The solution to helping women heal shame resides in the nervous system

Research increasingly suggests that if you are trying to treat your trauma solely by talking about it, your healing is going to be limited.

Somatic coaching is fast becoming one of the most sought after modalities for healing worldwide. Somatic means body oriented, so in somatic coaching we explore beyond the cognitive mind. This means diving into the unconscious, the implicit memories that are stored in a person’s physiology, which block them from achieving their goals. My role as a somatic coach is to help people uncover and transform the unconscious limiting beliefs that are defining every single choice that they make: their career path, their relationships, health and more importantly, how they relate to themselves.

I believe it is the type of coaching you didn’t know you needed: here’s why.

Growing up as a teenager and into my early 20’s, I suffered with chronic anxiety. My sense of worth was low, and it was tightly bound to achievement and perfectionism. Pushing myself to burnout was normal for me, and I struggled daily with body dysmorphia. On a nervous system level, I was living in survival mode. Then at the age 21, I had an accident while travelling in Bali and almost suffered a serious spinal injury. With a nervous system that was already at breaking point, this experience almost broke me. It was a pivotal moment for me - I knew something had to change. In the following months after the accident I discovered Pilates, which helped me heal from the physical pain and restored my posture. I became so inspired by the Pilates method that I decided to move to London to become a teacher.

When I moved to London in my mid 20’s to train as a Pilates teacher, I started to develop an interest in the nervous system. I was fascinated by people, and the ways in which they moved, breathed and held themselves through their posture. One thing I noticed was that no matter how much stretching they did in session, certain clients would always return with chronically tight muscles. I knew there was something deeper occurring that exercise alone couldn’t cure. I came across somatic coaching, and my life began to change.

Over the course of some months, I started to feel more secure and resilient. I felt more confident in who I was, and I started to believe that I was loveable and worthy. I was more connected to my emotions and in turn, I felt more connected to life as a whole. I began to trust myself and my decisions, which enabled me to set stronger boundaries. The most important thing that I learnt was that as a woman, when I’m connected to my emotions, I’m connected to my power. I learnt that everything I had been avoiding feeling held the key to my liberation.

This meant: In order to feel more confident, I needed to embrace the parts of me that felt insecure. In order to feel happy, I had to nurture the sadness I had been avoiding. In order to experience deeper intimacy, I first needed to connect to and heal the parts within myself that didn’t feel worthy of love.

I needed to stretch my capacity to feel the loneliness and sadness I had suppressed, so that I could re-train myself to experience more joy, pleasure, happiness, and love. I had to face the darkness within me head on, in order to amplify the version of me that wanted to shine brightly and be seen in the world.

My journey to healing is what fuels my mission.

From a young age, many girls are taught, whether directly or subtly, to be agreeable, accommodating, and self-sacrificing. Over time, this creates an internal conflict where authentic feelings are suppressed in order to maintain connection and approval.

Patterns such as imposter syndrome, anxiety, low self-worth, perfectionism, people pleasing, hyper-vigilance and comparison are common amongst women. They aren’t flaws: they are intelligent survival strategies that are reinforced over time when the nervous system remains dysregulated. At the root of these survival strategies is chronic shame.

Chronic shame plays a central role in keeping women within the boundaries of what is considered acceptable, but at a cost. In addition to this, it is further compounded by cultural and social conditioning, which teaches women to disconnect from their instincts, bodies, and authentic expression, often within a limited ideology of what it means to be a woman. A world where being “too much” or “not enough” carries consequences.

Many of the women I work with appear highly capable and seem to function well in ‘productivity mode’, yet internally they feel disconnected, exhausted and deeply self-critical. They find themselves stuck in cycles of over-functioning and people-pleasing which when sustained over time, impacts their hormonal balance, immune function, and overall health. When generations of women before them have also experienced emotional suppression, trauma, and disconnection from self, these patterns are carried forward through epigenetics.

Chronic shame is a physiological response in the nervous system, which causes inflammation due to the body being in a constant sate of threat. This is where the link to physical health becomes impossible to ignore.

Women represent around 80% of the population worldwide diagnosed with autoimmune conditions. Research now shows that trauma plays a key role in the causes of such conditions.

As the pace and demands of modern life intensify, this work matters for women now more than ever.

Women are expected to hold multiple roles without adequate support or space for rest and regulation: they are starved of oxytocin, the main regulator for the female nervous system. Healing, therefore, is not just cognitive, but somatic: it requires working directly with the nervous system to move out of survival states and into regulation, embodiment, and self-trust.

I am a somatic coach, and my mission is to help as many women as possible heal their nervous systems so they can have deeply meaningful relationships and a fulfilling career, whilst embodying a strong and confident sense of self.

Addressing these problems is not about “fixing” women, but about recognising and creating new environments and conditions that foster safety, expression, and balance. As women reconnect with their bodies, restore boundaries, and reclaim suppressed parts of themselves, the impact extends beyond the individual and into families, communities, and future generations, making this work not only personal, but deeply collective.