Towan Therapies

15/11/2025

14/11/2025

Whilst having a quick walk on the beach this evening to regulate from the particularly heavy week and afternoon I’ve had this brought me a little bit of love and joy so I thought I would share. ❤️
Life seems to be particularly unsettling and overwhelming at the moment for most people I meet both personally and professionally - capturing little moments to reflect, breath and tune into your authentic self makes all the difference.

08/11/2025

Some people feel emotions intensely — but struggle to recognise, label, or explain what those feelings are. They can say things like “I don’t know”, shutting down, going quiet, or becoming overwhelmed very quickly.

It’s a difference in how the brain processes and understands internal emotional signals - working through this with clients and finding ways to expand their ability to recognise process and communicate their emotions is a big part of the work we do in sessions.

Some young people feel emotions intensely — but struggle to recognise, label, or explain what those feelings are. When I first came across it in a young person I was supporting it was baffling - until through research I found alexithymia - and the young person went on to obtain a diagnosis.

This can look like “I don’t know”, shutting down, going quiet, or becoming overwhelmed very quickly.

This isn’t a lack of feelings.
It’s a difference in how the brain processes and understands internal emotional signals.

If you’re supporting a child or teen who finds it hard to express what’s going on inside, the Managing Big Feelings Toolkit can help with visual emotion check-ins, co-regulation strategies, and gentle language prompts. Link in comments below ⬇️ or via Linktree Shop in Bio.

07/11/2025

🩶 Every Pair Tells a Story 🩶

A space for families to share their SEND journeys.

If you’ve ever had to fight for support, wait endlessly for an EHCP, or watch your child struggle in a system that was meant to help them, your story matters.

You can now share your child’s experience on their website so it becomes part of the Every Pair Tells a Story movement. Each story will appear publicly on the Story Wall, helping to show the true scale of what families are facing across the UK.

You do not have to use your child’s real name and you do not have to include a location. The only things that are needed are a name, which can be made up, your story, and consent for it to be shared. Everything else is completely optional.

👉 Add your story here: https://www.sendsanctuaryuk.co.uk/every-pair-tells-a-story/share-your-child-s-story/
💚 One story is too many, but together we can make them impossible to ignore.

🩶 Every Pair Tells a Story 🩶

We’ve opened a space for families to share their SEND journeys.

If you’ve ever had to fight for support, wait endlessly for an EHCP, or watch your child struggle in a system that was meant to help them, your story matters.

You can now share your child’s experience on our website so it becomes part of the Every Pair Tells a Story movement. Each story will appear publicly on the Story Wall, helping to show the true scale of what families are facing across the UK.

You do not have to use your child’s real name and you do not have to include a location. The only things that are needed are a name, which can be made up, your story, and consent for it to be shared. Everything else is completely optional.

👉 Add your story here: https://www.sendsanctuaryuk.co.uk/every-pair-tells-a-story/share-your-child-s-story/
💚 One story is too many, but together we can make them impossible to ignore.

05/11/2025

With Christmas around the corner 🥳 the updated version of making the festive season more manageable is well worth a look at.

The expanded and updated second edition of A Community Guide to a Happy Neurodivergent Christmas is out tomorrow!

It's 78 pages of information, ideas, experiences and validation from dozens of neurodivergent advocates, parents and professionals - and it's completely free.

The new edition features an even wider range of identities and experiences to make it relevant to the situations of as many people as possible.

It's designed to support neurodivergent people and families, while also helping neurotypical professionals and family members to understand and empathise with the range of challenges Christmas presents. There are lots of tips about how to do better too.

Grateful thanks to all the contributors who include:
Laura Hellfeld Neurodivergent Nurse Consulting
Tribe around the table
Jill Holly - NeuroDiversity University
Bex Milgate Psychotherapy And Psychoeducation
Aurora Consulting
GROVE - Online Community for Autistic Young People
Neurodiverse Journeys
Nicola Reekie of The PDA Space
Dr Joanne - Neurodivergent Educational Psychologist
Viv Dawes Autistic Advocate
Black Cat Counselling
Joanna Grace Tsp
Munira - Children's Occupational Therapist
Callum Brazzo Autistic Led of Autistic Lincs - Empowerment, Collaboration and Community
Jodie Clarke, Children's Well-being Practitioner & Autism Specialist
Tigger Pritchard: Neuroaffirming Advocate, Consultant and Trainer
Liz Evans - The Untypical OT
Helen Autistic Realms
Jo Gaunt
Autistically Scott
Chameleon Coaching
NDwise Hub
NT in a ND World
Scottish Ethnic Minority Autistics CIC
Emergent Divergence: The neurodivergent ramblings of David Gray-Hammond
Reframing Autism
Spilling the Tea on Autism and ADHD
And more!

Enter your email at https://jadefarrington.substack.com to receive your free copy on Thursday 6th November.

04/11/2025

An awareness of our own emotions that we often have learnt to shut down and ignore is one of the first steps to better emotional regulation. I love supporting clients with developing this awareness and finding more efficient and healthier ways to understand and manage their emotions.

DBTSkills. Emotions/Emotion Regulation.
Emotions are crucial in navigating everyday life. Many of life's problems can be solved or eased by better emotional awareness/regulation.

"I need a drink after that"
"The day I've had.."
"She made me so angry"
"He had such road rage .."
"It's like treading on eggshells coming home from
school/college/work''...

Emotional awareness is key to emotion regulation.

Then not needing to change the way we feel with anger outbursts, unhealthy lifestyle choices :drink, drugs, feeding our feelings, overeating, spending, shopping, gambling, other forms of self harm.

Most of us have a more than reasonable grasp on emotional literacy.

We know that we need the so called ' negative emotions' as much as the feel good 'positive emotions'.

If we've never experienced sadness then we wouldn't know joy.
[ ie :the movie Inside Out and its sequel].
Yet still we go about our day, or many of us do - blaming external issues for rising levels of stress, overwhelm, reactivity.

[Image credit : Brene Brown who adapted the seminal work of Wilcox, Plutchik & Zinker]

03/11/2025

Always an extremely emotive time when it’s affected your own family life for so long and so deeply as well as the majority of client’s you work with. Unmet SEN and school trauma is having such a significant impact on our children and families we desperately need change.

This is a National campaign where each pair of shoes represented a child who has been failed by the system, and was labelled with a description of its young owner’s personal experience in education or of the education system.

03/11/2025

https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/shoes-protest-powerful-sign-cornwall-10618886?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwZnRzaAN1_htleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHrzHGzEE8h-egke2l0AQlOCgOh9oLOX9uJpXm-48yBGaElBziD-6zOB15P12_aem_zb4N8ttEGCKYvirqeI5u2A =1762190776

'There are thousands of children that we are speaking for today because they can't'

29/10/2025

I don’t talk or post much about couples therapy; which is one of my favourite type of sessions with clients - attachment styles and knowing your default style and how to heal to be having a healthier reaction is a core part of couples therapy, but also really important for individual therapy to know and understand why you react like you do.

27/10/2025

I love teaching nervous system responses and how to repair and regulate your systems as part of the psychoeducation in therapy sessions. Supporting clients to learn about themselves and gain greater harmony and peace in their lives is such a beautiful and empowering process.

The autonomic nervous system ladder is adapted from the wonderful Deb Dana’s work.

She highlights our nervous system has three key states:

🔆SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT (PARASYMPATHETIC/ VENTRAL VAGAL)

🔆FIGHT OR FLIGHT (MOBILISATION/ SYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEM)

🔆SHUTDOWN (IMMOBILISATION/ DORSAL VAGAL)

With this ladder, it can help us to get to know our different nervous system states & with knowing these triggers, we can better regulate ourselves.

So for example, we might use the ladder, to notice when we have dropped from ventral vagal, where we feel safe & connected, down to the bottom of the ladder, or as some say - down the dorsal drain, to a place where we feel shut down and disconnected.

We can begin to do things to help bring us back to ventral vagal. Some tips could be:

✨Keeping a trigger log of the times you drop down into mobilized/ immobilised.
✨Get to know what your body does in these times - for example, does your heart race in certain situations or you become all tense?
✨Meet yourself with compassion, your body is adapting to keep you safe!
✨How can you regulate/ or Coregulate - what resources are helpful to you? It can be helpful to have these written down as reminders too.

i teach these skills in my FREE live webinar From Survival to Safety which will teach you all about where you are just now on the ladder and what to do about it

Just say REGULATE & I’ll whizz it your way ❤️
⁣

26/10/2025

100% agree - it would improve so many peoples lives in ways they couldn’t imagine if they accepted this reality of how closely correlated phycial and mental health is

💜 I totally agree with this. 💜