About me
Most of the people I work with look, from the outside, like they are coping.
The job gets done. The relationships hold. There is nothing anyone else would point at. But underneath, something does not match. You feel anxious, or flat, or a long way away from your own life. You read a room before you enter it. You apologise for things that were never yours. You cannot rest, even when there is nothing left to do.
Some people arrive because the coping has just stopped working. That is not too late. It is usually the beginning.
You have probably tried to think your way out of it. Most capable people do. You understand your childhood. You can explain it clearly and calmly, without getting upset. And it has not changed what your body does on a Thursday afternoon.
What I mean by trauma
Most people hear the word trauma and picture one terrible event. A crash. An assault. Something with a date attached.
That is one kind. It is not the kind most of the people I work with bring.
More often the difficulty was not an event but a pattern. Years of it, usually starting young, usually inside a relationship you could not leave. A parent whose mood set the temperature of the house. Love that came with conditions. Being needed rather than seen. Often nothing you could point to and call abuse. Just a long stretch of childhood spent working out what kept you safe, and then doing that. This is the kind sometimes called complex trauma.
Children in that situation are clever. They learn fast. Go quiet. Be useful. Need very little. Get it right the first time.
Those are not character flaws. They were the correct answer to the question you were being asked. The problem is that the question changed and the answer did not. So you are forty-five, sitting in a meeting with people who are not a threat, and your body is still scanning the room.
Why insight has not been enough
If you have had therapy before and found it useful without it quite reaching this, there is a reason, and it is not that you did it wrong. Understanding why you flinch does not stop the flinch. What you learned, you learned in a relationship, when you were small, from someone whose reactions you could not predict. That is where the lesson went in, and it tends to be where it comes back out.
How I work
Slowly.
I do not push for answers, go looking for the worst thing that ever happened to you, or assume I know what is going on. With trauma, speed is usually the enemy. A nervous system that spent years bracing does not soften because someone asks it to. So we work at the pace your body will actually allow, paying attention to what shows up in it, and to what is hard to stay with.
The other half is the relationship itself. Being in one where the old rules do not apply. Where you are not reading me for signs. Where going quiet is allowed, and so is not going quiet. It is slower than insight, and it is the part that holds.
Something you can use today
Next time the feeling arrives, notice the order. The body moves first. The chest tightens, the stomach drops, the shoulders come up. The story arrives second, and it arrives sounding like the truth. "I have annoyed them." "I am going to be found out." It is not the truth. It is the alarm explaining itself. You do not have to argue with the story. Just notice that it turned up second.
Working together
I see people in person at Water Lane Cottage in Bishop's Stortford, and online by video across the UK. You do not need to arrive knowing what the problem is, or have a diagnosis, or a crisis, or a story bad enough to qualify. If something feels heavier than it should, that is enough.
If you would like to find out whether working together feels right, I offer a free 20-minute call. No pressure and no commitment. I write in more depth about the survival cycle and how these patterns work at rinomanzo.com.
Training, qualifications & experience
I am a qualified counsellor (CPCAB TC-L4) and trauma-informed. I am a Registered Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (MBACP) and an Accredited Registrant of the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society (MNCPS (Acc.).
My work is grounded in relational and trauma-informed practice, with particular attention to what happens in the body rather than only what is understood in the mind. I work within the BACP Ethical Framework and receive regular clinical supervision.
Alongside my clinical work, I write about the survival cycle: the sequence by which a present-day trigger produces a body response, a survival response, and then a story that explains it. Much of what I do with clients is helping them see that sequence in their own lives, in real time, rather than only in hindsight.
Member organisations
school Registered / Accredited
Being registered/accredited with a professional body means an individual must have achieved a substantial level of training and experience approved by their member organisation.
The National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society This Not For Profit association of counsellors and psychotherapists aim to support the counselling profession, members and training organisations. In 2013 the NCS register was accredited by the Professional Standards Authority under the Accredited Voluntary Register Scheme. Accredited by the Professional Standards Authority.
Accredited register membership
The Accredited Register Scheme was set up in 2013 by the Department of Health (DoH) as a way to recognise organisations that hold voluntary registers which meet certain standards. These standards are set by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA).
This therapist has indicated that they belong to an Accredited Register.
Areas of counselling I deal with
Therapies offered
Fees
£70.00 per session
Further information
I work almost entirely with adults carrying trauma from childhood: people who look as though they are coping and cannot work out why they feel braced, flat, or disconnected underneath it. Often the presenting issue is anxiety, people-pleasing, shutdown, or a sense of not being real, and the pattern underneath it is older than the situation that seems to have caused it.
