Recently I’ve been reading Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. It’s not an easy read, being an account of how child abuse and neglect lead to poorer life chances in adulthood. And the failure of the American Psychiatric Association to address the relationship between childhood abuse and mental health problems.

However the book brings a message of hope: “Our great challenge is to apply the lessons of neuroplasticity, the flexibility of brain circuits, to rewire the brains and reorganize the minds of people who have been programmed by life itself to experience others as threats and themselves as helpless.”

I’ve seen my fair share of people damaged by child abuse – mostly presenting to me with chronic fatigue syndrome, but I know for many the damage presents as addictions or repeated relationship breakdown. What I now realise though is that there is hope of renewal because we are none of us ever broken, and we all contain the seeds of change – the neuroplasticity that van der Kolk talks about.

Coaching offers a context in which people can change and heal. And this depends on a number of what I suspect are essential requirements.

Perhaps first among these is the fact of being listened to and of being heard; rather than being put into a box such as depression or borderline personality disorder, or dysregulated social engagement disorder (!).

The second is the conviction of the coach or therapist that the client is not broken and can heal. That they have the resources they need because of who they truly are. And their ability to communicate all of that to the client.

And of all of this must happen within a space where the client feels held, where they can experience a feeling of safety and calm. Because letting go of old behaviour patterns (which may well have served them well in their childhood) is so much easier when we feel safe.

Of course there is a link between childhood experience and later adult behaviour (for good or ill), but seeing it as a direct cause-effect mechanism is not helpful. Recognising that the adult’s behaviour is an expression or acting out of old programmes that are no longer serving us is an important step in the process of change. Those programmes may not be conscious, but they are likely to be accompanied by thinking (such as “I can’t change” or “I don’t deserve any better”) and these are just thoughts.

There are going to be steps the client needs to take for their recovery, and it helps to have someone who can accompany them on that journey and continue to remind them of who they truly are and that they are their own best resource.