Jacqueline Green Counselling

03/09/2026

Word 7 in this series giving language to the hard-to-explain physical realities of healing: Pendulation.

When people come to therapy, they often believe the goal is to feel completely calm, happy, or unbothered all the time. But a regulated nervous system isn’t a frozen state of peace - it’s a flexible one.

In my practice, pendulation is one of the somatic interventions I use with clients holding trauma or distress.
Instead of diving headfirst into overwhelming trauma memories or trying to force immediate relaxation (which often backfires), we pendulate.
In real time, we touch briefly on a difficult sensation or memory in the body, sometimes we don’t even need to hash out the story because the body reacts instantly! And then we deliberately swing the attention back to a grounding exercise - a resource, a physical anchor, or a sense of safety in the room. Maybe it’s a metaphorical visual we’ve created together, something we’ve agreed upon before that helps, something in the room like the touch of your blanket, or the look of a plant or art to focus on, or maybe it’s guided breathing by me…. And we stay here until our bodies understand it’s safe again.

We do this over and over again.

Back and forth into the activation and then back to grounding. Over and over….

We pendulate between the trauma and safety because our body needs real-time, physical practice to remember that it can visit uncomfortable states without staying trapped in them.

Talking therapy helps you process the memory and map out why it happened. Somatic pendulation physically teaches your tissues that safety is accessible right now, even when difficult emotions arise. I offer this blended approach in my therapy - I call it the dual approach.

So you aren’t broken because you swing back into anxiety, grief, or tension all the time. That isn’t a failure…. it’s your nervous system doing its job….

The work is simply learning how to guide the pendulum back toward safety when it swings too far ❤️‍🩹

Have you ever noticed your body naturally wanting to pull away or distract itself when a feeling gets too intense? That’s your system asking for pendulation.

What do you think???

28/08/2026

Here’s to friendship chats on Friday nights, and Therapy on Monday mornings 😅🥲

27/08/2026

27/08/2026

Word six in this series….

Have you ever had a day where you feel completely overwhelmed and think, “I can’t keep feeling like this”… and then, a few days later, you’re absolutely fine?
That’s a little bit of what emotional permanence can look like.

When we’re anxious, depressed, rejected, lonely, angry or overwhelmed, the feeling can become so present that our brain struggles to access the memory of feeling okay.

It can sound like:

“Something is really wrong.”
“I’m always going to feel like this.”
“It’s just the way I am now”
“I don’t think I can cope.”

And sometimes we make decisions from that place because the feeling feels like the whole truth.
But feelings have a habit of changing….

The version of you who is having a really s**t Tuesday can genuinely struggle to remember the version of you who was absolutely fine on Sunday 🙃

This is one reason I talk so much about slowing things down and getting curious about what is happening in your body, rather than immediately believing every thought that arrives alongside it.

You don’t have to convince yourself that you feel differently at that moment. Sometimes it’s enough to gently remind yourself:

“This is how I feel right now. It isn’t necessarily how I will feel forever.”

If you’re in this state, just know, it’s not the whole story ❤️

13/08/2026

I think I had a version of summer in my head before it even started.

One where I’d have more time. More space. More of those slow, unhurried days where I could just potter about and not feel like I was already thinking about what was next.

And actually, it hasn’t really been like that.

When one role pauses, another begins. My diary changed, but life didn’t stop. There was still work, studying, supervision, family, friendships, plans, things to organise, things to do.

And I’ve noticed myself doing that thing where I compare what actually happened with what I thought would happen. And then feeling grief of what it could have been.
As if the imagined version was somehow the better version.

I think we do this quite a lot. We can become so focused on the life we think we should be having that we lose sight of the one that’s actually happening.

And sometimes I wonder if that’s where we miss something important.

Not because everything needs to be appreciated or turned into a lesson. It doesn’t. Not at all. But because there is something about accepting our actual lives that feels very different from constantly measuring them against an imagined one.

This summer didn’t give me everything I thought I wanted from it. But it gave me a lot. And I am so grateful.

And maybe I don’t need to make it more than that 🤷🏼‍♀️

As September approaches and the pace starts to shift again, I’m trying to remember that I don’t need to leave this summer feeling like I did it perfectly. I also don’t need to create a fresh start and make Autumn the new project.

I just want to have noticed that I was here.
That I was living it.
And maybe that’s enough.

Does this resonate? 😏

Oh btw…. School holidays in Scotland are over. If you’re in England/ Wales and think I’m a little confused 😏😝

03/08/2026

The fourth word in this series of giving words to experiences that can sometimes feel hard to explain…

Liminal.

Have you ever found yourself in that strange in-between space? Where you know something has shifted, but you’re not quite sure what’s next yet.

Maybe…

🍂 Someone you love has died, and you’re trying to find your way in a world that looks the same but feels completely different.

🍂 A job that once felt right doesn’t feel the same anymore, but you don’t know what the next step is.

🍂 A friendship or connection has changed, and you’re grieving what it used to be while trying to understand what it is now.

🍂 Your priorities have shifted as you’ve got older, and the things you once chased don’t feel as important anymore.

There’s actually a word for this: liminal.

It describes that space between what was and what is yet to come. The boundary or the in-between threshold of transition.

I think these spaces can feel really uncomfortable.
Because we’re often much more comfortable when we know where we stand. When we have a plan. When things feel clear and defined.

But life doesn’t always work like that.
Sometimes there’s a period of adjusting, grieving, questioning, letting go, and slowly finding our feet again.

And we can be so quick to judge ourselves when we’re in this place.
Thinking we’re stuck.
That we should have moved on.
That we should know what we’re doing by now.
But what if this isn’t a problem to fix?
What if it’s actually a process of change?

I see this a lot in therapy….that the messy middle can feel like something has gone wrong, when actually it can be the place where something new is beginning to form. The old ways of being might not fit anymore… but the new ways haven’t had time to settle yet.
And that can feel uncertain.
Vulnerable.
A little uncomfortable.

But maybe this space deserves a little more compassion. Maybe we don’t have to rush through every transition or force ourselves to have all the answers.

Maybe we can trust that something is shifting, even when we can’t quite see what it is yet.

If you’re in a liminal space right now… you’re not necessarily lost.

You might just be in the middle of becoming 🤍

23/07/2026

Word 3 in the ‘Giving words to experiences that are hard to explain’ series.
Fight or flight gets all the attention in the trauma conversation, but today I want to shine a light on a survival response that lives quietly in the body: fawning.

It’s one of the hardest trauma responses to recognise. Largely because our culture actively rewards it.

Somatically, fawning is a physiological reflex.
It’s that knee-jerk urge to soften your stance, appease, and over-explain the moment you feel a shift in the room’s energy. It’s going back on an opinion when you sense judgement. It’s agreeing when your gut says no. It’s smiling through visceral discomfort. It’s micro-managing everyone else’s emotional temperature just so your own nervous system can relax.

When you grow up learning that peace is your responsibility to maintain, self-abandonment becomes a physical habit.

I’m sharing this because after nearly two decades in clinical practice, I see so many people mistake this response for kindness, selflessness, or “being easygoing.” It’s not that! It isn’t a personality trait.
It’s survival. It’s your nervous system defaulting to a strategy that once kept you safe when being authentic or setting a boundary felt dangerous.

When we give words to these hard-to-explain bodily experiences, we take away their shame and the personal responsibility we hold - and that’s where real somatic integration begins.

Does this resonate with how your body copes with tension?

22/07/2026

Almost 20 years in this field, thousands of hours in clinical training, and a lifetime of conscious experience have taught me one fundamental truth:
healing isn’t about forcing your body to fit a trend.
It’s about learning to listen to what it’s been trying to tell you all along, underneath all the noise and conditions.

These are some of my truths about your nervous system, trauma, and what emotional integration actually takes.

Which one hit closest to home for you today???

13/04/2026

So many people come to therapy believing they are the problem. That something in them needs fixing.

But most of the time, what we’re looking at are responses that made sense at some point.
Patterns your body learned to help you cope, manage, get through. And in fact, these are highly intelligent responses from our bodies and it means your body is doing what it’s meant to - keep you aware - to survive!

The work I do isn’t about getting rid of symptoms. It’s not about helping you learn more coping strategies so you can ‘tolerate’ more pain. It’s not about ‘fixing’ you.

It’s about getting curious about what shaped them in the first place. This is crucial to helping you move forward. Understanding quite often that it didn’t start with you.
With more understanding of the systems at play, you can build capacity to choose differently.
Helping you to resist, where appropriate, and cope with compassion when needed.

Because when you understand your responses as adaptations that your body makes - not flaws - something shifts.

The shame lessens as you realise they are not a personal failing.
There’s less judgement and more compassion.
More choice.

This is where the blend of talking therapy and somatic work matters.

Not just making sense of your story, but noticing how it’s still held in your body. The tension, the bracing, the habits that keep things in place.

And gently, at your pace, creating space for something different.

You’re not the problem.

But your experiences deserve your attention.

J x