The coaching programme is 3 months. 12 weekly sessions with voice note support between sessions.
Three months is not a marketing number, and it is worth saying where it comes from, because the obvious question is why not 6 weeks and why not a year.
A pattern that has been running for 20 years does not come apart in a fortnight. It also does not need 5 years of being talked about. What it needs is long enough for the body to have a different experience several times over, in several different situations, so that the new response stops being an experiment and becomes what happens.
Twelve weeks does that. It is also short enough to be finishable, which matters more than people expect. Open ended work has no shape, and work with no shape has a way of turning into company.
Month 1, Untangle: somatic mapping, breathwork, Flash EMDR for specific traumatic memories. We identify where the patterns live in the body and begin to separate your responses from the ones that were installed by someone else.
Untangle is about location, and it goes first because everything after it is guesswork without it.
Most people arrive with an explanation. They know the history, in order, with dates. What they usually do not know is where it lives now, in the present tense, in the body. That is a different question and it has a physical answer. The throat. The jaw. The place between the shoulder blades. The moment the breath stops.
The separating is the other half of the month, and it is the part that tends to land hardest. A good deal of what people take to be their own character turns out to be a response that was learned, under pressure, in order to manage somebody else. Once you can tell which is which, there is a choice where there was not one before.
Month 2, Unbind: TRE for trauma release, Internal Family Systems, boundary recalibration. The parts of you that learned to fawn, freeze, or fight begin to find new options. Boundaries start to become something you feel rather than something you think about.
Unbind does the most and looks the least impressive from outside.
Fawn, freeze and fight are not flaws. Every one of them worked. Each kept somebody safe in a situation where the alternatives were worse. The trouble is that they are now running in a kitchen, in a work meeting, in a conversation with somebody who has done nothing wrong.
What changes is not that they stop. It is that they stop being the only option. A body with 3 responses available behaves completely differently from a body with 1.
Boundary recalibration is the part people expect to be a script, and it is not. A boundary you have thought your way to has to be remembered and defended every single time, and it fails on the first tired evening. A boundary you can feel does not need defending. You simply notice that the answer is no, before the part of you that manages has got its coat on.
Month 3, Unbound: integration, intuition strengthening, personal rebuilding map. This is usually where your inner guidance system starts to come back online. The final month is about consolidation, making sure the changes are stable, your practices are sustainable, and your signal is clear.
Unbound is consolidation, and the reason it gets a whole month to itself is that this is where work of this kind most often comes quietly undone.
Something shifts, the relief is real, and everybody stops. Then a hard month arrives, the old response turns up on cue, and the conclusion is that none of it ever worked. What actually happened is that nothing was ever made durable.
So the third month is deliberately unexciting. It is practising the new thing while nothing is wrong, which is the only time it can be practised, because the moment something is wrong you will reach for whatever is most familiar.
This programme is not gentle encouragement. It is structured nervous system work, delivered with care by someone who has walked the same road.
What that means in practice is that there is something to do between sessions. Not worksheets. Small things, most days, which take minutes rather than an hour. That is also why the voice notes exist.
The voice notes are the least glamorous part of it and they do a great deal. A pattern does not show up in a session. It shows up on a Thursday, in a car park, after a phone call. Being able to say that out loud within the hour, while it is still live, is worth more than describing it 6 days later with the edges filed off.
So the ordinary week inside it looks like this. One session. One short practice most days. One or 2 voice notes when something happens.
That is the whole commitment. It is not a retreat and it does not ask you to rearrange your life around it.
It is also worth being honest about what it is not for.
It is not for anybody who wants to be told what to do. The structure is mine and the content is yours, and none of it works without you noticing things.
Work like this is also not the first thing to reach for in the middle of an acute crisis, where what is needed first is safety and practical help rather than 12 weeks of structured work.
And it is not for somebody looking for a conclusion. There is no certificate at the end of it. What there is at the end of it is a clearer signal, and a shorter gap between something happening and you coming back.
More like this.
TRE, Brainspotting and Flash EMDR, what they actually are, in plain language. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/tre-brainspotting-and-flash-emdr-what-they-actually-are-in-plain-language
The coaching quiz, your starting point in 5 questions. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/the-coaching-quiz-your-starting-point-in-five-questions
The Reset, 6 weeks that actually change something. https://www.annalouwellness.com/work-and-money/the-reset-six-weeks-that-actually-change-something
If you want to know whether it is right for you, write to me at anna@annalouoflondon.com or message me on https://wa.me/447738470156. We start with whatever is going on for you.