There is a sentence I hear in my therapy room almost every week. A client will be in the middle of describing something that happened to them, and right in the middle of saying it, they will stop and say — but my parents did their best. They say it in a particular way: not as a complete sentence in itself, but as a guard rail. As something they are putting up between themselves and the wound they just started to describe.

What I usually say to them, very gently, is something like this. They probably did. Your parents probably did do their best. And you were also hurt. Both of those can be true. They are not in competition. You don’t have to choose between them.

This somatic talk — drawing on inner child work, polyvagal informed somatic practice, and the systemic frame of Family Constellations — is about that moment. About the two voices that live in most of us: the adult voice that wants to be fair to our parents, that has perspective and context, and the wounded voice that didn’t get what it needed and is still, often without our noticing, carrying that. The work is not to make them agree. The work is to let them both speak.

Guided by Abi Beri — Integrative Therapist and Nervous System Specialist (Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & online) — this is for anyone who has been quietly forcing themselves to choose between loving their parents and acknowledging that they were hurt. You don’t have to. They loved you. They hurt you. Both. Real. Allowed.

Looking for a somatic therapist for inner child work, complicated grief about parents, attachment wounds or the two-voices work in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge or online from anywhere in Ireland or the world? More at somatictherapyireland.com and blissfulevolution.com.

Welcome. This is a guided practice for building safety from the inside out. Most safe space meditations ask you to imagine a place where you feel safe. For some people this works beautifully. For others — and I suspect some of you are in this group — it doesn’t. The imagination doesn’t quite produce a felt sense. The body doesn’t quite believe the image. If that hasbeen your experience, you are not failing the practice. You are simply someone for whom safety is going to come differently. Not from a place you imagine, but from a quality of attention you offer yourself. Safety, in the end, is not a location. It is a kind of company.

Guided by Abi Beri — Integrative Therapist and Nervous System Specialist (Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & online) — this practice draws on EMDR safe-place resourcing (Francine Shapiro), Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine), polyvagal-informed care (Stephen Porges), and the self-compassion lineage (Kristin Neff, Tara Brach). We build safety by becoming the safe presence ourselves — by offering, to whatever is inside us in this moment, the kind of company that creates safety simply through being there.

If you’d like to work more deeply with the inner ones, with safety-building somatic resourcing, or with the older material that often surfaces when safety is finally available — in person across Dublin and Kildare or online globally — more at somatictherapyireland.com and blissfulevolution.com.

The body keeps the score. The body also keeps hope. The same plasticity that took on the trauma is taking on the present moment. The doom-half of this conversation has been louder than the rest. This talk says the rest. A long-form Sacred Talk on what van der Kolk's original argument actually was, what the doom framing costs, what plasticity really means, what hope in-the-body looks like in real work, and what changes when you hold both halves of the sentence together.

Abi Beri | Integrative Therapist | Family Constellation Facilitator | Nervous System Specialist.