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.

If you collapse exhausted at the end of the day and still can't rest — your mind still going, your body still humming — this talk is for you. You are not lazy. You almost certainly have a nervous system stuck in sympathetic activation that doesn't know how to come off. A long-form Sacred Talk on what the sympathetic trap is, how it gets laid down, the lie of the productive evening, what rest actually requires at the nervous system level, and the slow, real route home.Abi Beri | Integrative Therapist | Family Constellation Facilitator | Nervous System Specialist.

A different kind of body scan. Not to relax, not to release, not to fix. We walk slowly through the body and speak to each part — not about it, to it — as if it were someone we had been away from for a long time. Throughout, we assume that every part of the body that is doing something is doing it for a reason. The body is not malfunctioning. The body is reporting. From the crown of the head to the feet and back, each part receives the missing sentence: I see you. I am here.

Let it go. Three words you have heard your entire life. And if you are honest with yourself, you have probably nodded politely, agreed yes, and then in private completely failed to. This long somatic talk argues that most teachers have not been honest about what letting go actually is.

Letting go is not something you do. It is what becomes possible when the body finally feels safe enough to stop holding. It is the result of conditions, not the result of will. The thing being held is almost never in the head. It is in the body — resentment in the jaw and shoulders, grief in the chest and diaphragm, old shame in the belly, ungrieved anger in the upper arms. Telling someone in their head to let go of something that is being held in their body is, structurally, a category error.

Guided by Abi Beri — Integrative Therapist and Nervous System Specialist (Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & online) — this is for everyone who has been quietly failing at the one piece of advice the entire culture seems to agree on. The work I do is, in many ways, the slow building of the conditions in which the body can finally, on its own terms, exhale.

Looking for somatic therapy in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge or online from anywhere in Ireland or the world? More at somatictherapyireland.com and blissfulevolution.com.

Your mother wound is older than you think. Most of what is written about it stops at the level of your relationship with your mother. The deeper question is just beginning. If you have done some work on the mother wound — read the books, done some therapy, named the patterns — and you are still finding that something underneath does not fully resolve, this hour is for you. The wound that came to you came through your mother, but did not begin with her. It reached her already in motion, given to her by her mother, given to her mother by her mother, and somewhere back in the line, several generations ago, something happened that none of these women fully metabolised. Guided by Abi Beri — Integrative Therapist, Family Constellation Facilitator and Nervous System Specialist (Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & online) — this long somatic talk traces the mother wound backward through the line, drawing primarily on Family Constellations (the Hellinger method), with polyvagal informed practice and inner child work. The frame: you are not a failure of the line. You are its possibility.

For sons as well as daughters — the mother wound is not gendered. Looking for a somatic therapist and family constellation facilitator for the mother wound in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge or online from anywhere in Ireland or the world? More at somatictherapyireland.com, blissfulevolution.com and familyconstellationseurope.com.

Nothing bad happened, really. Your parents loved you. You had food, a roof, no abuse, no addiction in the house. And yet there is a kind of emptiness you can’t account for. A sadness with no story. A sense that something is missing, and you can’t tell anyone what. If that sentence is yours, this hour is for you.

This long somatic talk gives language to what is sometimes clinically called childhood emotional neglect — the work of psychologist Jonice Webb popularised the term — and goes further than the clinical definition. It names the specific kinds of nothing most people are actually describing: the nothing of nobody-asked-how-you-felt, the nothing of don’t-make-a-fuss, the nothing of competent-from-too-young, the nothing of the depressed or anxious or just-checked-out parent. It does this without making your parents villains and without asking you to upgrade your story into something it isn’t.

Guided by Abi Beri — Integrative Therapist and Nervous System Specialist (Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & online) — this is for the dependable ones. The competent ones. The ones who have spent years dismissing themselves because they don’t have the kind of childhood that would make a memoir. The story is missing because the missing was the story. The body remembers, even when the mind has nothing topoint to.