useful, ask you questions to guide you through your process and hold space for your emotions.

​

My coaching is trauma-informed and based on useful psychoeducation and tools. I'm not going to just blast you with 'you can do it' type of crap or focus much on changing your mindset. Although I will be full of belief in you and your process. I'm also about as non-judgemental as they come and coping mechanism, drug, sex work, polyamory and kink friendly.

​

​

​

​

​

Liberating Yourself!

I get that overcoming one's current circumstances and limits often feels impossible and I believe that's almost always a trauma response. It is scary to push past our limits, to let our identities be malleable, to make needed changes within our social network, to take risks and step outside our comfort zone, and to feel painful feelings.

 

If we want to stop getting in our own way, we have to choose to face those fears! Most people never find a way to do this and traditional therapy and other psycho/spiritual methods often don't seem to help much. But that doesn't mean it's not possible.

 

Yes, privilege and oppression can make changing your life drastically easier or more difficult. Our circumstances can also potentially limit how much liberation we can ultimately experience. However we also usually have beliefs which come from our trauma (whether it's the extreme or relatively normal kind), which make us believe that changing things is far less possible than it actually tends to be.

​

I believe it's always possible to massively improve your life from wherever it is, through strategic psychological work. In most situations where you might think it's impossible to make big changes, it's often totally possible with the right tools and dedication. We all have far more potential than what our trauma based beliefs lead us to believe!

 

I'm not promising a utopian lifestyle from personal change. We can get a long way towards achieving our true potential, self-actualising, liberating ourselves, or whatever you want to call it, through psychological work and changing our lives. But to get the rest of the way, we'll need system change! We should be far better placed to help make that happen though by liberating ourselves.

 

I also want to emphasise that it's brave to do this work! It's not for the faint of heart. Things will change and there will most likely be some really tough parts along the way. Liberating yourself isn't easy, and it will always be an ongoing process, but I believe it's super fucking worth it!

​

​

​

​

​

Meeting Your Needs...

If to be oppressed is to be put in a situation where you are unable to have your needs met because the system takes away your opportunities and freedom to do so; then to liberate yourself is to work out ways to get your needs met anyway!

 

Humans have needs and when they're met, we feel fulfilled, peaceful and joyful. It becomes easy to get shit done, to take risks, to recover from shocks, to be infectiously happy, creative, powerful, giving, loving, grateful, etc.

 

When our needs are not met, we end up with mental health issues and maladaptive coping mechanisms. We self-sabotage and act out unconsciously in attempts to get our needs met.

​

If you work backwards from understanding that, one of the keys to a good life is simply prioritising getting your needs met. Instead of individualising/pathologising our difficulties, liberation coaching recognises and works with the actual reason we're not doing well in the first place – the system stopping us from getting our needs met. So a central part of the liberatory process I help people with is visioning, planning and working through blocks so you can get your needs met.

 

Therapy usually starts with what's wrong in someone's life and then focuses on healing the trauma that created the issue, so that it can be resolved. Liberation coaching reverses that process. We will focus on getting your needs met first, because it's often much easier and safer than healing the trauma directly. Where there are blocks, whether to do with trauma, socialisation, lifestyle or the system, we will use psychoeducation and other tools (psychological and material) to work our way through them. This method still heals the trauma, just in a more indirect way.

 

I prefer this method because delving into the past and bringing up old traumas is risky business. Although trauma can be healed that way, the process can be very destabilising. When those of us who are traumatised, neurodiverse or oppressed are often struggling so deeply already, doing anything potentially destabilising can be risky to one's overall process - potentially slowing us down or setting us back. Looking into the past is still important, but I prefer to prioritise psycho-education and resourcing first, so that the emotional safety is there to process the past when it does come up.

 

Instead of focusing on the past, we'll be proactively resourcing you and making things better in the here and now. Each shift leads to increased capacity, as well as increased trust in the process - both of which make future shifts easier. I've found the process becomes really exciting and quite addictive! Except that's not the right word because there's nothing negative about it.

​

​

​

​

​

Feeling is Healing!

Besides prioritising your needs, I've found that understanding emotions, creating safer space to be able to feel them without too much difficulty, and then healthily processing them, is one of the other biggest keys to a good life. 

 

Unfortunately, we've been socialised by patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism to avoid feeling our feelings, to stop others from feeling safe to feel either, and uncertain of how to interpret our feelings. 

 

When we force our emotions into our shadow (the place where we park the parts of ourselves that we have rejected), as we have all been socialised to do, we end up not knowing what we really need or how we can get it. Our emotions have evolved to let us know what we need and to motivate us to find ways to make it happen. Because we stifle our emotions, we can end up quite lost, or having them come out sideways in confusing and regretful ways.

 

There are tricks to feeling your feelings safely and bearably which are teachable, empowering methods for processing different feelings and it gets easier with practice. Being able to deeply feel our feelings can mean that we don't need to force personal changes with willpower and continually fall back as we inevitably lose it. Feeling our feelings can guide and motivate us to make better choices, while we continually increase our capacity by focusing on our needs and boundaries, so we can build fucking amazing lives for ourselves!

 

Not to mention all the ways that feeling and processing our feelings about the world properly can make us far more effective change-makers!

​

​

​

​

​

All The Useful Tools...

My liberation coaching is very much based on psychoeducation. Once you fully integrate the tools, you're able to apply them to whatever is going on in your life, so this kind of healing journey is also a very empowering process.

 

Most therapy, books or courses only seem to focus on one or a few strategies, which is why they can be helpful at first, but it can still feel impossible to make and maintain the deep change which is usually needed.

 

When someone has both the normally understood kind of privilege, as well as the privileges of minimal trauma and being neurotypical, it's much easier to get somewhere with just one or a few helpful strategies. I've seen in myself and many of the people around me, that that kind of approach just isn't enough. Change can start to happen and then it all falls back for some reason or another. Eventually it feels difficult to try anything as you don't trust it's even possible to change.

​

​