21 Lessons from 21 Years in Private Practice

The Feel Better Every Day Podcast

Celebrating 21 years as a professional writer and in practice, I (Self care coach, supervisor and trauma therapist, Eve Menezes Cunningham) share 21 lessons I've learned in hopes of saving you years or even decades in your own trauma and ADHD recovery journey.

From my early days discovering "you're not broken" to advanced insights about nervous system regulation and embodied healing, I reveal what really works (and what doesn't), why your body's wisdom trumps any technique, how trauma healing can be gentle, and why following your life force is the ultimate GPS.

These aren't just textbook theories. Whether you're a practitioner, on your own healing journey, or simply curious about what actually creates lasting change, this anniversary episode offers ideas to help you transform how you approach your own self-care, wellbeing and personal growth. And, if you have one, your own practice.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

It might be joy, it might be gratitude, it might be anger, it might be pain, it might be sadness, it might be jangly anxiety, it could be anything at all, but the more you get into the habit of connecting with your life force, connecting with your energy, connecting with your charge, connecting with your prana, your chi, it makes everything much easier.

You don't need all the theory, you don't need all the tools, all you need to do is connect with yourself and ask yourself, what do I need? What will help me right now? What am I feeling? What is that an indication of?

And it becomes a beautiful, exciting language, learning your own body, learning your own energy.

Hi, you're listening to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast and I'm your host, Eve Menezes Cunningham.

To find out more about the podcast, access free resources, find out different ways in which we might work together, events coming up, the book, full show notes for each of the episodes, including transcripts and links, you can go to thefeelbettereverydaypodcast.com or selfcarecoaching.net and let me know if you've got any questions.

There's a lot there, but I hope that all the resources are easily accessible for you. Whether or not you get in touch with me there's loads and loads you can do yourself. And with that in mind, I want to start today's episode, which is celebrating my 21st business birthday today.

And essentially, you don't need me or anyone else to remember how to trust yourself. That being said, I can help. I love doing these podcast episodes. I love sharing through my writing, through all the different ways in which I work, sharing some of the things that have helped me as well as many of the things that I work with in my private practice and with groups. Because we have access to a world of resources and ancient wisdom being proved by modern neuroscience.

We have so much available to us. And I thought with that in mind, I would share 21 of my lessons and blessings from 21 years in business. I hope it helps you, but I also never want you to forget that you already have everything you need within you.

You don't need me. You don't need anyone else. And what we listen to, what we watch, what we pay attention to, it helps us. It can, where we put our attention has quite a big impact. So I am hoping that my work does help you, even if we've never met or I've never heard from you.

1) I want to start with number one, which is something I wish I'd known when I was starting out. I had a suspicion and everything I initially trained with was to save my own life. But the fact that you're not broken, no matter how much your trauma history or your ADHD brain tries to convince you otherwise, you are not broken. You are worthy. You are lovable. You're not too much and you are enough and you deserve all the goodness life has to offer. So if you stop listening now, I hope you remember that.

2) I've made a note of Cheryl Richardson, who was, she still is one of my favourite authors. She was booed on Oprah decades ago for having the temerity to suggest that the audience should be taking care of themselves. She kind of popularised the idea of self-care and yeah, she was booed by lots of mums who had been conditioned to say, No. Now, everyone talks about the oxygen mask and on an aeroplane, you sort yours first, you make sure you're OK. You can breathe before you look after any dependents. Great.

Of course, everyone wants to make sure that other people are safe as well. But I want you to also consider the fact that you, even if you don't have dependents, even if you're just getting your oxygen mask for yourself, you are worthy. I love Cheryl Richardson's approach and she was an enormous inspiration to me early on.

I wouldn't have believed that I'd still be doing this and I'd be loving it even more 21 years later. But I just had a bit of a flicker of the light behind. So yeah, easily distracted ADHD brain.

She is such a gentle presence. Her books are so lovely. And I think for me, even though she was on Oprah, and obviously I was starting out as a coach and complimentary therapist back in 2004, it was her gentle approach. I didn't have the words for it then, therapeutic coaching. And I trained as a coach before I trained as a therapist. So I wasn't doing that yet.

It became what I call self-care coaching. Where I integrate all my offerings, including the yoga, the NLP, the EFT, all of it. But back then she was the only one who... I thought I knew that my coaching was working. I knew it was helping me. I knew it was helping my clients. But when you'd see coaches in the public eye back then, they tended to be very Tony Robbins, who I also love, but very much not my vibe. So yeah, I just wanted to name her as an enormous lesson and blessing.

And also Martha Beck, who I later got to interview, which remains one of my favourite interviews, but just their gentleness and their wisdom. And I'm not suggesting that the more dynamic coaches weren't like that. But I think Martha Beck also was my introduction into working with the body long before I actually started working with the body, because...

This is Mighty Meadbh. I don't know if she's going to say Hello.

I remember her having me and other people in the group identify a really simple, basic way, I'll go into it with the Sole to Soul Circle. To just listen to the body's wisdom, which is always there. This was before I trained as a yoga therapist, before I did any of the somatic work that I do, but it was a real revelation.

So definitely there.

3) And that's what I'm saying, really, when I say number three, you know yourself best, you can trust yourself, you may well have, especially with trauma, especially with ADHD, have been conditioned into believing that you need outside information and outside dictators, like kind of didactic, telling you what to do, how to do everything. Learning how other people have done it can be really helpful, checklists, body doubling, all sorts of things, all of this can be really helpful.

But you don't need it, you know yourself, you know what feels good, you know what doesn't. And the more I've learned, and the more... can you hear her purr?

The more I understand about the nervous system and Polyvagal Theory and how we're wired to thrive when we feel safe, welcome and loved. And with trauma, with ADHD, you may well have been conditioned out of it, but it's never too late to relearn, to notice what feels good, move towards that, what doesn't, move away from that.

4) Feel Better Every Day. I liked the name because it had my name in it, Eve, and it just felt positive.

But I was always careful to avoid toxic positivity, encouraging people to welcome the full emotional landscape. And recognising it's a bit like when you go to the gym, or if you're doing anything fitness-related. As we build muscle, we're breaking muscle down. With personal development work, with trauma recovery, with the Self Care Coaching, with befriending your ADHD brain, a lot of the time you'll feel better after watching a video, or listening to a podcast, or doing one of the exercises I shared, or for people who work with me one-to-one or in groups. But it's not always the case. Healing isn't linear.

It's not like Woohoo! But I think for me, even knowing that I was learning things that were helping me enjoy life and want to be alive, Feel Better Every Day just felt like a lovely name.

5) Following your life force, your charge, your prana, your chi. Again, it's so body-based, and it's energy-based, and it's recognising, in any given moment, where you feel most alive. And it might be joy, it might be gratitude, it might be anger, it might be pain, it might be sadness, it might be jangly anxiety. It could be anything at all.

But the more you get into the habit of connecting with your life force, connecting with your energy, connecting with your charge, connecting with your prana, your chi, it makes everything much easier.

You don't need all the theory. You don't need all the tools. All you need to do is connect with yourself and ask yourself, what do I need? What will help me right now? What am I feeling? What is that an indication of? And it becomes a beautiful, exciting language, learning your own body, learning your own energy.

6) The embodiment, the embodied wellbeing element. And I think it was a huge lesson and blessing to learn that it was safe for me to be in my body. Like I say, all the things I trained in initially, they were to help me.

Start however small you need. There's a lovely exercise around it. You might start with an earlobe, you might start with the tip of your nose, you might start with one toe. Any part of the body that feels neutral and that you can expand on.

We all are embodied in this lifetime, and it's how our souls have chosen to experience the world. And the more embodied we are, the more we are as comfortable in our own skin as possible, the more we enjoy life, the more we can ground, the more we can transcend whatever’s going on for us.

7) Because we're paying attention to those early signs, we're adapting, we're able not only to feel OK, but to feel joy. And to recognise that joy is a wonderful GPS, joy is a way, contentment is a way, love is a way, all the positive emotions, they're ways of guiding us towards our highest goods. Finding safe ways to feel embodied and to build on them is just incredible. I never, ever, ever would have believed that I would be sitting here saying that, I used to be so disembodied.

8) Cats are incredible. And it's Meadbh! I'm not going to lift her now, because she's kind of purring away on my lap and holding paws with me, and I don't want to disturb her. But I kind of, I learned over many, many years, to have more courage to be myself.

And my site, probably since I wrote the book, 365 Ways to Feel Better: Selfcare Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing, I put everything that I was doing at the time into the book. And it kind of was a way for me to out myself with some of my stranger offerings. And I think the more experienced I've got, and the more I've healed myself, the more I've realised it's safe to be me, the more I've really kind of allowed what moves me to drive me.

And I have a whole area of work inspired by the rescue cats, working with polyvagal theory, presenting at a conference and recording CPD for a therapy organisation, and working on a book about it. But I've been, for 13 years since I got Rainbow, it's been so informative. Like before I could get embodied as a human, before I could co-regulate with another human, it was Rainbow Magnificat helped me come to a place of peace and ease in my body on a regular basis, to help her stay in rest digest mode as much as possible, me talking as gently to her, and that became me talking gently to myself as well.

So obviously, I'm still a human. But yeah, cats being incredible had to be number eight.

9) Moving to Purr! Hiss! Freeze! and how I use cats to illustrate Polyvagal Theory (and encourage people to come up with their own names, when naming the dorsal vagal sympathetic survival and ventral vagal states) helping you get to know your own nervous system. You can listen to that episode again, or go to selfcarecoaching.net/feline. And that will take you there. But yeah, I just find it incredible how not just me, but my clients, people I know personally, and groups, we're generally much kinder in the way we talk to a beloved cat or kitten or puppy or dog or lizard or toddler or baby or child. And the more you can think to yourself, the way you talk to yourself matters.

In terms of polyvagal theory, like your tone of voice is hugely important. And that was the start of it for me, really softening my tone of voice, because I didn't want to upset the cat. And as a result, I began to internalise a softer inner voice, then all the tools and techniques and tips and tricks which do work, which are helpful, but they weren't enough for me.

It's simple, just play with it, experiment with it, be gentle with when you kind of go back into less friendly self-talk.

10) Healing can be painful. There were times when I was doing my crystal therapy training, there were times when I was doing my therapy training, oh my god, the amount of full-on snotty nose tears and sobbing and shaking and all of it.

Healing can be painful. You can have spiritual crises where I remember being told ground, ground, ground by my crystal therapy trainer. And later, when I became a trauma therapist and realising how important grounding and resourcing are.

11) But you don't need any training to think how can ground, something like washing up can be grounding, putting your laundry away, walking barefoot in the grass or on the sand. Just putting the feet down, putting like the hands down, like touching the ground, imagining you've got roots going into the heart of the earth, breathing in that nourishing, supportive earth energy. Loads of kind of loads and loads and loads of ways, but I don't want you to be thinking that it's overly complicated.

Think of the times you felt most nourished and supported by the earth's nourishing, supportive, accepting, holding, containing, beautiful healing energy. When have you felt most, you can just undo more of that. In terms of spiritual crises, I wish I had taken more time back then to rest.

I wish I had taken more time back then to process, to sleep, to dream, to nap, to meditate, to journal, to do the things that with hindsight would have helped me not feel like I spent the entire nearly four years of counselling training in an emotional washing machine. You can make it gentler for yourself. So that's number 11.

Healing can be gentle. You get to choose and it really is about prioritising yourself.

12) If you choose gentle, if you choose ease for whatever's coming up for healing for you in any given moment, maybe a lifetime of pain, maybe day to day, trust your nervous system. Stop overriding what you know to be true. You might be thinking you don't understand, and again with trauma, with ADHD, we were conditioned to override.

We were conditioned to endure. We were conditioned to mask, to pretend to be okay when we weren't. But you can unlearn that at any time and your nervous system is designed to help you thrive through what feels good.

It's something that helps you then connect with others to create safety, not just for yourself, but for others. It contributes to peace in your relationships, in your communities, in the world at large, to your connecting with your resourcefulness. And oh my god, if we could live in a world where everyone was safe, welcome and loved, everyone would be in a position to thrive.

No problem would be insurmountable because we'd be working together in ways in which people felt safe enough to make mistakes and to really bring their best selves without pressure to be their best.

13) Is the everyday aspect of the Feel Better Every Day name and creating a life you don't need to retreat from. Self-care is free. You don't need fancy retreats. You can go for them. You can enjoy them. I've facilitated a few myself. It can be wonderful. But self-care is daily. It's hourly. It's every minute. You have a choice with every breath to move towards what feels good, what feels friendly and what doesn't.

And I know that the self-care industry is a multi-million, multi-billion euro industry. But at its core, it's about you connecting with yourself. You don't need fancy candles. You don't need anything.

I've got loads of free resources on the site. The book is very reasonable. There are libraries.

There's the podcast. But there is loads of free information out there, not just from me, free meditations, free yoga nidras, all sorts of things.

But the more you learn to connect with yourself, the more you know in any given moment, what is your life force telling you? What is your nervous system telling you? And listen to it all.

14) Is the lesson and blessing that I've created a life I don't need to retreat from. I've been in this house for six years. I've been in Ireland for six and a half years. And that was probably one of the most dramatic examples for me back in 2018, where I was so upset watching Boris Johnson on the TV, on the news, not facing any consequences from all the lies before the Brexit vote, which kind of led to so much hate and led to so much.

I mean, sunlight's the best disinfectant, but it was just such an awful realisation for me, growing up Indian Irish, born in London, but believing that most people were against what the British Empire had inflicted on so much of the globe and realising, no, that hadn't been the case. So, yeah, I've created a life I don't need to retreat from, which is wonderful.

15) It came from number 15, following my feelings and letting myself sob watching him on the telly on Valentine's Day 2018. And I was single, and I'd been single for a really long time. I was used to using my NLP, my coaching, all the things to get myself into a resourceful state and to not wallow.

But that day, I just let myself sob and sob and sob and sob. And I expected that the idea to move to Ireland would vanish. And for several days, I thought I'd wake up and feel differently.

But the more I learnt, I'd always had an Irish passport, the more I learnt, the more I wanted to do it. But I had to feel that pain, that hurt, that rage. And by this time, I'd gone through my therapy training, I'd done all of that, but it was still such a revelation that from such pain, like I couldn't breathe, I was so upset the idea that hate had been legitimised.

And then later that year, what happened in America, and what's going on now, what's going on in so many parts of the world, it's horrific. And we can use our rage, we can use our pain, we can use our hurt to heal, to make yourself safe, and to then ground resource yourself and figure out what you can do to turn that pain into support for yourself, for others.

16) Going back in time, learning from all over the world, learning from all different ages. So much of