Turning the Mirror on Ourselves

This handout draws together the themes from a recorded conversation between Donna and Kelsey, recorded as a moment of learning. It is offered as a reflective resource, not a transcript, for anyone holding space for others and wanting to look honestly at what they themselves bring into the room.

Naming the Journey, Not Making It the Story

Donna opened by acknowledging her own developmental trauma, something she never hides from in her work, because integrity and transparency about who we are is part of what makes the work trustworthy. As her mentor Pennie Brownlee once told her, the trick is not to make the trauma your story, but to let the journey of uncovering it sharpen the way you support others.

When Control Is Really Fear

In a supervision session with Donna Rego, Donna was challenged on a decision she had made without fully realising why: she had moved a session from a family's home into a park, a more regulating space. Supervision unpacked it gently, and in the last five minutes of the session, the real reason surfaced.

Once she could see the fear clearly, she could ask the harder question: was moving to the park actually the wrong decision, or was it the right one, made through the very attunement her work is built on? Looking back, she believes it was right. In an interplay space, the facilitator is also part of the room, and flowing with what she needed was part of flowing with the whole system.

It Is Never Just One Person

Relational Flow itself grew out of a case where a mother kept insisting the difficulties were all her fault. Donna could hear couple dynamics, parenting dynamics, and the children's own needs all tangled together, and she followed every crisis as it came rather than one fixed plan. What she found was never one person to blame. It was the dynamic of the whole family, sitting inside the wider dynamic of society.

Kelsey's Reflection

Listening to Donna, Kelsey turned the conversation toward something she'd been sitting with herself: that anyone holding space for others, teachers included, is in relationship, and we bring ourselves into that space whether we mean to or not. It's easy to keep the mirror pointed outward, at the other person, but Kelsey named how overdue it is to turn it around and ask what we ourselves are bringing, what triggers us, what old wounds surface, things we're often not even aware of.

Doing Her Own Work First

Donna Rego was blunt with her one day: Donna had hit her ceiling, and if she wasn't prepared to break through it, she needed to let someone else do the work. It landed hard, but she knew it was true. She wanted to work with dysregulated mums, that was the work she lived and breathed for, but really helping them meant going off and doing her own work first: identifying why she was controlling, where her fear lived, and how to trust herself to speak up for the child without becoming dysregulated herself.

What she did next isn't common practice. She went back to the parent and told her the truth: this is my history, and I'm not sure I can do this next step. Working as free and equal human beings rather than from behind a professional mask, the mum met her there and said she never wanted to put Donna in a position where she didn't feel safe. Donna remained the senior dance partner, still responsible for holding safety in the relationship, but once she had felt in her own body that she could stand up and say enough, she let go of the control she'd been holding. She messaged the mum the next day and handed the choice of where to meet back to her entirely.

Deep Work Doesn't Fit in a Box

Donna named a real tension in the work: relationships and healing can't be put on a timeframe. There's no fixed goal or fixed number of sessions to tick off, because the work unfolds for as long as the person needs it to. That's not a flaw to be managed, it's the nature of how trust and nervous systems actually change, and it's something funders need to understand: breaking intergenerational trauma takes real commitment, not a quick programme with an end date.

Intergenerational patterns keep repeating for a reason. Staying with a family for as long as it genuinely takes is what allows that cycle to actually break, rather than simply pause. And the cost of not investing that time shows up later, in the families who stay stuck, hidden behind closed doors, too afraid to ask for help. The commitment asked for up front is small next to the cost saved down the track.

Donna is out of the mainstream educational system by choice, because she can't tick the boxes it asks for. She's open to being part of an organisation, but not to being put in a box, because the work itself is too deep to fit in one.

Attunement at the Top of the Window

Donna described a recent moment with a mother and her two children, all fully dysregulated and energy running high, where instead of trying to calm everyone down, she matched the energy of the room. She stayed at the very top of everyone's window of tolerance, including her own, while remaining connected to herself the whole time.

For a parent who had never once had someone stay with them at the height of dysregulation, without escalating further or disappearing into freeze, being matched like that was something entirely new.

Anchoring In Who Someone Really Is

Donna spoke about deliberately looking for who a person is when they are regulated, even if it takes weeks to see it, and anchoring that image in. In the chaotic, messy moments, she holds onto how much a parent loves their children, how much they want to change, and the trust it takes for them to let her into a world they usually mask.

Parenting tips and techniques mean little once someone is nearly out of their window of tolerance and has lost access to their thinking brain. This is why the somatic work, learning to notice and stay with the nervous system, sits alongside the practical skills rather than replacing them. As Anna Tardos has said, it is less about technique and more about how we are within ourselves.

Safety Is What Lets Trauma Clear

Donna is honest that she does not always get it right. Ruptures happen, and she has had to learn repair after repair. Differences and mistakes, often rooted in things that happened to us long before this relationship, do not have to mean the end of a connection. They can mean coming back and repairing.

Naming that someone "has trauma" without the next step of support is, to Donna, the same as naming a child's struggle with a limit without also supporting them through the big emotion that follows. Both call for a second half of the sentence: what happens next, together.

Community Over Isolation

Donna reflected on a village she created five years ago for people who had experienced trauma and neurodivergence, children, parents, and teachers alike. At the time she didn't fully realise what she was building, and it wasn't as transparent as it could have been, because she hadn't yet understood it herself.

Both Donna and Kelsey spoke to the same instinct: no one practitioner can hold every layer of this work alone. The way forward is trusting and working alongside each other, tagging in and out for the good of the families and communities they serve, rather than each person working in isolation until they reach the edge of their own skill.

The Soil Metaphor Kelsey and Donna Built Together

This is a metaphor the two of them had been playing with before they ever hit record: the work as a whole ecosystem, with different practitioners suited to different layers of it. Kelsey described herself as having started up in the topsoil, in the softer, gentler, facilitated spaces, but now finding herself moving further down, drawn into bigger, harder cases and more of a compost stage of the soil, the layer where the practical how of putting Donna's deeper work into practice actually happens.

Further down are the little-t and big-t traumas, the harder things, sitting in the deep, dark, sticky layers where nothing grows well without amendments. That's where Donna works, in the clay itself. Donna was quick to add that this isn't only true for the families she sees one-on-one: in an ordinary parent-infant class there might easily be one mum behind closed doors who isn't coping, and neither of them started their own journeys understanding how deep their own trauma actually went. They both began up at the topsoil too.

Kelsey's point was practical, not hierarchical: none of us can do the same work, or hold the same skills, and that's exactly why we need each other. When something goes beyond her own window of tolerance or skill set, she can tag Donna in, or point someone toward her, rather than saying "this is as far as I can go with you, sorry." Recognising your own layer of the soil, and trusting the people working the other layers, is what lets the whole ecosystem hold people well.