Last week I attended Transform Trauma Oxford, surrounded by some of the leading voices in trauma, neuroscience, psychology and emotional wellbeing. Nearly 4,000 people had travelled from around the world to hear more than 100 speakers, including Dr Gabor Maté, Dr Tara Swart, Bessel van der Kolk, Richard Schwartz and many others, all brought together around one central theme:

Science, Spirit and the Body – The Synthesis of Healing. And that word synthesis stayed with me.

Because the deeper our understanding of human behaviour becomes, the harder it is to place it neatly into one box. It isn’t only cognitive. It isn’t only emotional. It isn’t only neurological. It isn’t only physical. And perhaps it isn’t only spiritual either. We are whole human beings.

And increasingly, the conversation around trauma, behaviour and emotional change is moving beyond talking therapies alone. There was so much focus throughout the conference on the body. On the nervous system. On the younger child. On the coping strategies we created to survive. On spirituality. On the ways we numb what we do not yet know how to feel. And, for me, much of it felt extremely relevant to leadership.

Because when we talk about patterns, we are not only talking about people in obvious distress. We are also talking about successful people. Leaders. CEOs. Founders. Public figures. People who appear outwardly confident, capable and high functioning.

The person who freezes in a difficult conversation. The founder who cannot switch off. The leader who controls every detail because delegation feels deeply uncomfortable. The executive who overthinks decisions long after everyone else has moved on. The high achiever who keeps pushing because slowing down feels unsafe.

From the outside, these can look like personality traits. But sometimes they are patterns. And sometimes those patterns were formed a very long time ago.

The Pattern That Once Protected You

Dr Gabor Maté spoke to an audience member about the freeze response and the younger child who may not have received the comfort, support or emotional attunement they needed. This is something I work on regularly with my own clients.

Imagine a small child who is overwhelmed. They cannot leave. They cannot make sense of what is happening. They cannot necessarily explain what they need. So they do the best thing they can. They freeze. They shut down. They disconnect. They protect themselves.

And at the time, that response may have been incredibly intelligent. The problem is that decades later, the same response can still appear.

• Perhaps you freeze when conflict arises.
• Perhaps you withdraw.
• Perhaps you overthink instead of acting.
• Perhaps you become highly controlled.
• Perhaps you people-please.

And then what do we do? We get cross with ourselves. We tell ourselves to stop being ridiculous. To get over it. To pull ourselves together. To be more confident. In a strange way, we end up scolding the very part of ourselves that once did such a good job of keeping us safe.

And this is where I think we need to change the question. Instead of asking:

“Why am I like this?”

My favourite question to ask is:

“What happened that makes this response make perfect sense?”

That question changes the energy completely. It moves us from judgement to curiosity.

Why Understanding Alone Is Not Always Enough

Another theme that came through strongly was the importance of working with the body, not only the thinking mind. Poppy Delbridge demonstrated rapid tapping her own form of work related to the EFT techniques I use and showed how emotional charge can be shifted through the body rather than only analysed cognitively.

That matters. Because many people understand themselves extremely well. They know why they do what they do. They know where their perfectionism came from. They know why rejection triggers them. They know why they struggle to say no. They know the story. And yet the reaction still happens.

That is because intellectual understanding and emotional change are not always the same thing. You can know something logically while your nervous system is still responding as if the old threat is present. This is why, in my own work, I often combine understanding with EFT, inner-child work and other techniques designed to help someone experience the pattern differently rather than simply think about it differently. We decode the pattern. Then we begin to create a new response.

Rewiring What We Notice

Dr Tara Swart spoke about neuroplasticity and the brain’s capacity to create new pathways through repeated attention and experience. She spoke about the research done on the value of noticing beauty.

Nature. Art. Music. Something that makes us pause. It sounds almost too simple in a world that loves complicated solutions bit the results showed 20% reduction in cortisol

It matters. If your brain has become extremely efficient at scanning for threat, pressure, deadlines or what might go wrong, then consciously noticing something beautiful introduces a different input. Not because we pretend the difficult things are not there. But because we only look at things of beauty when we are not under life threatening attack. So shifting you focus to something beautiful tells your body you are no longer in fight flight freeze mode

Repeated experiences matter. What we practise matters. Where we place our attention matters. This is part of what I mean when I talk about recoding. Once we understand and begin to release an old emotional pattern, we also need to practise a different one.

What Are We Trying Not to Feel?

Ruth Cohn explored the ways human beings numb pain through alcohol, drugs and other behaviours rather than addressing what sits underneath. And again, this made me think about how differently numbing can appear in high-performing environments.

Not everyone numbs through substances. Some people numb through work. Achievement. Busyness. Exercise. Scrolling. Food. Constant stimulation. Even helping everyone else.

Some of the most socially rewarded behaviours can still function as avoidance. That is why looking underneath the behaviour matters.

The question is not always:

“How do I stop doing this?”

Sometimes it is:

“What feeling does this behaviour help me avoid?”

The Field Is Changing

The more I listened throughout Transform Trauma Oxford, the more encouraged I felt by the direction these conversations are taking. I am not a doctor, and my role is very different. But I found it fascinating to hear so many of the themes I work with every week being explored openly by leading voices in the field.

Helping someone understand why they freeze. Helping them connect with a younger part of themselves. Using the body to release an emotional response rather than only analyse it. Recognising the patterns underneath behaviour. Creating new neural pathways. Exploring meaning, connection and spirituality alongside science.

We are moving beyond the idea that human beings can simply think their way out of everything. And for me, that is incredibly exciting. Because human beings are complicated. We need different approaches at different times.

Sometimes we need to understand. Sometimes we need to feel. Sometimes we need to regulate. Sometimes we need to release. Sometimes we need to ask for help.

Dr Gabor Maté mentioned one of my favourite books, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, quoting the line:

“The bravest thing to do is ask for help.”

He shared that he had started working with a therapist himself just three weeks earlier. There was something wonderfully human about that. A reminder that no matter how much we know, how much experience we have or how much we help others, we still have blind spots. And perhaps we need different forms of support in different seasons of our lives. That applies to all of us. Including leaders. Perhaps especially leaders. Because carrying responsibility does not make us immune to being human.