Self paced course
A short course for people who are not ready for weekly therapy, cannot currently afford it, or are on a waitlist somewhere and want to start doing something useful now.
$140 for lifetime access, or included free with any reduced fee therapy place.
Ground Floor is psychoeducation. It is not therapy, it does not know anything about you, and it will not respond when something difficult surfaces.
I built it because of a pattern I kept seeing. People would arrive for a first session and spend most of it learning things that could have been explained in a video: what a nervous system does under threat, why avoidance strengthens anxiety, where a critical inner voice usually comes from. Useful material, but an expensive way to receive it.
So the groundwork moved out here. If you go on to work with me, you arrive already fluent in the vocabulary and we spend session one on you rather than on definitions. If you do not, you still have the groundwork, which is genuinely worth having on its own.
What actually happens in the body under threat, why the response is fast and stupid by design, and why you cannot think your way out of a state your nervous system has already committed to. Includes the practical settling techniques, taught properly rather than as a slogan about breathing. Roughly 55 minutes across five short videos, plus a two page worksheet.
The beliefs running underneath the behaviour. Rest must be earned. Needing things makes you a burden. If I stop performing it all falls apart. We look at how these get installed early, why they were sensible at the time, and how to identify your own specific set rather than a generic list. About 50 minutes plus a guided writing exercise.
The single most reliable engine of anxiety and low mood. Why relief teaches the brain that the threat was real, how a life narrows one reasonable decision at a time, and how to widen it again in increments small enough to actually attempt. Includes a graded plan you build yourself. About 45 minutes.
The liberation psychology module. What happens to symptoms when you correctly locate their source outside yourself, why that is not the same as blaming everything on circumstances, and how to tell the difference between something to be tolerated and something to be changed. About 50 minutes plus a closing exercise.
Fit
Most work through one module a week, which gives the material time to land. A few do the whole thing in an afternoon and then return to individual modules later, which is also fine.
The worksheets are the part that does the work. Watching a video about where your rules came from is interesting. Writing down your own three rules and where you first heard them is the thing that changes something. I would rather you did one module properly than four passively.
Several people have gone through it with a friend or a partner and reported that the shared vocabulary was the most useful outcome, particularly the module on avoidance, which tends to explain a lot of household friction that had previously been read as laziness.
After the course
Psychoeducation frequently loosens something. People finish the module on rules and find themselves unexpectedly furious with a parent, or work through the avoidance material and realise how much of their life has quietly shrunk in three years.
That is the material doing its job, and it is also precisely the point where a course stops being enough. If you get there, the next step is a conversation with an actual person. That can be me, and it does not have to be. Either way, do not sit on it alone because a video started something.
