welcome

COACHING TO HELP YOU MASTER YOUR TRAUMA AND FIND JOY BY LEARNING PRACTICAL WAYS OF DOING SO Hi, I’m Andrew. Welcome to my trauma coaching website. I am a trauma survivor who has helped himself to find joy and happiness, because survival is not enough. As such, I consider myself to be a trauma expert by experience and I sincerely hope that you will find a little of what you’re looking for here. Let me start with a brief explanation. What I offer is not trauma therapy. It is trauma coaching. I do not treat mental health problems. Rather, I try to help you to help yourself by offering you ideas drawn from my own experience of dealing with extensive trauma and finding joy in my life. This is coaching and many people can benefit from it but only if they really want to. Yet there are those for whom coaching is not enough. They may require therapy instead of or alongside coaching. If you need to consult a therapist or counsellor, I can recommend a very good one. Not only is she qualified and experienced but she also cares. And if she can’t help you, she can certainly refer you to someone who can.

trauma trauma in my life The events which resulted in conscious trauma in my life first began to occur at four years of age and continued throughout my childhood until I attained adulthood. Thereafter they occurred more sporadically and as recently as over a period of several years as of the time shortly before I turned sixty four. What was different about my experience of the latter, more recent traumatic events, is that the self-development which I had experienced in the interim, helped me cope with the resultant trauma so effectively that, despite some major challenges, I never risked losing the happiness which I had found within myself. from anger to happiness My ability to deal with my past trauma, cope with my more recent trauma and overcome both lies in the self-development which I embarked on in 2007. Over a period of a decade or more I came to experience profound change. From being an extremely angry man, I found joy on my own for the very first time in my life.

‘Take a leap of faith and discover the boat at the end of the pier.’ Andrew-Glyn SMAIL Click. Let’s talk!

coaching

IT’S NOT ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED. IT’S ABOUT WHAT IS HAPPENING AND WHAT YOU WANT TO HAPPEN! Trauma coaching is not psychiatry. As such, it is not an attempt to address mental illness. Neither is it a conscious attempt to help a person change their behaviour in response to their trauma with the aid of psychological methods. In a nutshell trauma coaching is not therapy or counselling and does not pretend to be. what is trauma coaching’s focus? Trauma coaching is not concerned with what happened, with the traumatic events that have caused an individual’s trauma. Rather, its focus is on what is happening to that person now and how to help them find or develop the tools, techniques and strategies to help themselves to change this into what they want to happen. As such, it is about self-empowerment. And it is based on the assumption that what we want to happen in our lives is not merely to exist but to find joy within ourselves and to be happy. immediate goal: short-circuit trauma Those of us whose lives have been shaped by trauma know that it can play havoc with almost every aspect of who we are and what we do. Trauma is never far from the surface and can be triggered very easily. A certain word, a taste, a smell, an image, a film, a book, a certain situation, anything capable of occasioning a sensitive memory can cast us unceremoniously back into the horror of it all at the drop of a hat. The immediate purpose of trauma coaching is not to desensitise you to your trauma but to provide you with the skills to short-circuit trauma with an equally immediate dose of calm contentment. long-term goal: joy and happiness Short-circuiting trauma with an immediate dose of calm contentment can provide you with the relief required to focus on long-term goals and the short-term targets you would like to meet in order to achieve those goals. The role of the trauma coach is not to try and do this for you but to help you do it yourself. You become the author of your own happiness. The coach is merely a guide and facilitator. Your long- term goal is joy and happiness, because survival is not enough! how: holistic, practical and easy The methods that you will learn to use are the ones that I employed and still do, not only to survive my traumas but also to find joy and happiness in my life, which in turn has helped me cope effectively with recent traumatic events. These methods are both holistic and practical. In addition, they are easy to learn. They are holistic in recognition of our complexity as humans and seek to help you improve your physical, mental and emotional well-being. They are practical in that anyone can use them and they do not require any expensive tailored equipment. And they are easy because they will not demand more of you than what you are capable of. prerequisite: you must want to be happy There is however one essential element which is a prerequisite for any trauma coaching and it is this. You must really want not only to survive your trauma but to find joy within yourself and happiness. Without this desire, do not even start. You will just get frustrated and disappointed if you do. But if you have this desire, your trauma coach can help you to seize control of your life and learn to live happily with your trauma packed away, knowing that you have the ability not only to trounce trauma when it emerges but also to allow tranquility to triumph.

self-development and horses Initially, my self-development did not occur as an attempt to deal with my trauma but as a way of learning how to interact with horses without tools of restraint and instruments of coercion. The horses responded well and I was eventually able to interact with and care for them without bits, bridles, whips, ropes and so forth. What I learned and the conclusions which I drew, I set out in a book titled Becoming Humans for Horses. In the course of writing it I became fully aware of how this self- development had helped me overcome trauma and find joy. trauma expert by experience In my early sixties my relationship of thirty-eight and a half years broke down, leading to a distressing divorce, abandonment by dear friends of twenty to forty years standing and the loss of access to my horses and other animals. The trauma caused by this, which I managed to cope with thanks to the gift of profound self- development courtesy of the horses, caused me to reflect on my life and the havoc that trauma had wreaked in it from the age of four until I was twenty-one and then subsequently at sporadic intervals. Reconnecting with the first love of my life at about the same time occasioned even more trauma, reflection and study. I was becoming a trauma expert by experience, albeit not precisely in the same way that some trauma counsellors insist we trauma survivors be confined to. book Trauma Trounced Tranquility Triumphant horses taught me that the purpose of life is to be happy, nothing less. Survival is not enough. As I increasingly find self-contentment on my own and share joy with fellow humans, I have extended my understanding of my self-development, of the severely debilitating impact of trauma in my life and of how I have overcome it to find happiness. This understanding I have now fleshed out into the pages of a book, which was published in 2023. The book is called Trauma Trounced Tranquillity Triumphant.