Before any of this, I did community work in Northern Ireland. Some days it was ten or twelve visits back to back. I remember sitting in the car outside the last house of the day and not being able to make myself get out.

Nobody had taught me how to come down. I was meant to be the calm one in every room I walked into, and by five o’clock I had nothing left for myself.

The assumption every helping profession runs on

Coaching, counselling, nursing, teaching, social work, HR. The caring professions all run on the same assumption: the person holding space for everyone else is fine, because she has to be.

She isn’t. She’s running on adrenaline and good intentions, and her nervous system has been switched on for years.

Most facilitator training makes the same mistake

It assumes you’re already regulated because you’re the one at the front of the room. It teaches you to guide someone else’s nervous system and skips over your own entirely.

That matters more than it sounds. Nervous systems read each other. A facilitator who’s frazzled, braced or running on empty brings that into the room, and the people in front of her feel it, even if they couldn’t tell you why. It’s also why the facilitator’s own panic is often the real problem when a client has a big reaction.

The facilitators who last sort themselves out first

The ones who don’t burn out within a year of qualifying. The ones still doing this in five years. They’ve got a few things in common:

• A daily practice of their own, short enough to actually happen
• A way of arriving before a session, so they walk in steady rather than rushed
• A way of coming down afterwards, so they don’t carry the room home
• Somewhere to take the hard sessions, like supervision or peers, instead of holding them alone
• Clear scope, so they’re not trying to fix things that aren’t theirs to fix

None of that is glamorous. All of it is what keeps you in the work.

Where to start

If you’re running on empty right now, start with yourself, not a qualification. Fight or Flight Club is a six-week course that gives you one practical somatic tool a week for getting out of fight, flight or freeze and back to steady. You don’t need to be a breathwork person or planning to train. You just need a body that’s been switched on for too long.

If you’re ready to train, self-regulation is built into the Breathwork Facilitator Training from day one, because you can’t steady a room you’re not steady in yourself.

Victoria