Something has been shifting in me for a while now. And I’ve been quiet about it – sitting with it, turning it over and it’s time to share it.
I want to tell you why I’m evolving , what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what you can expect from me going forward. Because if you’ve been following me for a while or if you’re new here, I want you to meet me as I actually am.
The Therapist who had all the tools. Sixteen years ago, I began my career as a Psychotherapist. I trained in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, then in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, EMDR, Compassion Focussed Therapy and mindfulness. I worked in the NHS (and still do). I have built a private practice. I became a specialist in chronic pain – a subject that lit me up professionally in a way nothing else had. Evidence-based and compassionate is the heart of my work. I help people, support them and I watch them move from paralysed by pain to participating in their lives again. That is real and it matters and I’m proud of it.
But something was missing. And for a long time, I couldn’t quite name it. I had all the clinical tools, and wondered, what other training do I really need?! What I was missing was not another modality of therapy, but permission to show up as my whole self. What my own body has been teaching me. I have hEDS – hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. My joints have always been bendy, always a bit unreliable, always causing a background hum of pain that I’d learned to manage and mostly ignore. In my twenties it was my knees. During pregnancy, a slipped disc that never fully healed. Then the gradual recognition that this wasn’t just “being injury prone”, there was a name for it, a diagnosis (not that it is easy to get a diagnosis these days!), people who understood. And then, more recently, perimenopause arrived (joy!). Quietly at first , a shift in sleep, a new kind of fatigue, a hormonal unpredictability that made my nervous system feel like it was tuned to a frequency I didn’t recognise. I found myself navigating something my training hadn’t fully prepared me for. Because knowing the neuroscience of something and living inside it are very different experiences.
All the while, I watched my mum. She has lived with chronic pain for over 25 years. I have seen her at her lowest – struggling to move, struggling to cope – and I have seen her build something beautiful from it. A life shaped by her values, not defined by her pain. She is my biggest inspiration and her courage and resilience is threaded through everything I do.
T H E C O L D W A T E R M O M E N T
The moment things started to shift. December 2024, I got into cold water swimming. At weekends, when I could fit it into family life, mainly in the Peak District, a lake or a river, whatever was nearby. The first time I stood at the edge I thought: this is completely ridiculous. I’m a Psychotherapist, I’m supposed to recommend this kind of thing, not actually do it at 1 degree in December (although I don’t think I ever suggested someone do this in these conditions!!).
But I got in. And something happened in my nervous system that no amount of clinical training had quite achieved. The shock of the cold forced me into my breath. My mind -which is usually running at pace, planning, analysing, processing – went quiet. For a few minutes, I was entirely in my body. Not fighting it. Not managing it. Just in it.
I went home feeling lighter than I had in months. And I started to understand something: I had been helping clients reconnect with their bodies for years – but I hadn’t fully done it myself.
The gap between knowing and living. Here’s what I’ve come to understand: evidence-based therapy is extraordinary. CBT, ACT, EMDR – these aren’t just tools I use with clients. They are genuinely transformative, and I believe in them completely. This is not me walking away from any of that. But I had been presenting a version of myself in my work that was incomplete. The Sheena who turns up in the professional context, the one with the credentials and the structured sessions and the evidence base – she’s real. But so is the Sheena who has crystals on her windowsill, who adds essential oils to her diffuser and always has oils in her bag, who finds something deeply medicinal about standing barefoot in the Peak District when everything feels like too much.
I’ve stopped seeing practices like cold water swimming and essential oils as separate from my evidence-based approach. For me, they are part of a holistic picture of wellbeing- supporting the nervous system in ways that are both scientifically interesting and deeply nourishing for the soul. These things aren’t contradictions. For a long time I treated them as if they were, as if admitting I found comfort in something that isn’t published in a peer-reviewed journal would undermine my clinical credibility. As if I had to choose between science and soul. I don’t. And neither do you.
You don’t have to choose between the science and the soul. The most powerful healing happens when they work together.
What I’ve realised about the women I help
The women who come to me aren’t just looking for CBT. They’re looking for someone who gets it. Who has felt the particular exhaustion of living in a body that doesn’t cooperate. Who knows what it’s like to grieve the life you had before your diagnosis. Who understands that some days the most radical act of self-care is not a structured thought record – it’s going outside and putting your feet on the grass and remembering that you are a living creature who belongs to the earth.
They’re also looking for permission. Permission to want more than just “managing” their pain. Permission to grieve what they’ve lost. Permission to build something genuinely beautiful alongside the hard stuff. Permission to stop surviving and start rising. That permission -I want to give it. And to give it authentically, I have to stop managing my own presentation quite so carefully.
So what is actually changing?
Honestly? Less than you might think – and more than it might appear on the surface. The clinical work stays. I’m still a BABCP accredited Psychotherapist. I still use CBT, ACT, and EMDR. I still believe fiercely in evidence-based practice. One-to-one therapy continues, exactly as before.
What’s changing is how fully I show up. Here’s what that looks like in practice: I’ll be sharing more of my personal experience – the hEDS, the perimenopause, the practices that genuinely help me alongside the clinical tools. I’ll be talking about cold water swimming and nature and essential oils and all the things that belong in a holistic picture of wellbeing – with the neuroscience to back them up, because it’s there. I’m developing something new – for any woman who has lost herself to illness, pain, hormonal change, or simply the weight of life. More on that soon.
My content will widen. Because chronic pain doesn’t exist in isolation from identity, from grief, from hormones, from meaning. And neither do the women I work with. I’ll be showing up as one whole person – not the clinical version and the real version as separate selves, but both at once.
A word about you
If you’ve been following me because you found my chronic pain content helpful – you’re still in the right place. That work continues and deepens.
If you’re here because something in your body or your life has left you feeling lost and you’re not quite sure this is the right space – I want you to know that it is. You belong here exactly as you are, with whatever you’re carrying. If you’re a woman navigating perimenopause, or a diagnosis that has rearranged your sense of self, or simply the quiet devastation of waking up one day and not recognising the life you’re living – this space is for you. You don’t need a specific diagnosis. You just need to be ready, in whatever small way, to begin finding your way back to yourself.
That’s the work. That’s always been the work. I’m just ready to show more of how I do it – and why. I’m genuinely excited about what’s coming. Not in a performed, marketing-copy way – but in the way that feels a bit vulnerable and a bit like standing at the edge of the cold water again. Knowing something good is on the other side of the discomfort.
Thank you for being here. For reading this far. For being curious enough about your own healing to spend time in spaces like this one. If something in this post has resonated with you, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me an email, find me on Instagram (@the_pain_therapist), or simply bookmark this and come back to it when you need it. That’s what it’s here for.
With warmth,
Sheena
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