A boy who could not read a face
The first person I ever helped feel safe in their own body was a seven-year-old boy who could not read a face.
He sat across from me in a classroom in England. He was on the autism spectrum. He could solve maths problems most adults would struggle with. He could not tell me whether I was happy or angry. His body registered the room as one undifferentiated signal: too loud, too much, too unpredictable.
My job was to teach him to feel. Not to perform feeling. To actually locate what was happening in his body and connect it to what was happening around him.
I was a SENCO then. Special Educational Needs Coordinator. I spent years doing this work with children who lived inside nervous systems that could not sort the signal from the noise.
I did not know it yet, but that was the beginning of everything I do now.
Years later
Years later I sit across from a man who cannot tell me what his partner's body is doing when she goes quiet at the dinner table.
He loves her. He has loved her for decades. He has no idea that her silence is not absence. It is a closing. Her system is protecting something she does not have the language to name.
He thinks she is withdrawing. She thinks he is not paying attention.
They are both wrong. They are both trying.
The work is the same work it was with that seven-year-old. Teaching the nervous system to read what is actually there.
The tools are different. The territory is different. The fundamental pattern has not changed since then: a human being sitting inside a body that is sending signals they cannot decipher, across from another human being doing the same thing.
Following the wound
People ask me how I ended up here. How does a Dutch SENCO who taught autistic children end up working with couples who have not touched in years, with women carrying decades of sexual trauma, with men who cannot feel anything below their neck?
The honest answer: I followed my own wound.
Every modality I hold, I found because I needed it first.
Orgasmic Meditation taught me that sensation is a language. A tightening in the throat is not anxiety until the mind labels it anxiety. Before the label, it is information. I learned to track what was happening in my own body before my mind had a chance to override it. That became the foundation of everything I teach.
Somatic experiencing gave me the framework: the body holds what the mind cannot process. It holds it in the shoulders, in the jaw, in the specific way a woman crosses her arms when her partner reaches for her. The body was never the obstacle. The body is the compass.
EMDR gave me access to the moments that carry the most charge. The bilateral stimulation, the eye movements, the cross-body work. Not to erase the memory. To prevent one moment from commanding the whole system.
Spinal attunement showed me where it all lives. Thirty-three access points along the spine. The stored tension that is not tension at all. It is experience, emotion, unexpressed response, held in tissue for years, sometimes decades. When the right touch meets the right gateway, the body does not need to be told what to do. It reorganises itself.
I trained as a hypnotherapist. As an NLP practitioner. In family constellations. In scar remediation. In BDSM as a therapeutic tool. In death doula work.
I did not stop. Every time something in me required a new language, I found it and qualified in it properly. Not by collecting modalities. By needing them.
What it looks like when it works
I want to tell you what this looks like when it works, because that is the part most people never see.
A couple came to me. Thirty-five years married. They had not had sex in twenty-three of them. They loved each other. They had built a life together. Something between them had calcified so gradually that neither could point to when it started.
I separated them. I always do this at the beginning. I worked with her body first. What it was holding. What it was protecting. What it needed before it could receive again. Then I worked with him. What he had stopped reaching for. What his body did when he imagined reaching and being refused.
Three months. Structured touch dates that built week by week. Specific homework between every session.
They went on a second honeymoon.
Twenty-three years of distance, moved in three months. Not because the method was clever. Because the body is loyal. Give it the right conditions and it remembers what it knew before the bracing started.
One session
A woman came to me carrying twenty years of sexual trauma in her body. The weight of it had shaped how she held herself, how she moved through rooms, how she could not allow herself to be touched without something shutting down.
One session.
I will say that again because people do not believe it.
One session. Twenty years left her body.
Not because I did something extraordinary. Because her body was ready. It had been waiting for the right conditions. The right container. Someone who could hold what was there without flinching, without rushing to fix it, without being shocked by any of it.
That is what all of it, the SENCO years and everything since, has been building toward: the capacity to meet what most people cannot meet. The part you are afraid to say out loud. I have probably already worked with it.
The MRI
R. came to me in East Sussex. Former army officer. Finance. A life that looked completely solid from the outside.
He booked because he was terrified of going into an MRI machine.
What came up had nothing to do with MRI machines. It had everything to do with an eight-year-old boy and a moment that had quietly run his life ever since.
By the end of our day together, he booked the MRI.
His wife texted me afterwards. She said: I could always depend on him. But now there is a steadfastness alongside a vulnerability. A willingness to lead from feeling, not from training. From himself. From them. From their children. Less punishing. More at ease.
Six weeks of sessions, then one day in person. That is the sequence that made it possible.
The gap
I am not the only person doing this work. There are men teaching men how to show up in relationship. There are women teaching women about desire. There are therapists who do beautiful work with couples.
What I have noticed is this: the men arriving at my door have already done some of that work. They have read the books, watched the reels, tried the seven-day programmes.
Their bodies have not caught up.
Close to five thousand men followed me in two months. While I was recovering from hip surgery. Not because of a viral strategy. Because I was telling the truth about what I see in bodies. The questions they ask are beautiful. They are not asking how to fix her. They are asking what is happening in her body when she goes quiet. What she is carrying that they cannot see. What it means when she says she is fine but her whole body changes.
Only seventeen percent of men in the United States received mental health treatment last year (Statista, 2024). Gottman found, in his longitudinal study of 130 newlywed couples, that only thirty-five percent of men were emotionally intelligent enough to consistently turn toward their partner. His research also shows an eighty-one percent chance a marriage collapses when a man will not share power.
The research says these men are stuck. What I see is different. I see men reaching. Reaching for language they were never given.
They can tell you what attunement means. They cannot feel what their partner's body is doing when she goes quiet in the car.
That is the gap I sit in. The distance between understanding something and feeling it in your body. Between knowing the right thing to do and being able to do it without the body overriding you.
Guiding couples, women, and men across twenty countries, I see the beauty of what is emerging. My tools are not conventional. Trauma work. BDSM as a therapeutic tool. Spinal attunement. EMDR. Family constellations. Scar remediation. Death doula work. None of it is what people expect. All of it is what the body requires.
I have worked with 950 women. 650 couples. Clients in twenty countries. I have held people through dying. I have held people through the moment they remembered what happened to them. I have held people through the first time they let themselves be touched without bracing.
I have walked people through dying. I can walk you through this.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette