My Story
For over 25 years, my work has centred around the body; how it holds, adapts, protects, and communicates. I’ve studied and practised across soft tissue therapy, the nervous system, breath, movement, and the brain–gut connection. Alongside this, I’ve been a mother, guiding my children from babyhood through toddler yoga, pony club workshops, and into the complex emotional landscape of adolescence.
Yet despite decades of professional experience, it has been the last few years, lived, not learned, that created the true lightbulb moment.
I now know, with absolute clarity, how I can support parents who are navigating teenage overwhelm while holding down jobs, running households, and trying desperately to keep everyone afloat. Because I have been there.
Why Parenting Teens Is So Different Now
The teenage years have always been a time of transition, but the landscape today is unrecognisable compared to my own adolescence.
Smartphones. Social media. The pandemic. Constant comparison. Academic pressure. A nervous system that never truly switches off.
Add hormones and emotional development into the mix, and many teens are left in a state of chronic overload, often stuck in freeze mode. From the outside it can look like withdrawal, defiance, anxiety, or physical symptoms that make no sense medically. Inside, their system is simply overwhelmed.
This is the reality so many families are living with.
A Family Year That Changed Everything
I used to write a yearly letter to friends and distant family, a January reflection, sent by post, knowing that January can be a quieter month for taking stock and catching breath after Christmas.
This year, I’m reflecting here.
2024 was extraordinary, and incredibly hard.
Our family faced:
- School counsellors and escalating GCSE anxiety
- Extreme self-harm and A&E visits
- Trauma affecting both daughters; one in pain, one traumatised by witnessing it
- Complete withdrawal from school, returning only for exams and results
- A boyfriend breakup
- Low self-esteem and a deep sense of worthlessness
- Transitioning into Sixth Form
- Psychiatrists and an ADHD diagnosis
- Medication that proved too strong, followed by no medication at all
Alongside this, my younger daughter began showing signs of OCD, alongside persistent nausea, bloating, and IBS-like symptoms. GP visits, blood tests, and referrals all came back idiopathic, no clear cause, no answers.
As a parent whose partner works away most of the time, I wasn’t coping well.
When the Pressure Continued
In 2025, the pressures did not ease.
My then 16-year-old was groomed online. Thankfully, she showed me the messages. We went to the police, an experience that was not as reassuring as I had hoped. Another mother later identified the same man targeting her daughter, leading to a second police report.
Children’s Advice Team referrals followed. CAMHS referrals. And eventually, support arrived in the form of:
- An exceptional psychologist
- A wonderful family support worker
- Self-referral to The Cart Shed for Spring/Summer support
At the same time, I took a long, honest look at myself.
I realised I needed to practise what I share with my clients.
And slowly, we began to turn a corner.
My Professional Breaking Point - and Breakthrough
While all of this was happening at home, I was also struggling professionally.
In March, I presented my research findings at the World Congress on Advances in Mental Health, Addiction Medicine and Neuroscience in Amsterdam. I did this because I genuinely believe I can make a difference.
What I didn’t yet have was the how.
A turning point came unexpectedly at a free business event with Adam Stott at The Green Dragon in Hereford. It gave me a glimmer of hope, not just for my business, but for how to communicate what I know in a way that helps families now.
Over the past year, I invested deeply in myself, learning modern tools to share a message that feels urgent and necessary.
What the Body Has Always Been Telling Me
As a soft tissue practitioner, I’ve spent decades observing how people carry life inside their bodies.
We store experiences, emotional and physical; as tension, pain, illness, and dysregulation. Chronic pain. Auto-immune conditions. Persistent stress. They are not random. In clinic I often refer to them as life’s souvenirs!
There’s a phrase I often come back to:
“An elephant never forgets, he knots his trunk.”
The body is the same. It does not forget. It knots, tightens, and adapts to survive. And if those knots are never unwound, we grow into dysregulated adults.
This is echoed by thinkers and clinicians such as Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No) and Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score).
After all these years, I can read what the body is telling me. I may not know someone’s history, but I can see it in how they sit, sleep, eat, breathe, and move, in what systems are no longer communicating effectively.
Why the Teen Regulation Method Exists
This is what I now know I must share.
We need to regulate our teens so they can become regulated adults.
Not just to reduce emotional explosions now, but to prevent chronic pain, chronic dis-ease, and auto-immune conditions later in life.
The tools are not ‘out there’.
They are already within us.
The Teen Regulation Method exists to help parents reconnect with their own nervous systems, so their teens can do the same.
And when regulation returns, connection follows.
If this story resonates with you, you are not alone. And there is a way forward.
