“What is split off, not felt, remains the same. When it is felt, it changes. Most people don’t know this.”
— Eugene T. Gendlin
This is my story.
Or rather — it’s the story of a question I’ve been trying to answer since I was nineteen years old, standing in a hospital corridor, already noticing something my training wasn’t accounting for.
Hi. I’m Anna.
A decade into my nursing career, I’ve found my home in high-stakes environments. I specialize in the intensity of Emergency and Intensive Care, with experience spanning the healthcare systems of both Italy and Scotland. Places where time compresses, every second counts, and pain, fear and human vulnerability are simply part of the daily landscape.
I was good at it. I knew how to stay present, how to move fast, how to hold a lot at once.
What I didn’t know — what nobody teaches you — is what all of that leaves behind in your own body.
For years I did what most people in those environments do. I held it together. I kept going. I put myself to one side and got on with the work.
Until, in 2020, working in intensive care in Scotland, I noticed I couldn’t quite do that anymore. My shoulders were permanently raised. My breath had gone shallow. My body seemed to be closing in on itself — as if, after years alongside suffering, it had learned that contracting was the safest way to survive.
That was the moment I understood something that changed everything for me:
Understanding what we’ve been through is not enough, if the body is still carrying it.
I’d always been curious — academically as well as clinically. I went on to do a PhD in Nursing Studies at the University of Edinburgh, researching the intersection of nursing, emotion and trauma. What happens in the bodies of people who spend their working lives caring for others. What they carry. What it costs.
Alongside that, I trained in Somatic Experiencing® — a body-based approach to trauma and nervous system regulation developed by Dr Peter Levine. And something that had felt fragmented for years suddenly had a shape.
The body keeps its own record. And it has its own way of letting go — when someone knows how to work with it, rather than around it.
In Edinburgh I found something I hadn’t had before: the freedom not to choose between the different parts of what I do.
In Italy, the professional categories are strict. You are a nurse, or a researcher, or a somatic practitioner. The idea that these things belong together — that clinical experience makes the research richer, that the research makes the somatic work more precise, that all three inform each other constantly — wasn’t easily accommodated.
In Edinburgh it was. And it was there I understood that the integration wasn’t a compromise or an awkward career story. It was the actual point.
There’s one patient I think about often.
He was in intensive care, post liver transplant. Conscious. Stable, but exhausted and uncomfortable in the way that only long hospital stays produce. Every day, he asked for the same thing — a lolly. One of those small ice lollies, just for the coolness in his mouth.
It was such a small thing to give someone. And he trusted me completely.
I left at the end of my shift, as you do. The next day, a colleague told me he had died overnight.
I’ve thought about that moment many times since — not as a story of loss, though it is that too. But as a lesson in what it means to be fully present with someone, and what the body holds when that presence ends abruptly. No transition. No space to process. Just: next shift.
That’s what I work with now. In myself. And in the people who come to me.
Three things I’ve never kept separate
Clinical experience
I know from the inside what it means to work in environments of high emotional intensity. The decisions made in seconds. The weight of what you absorb from patients and families. The particular exhaustion of caring when you have no time to feel it.
Research
I’ve spent years studying the relationship between the nervous system, emotion and trauma in healthcare contexts — through a PhD, peer-reviewed publications, and ongoing research with institutions including the University of Edinburgh and NHS Scotland. When I talk about what stress does to the body, I’m not drawing on intuition alone.
Neuro-somatic practice
I am a certified Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner and SE® Assistant in Training — meaning I’m also training to assist in international SE® programmes, one of the more advanced pathways in the field. This work has taught me that the body has its own logic, its own pace, and its own way of moving toward regulation when the conditions are right.
Today I work with nurses, healthcare professionals, and people outside medicine who are living with the effects of sustained stress — people whose nervous systems have been running on high for long enough that it’s become their normal.
I work online, which means the people I work with are spread across the UK, Italy and beyond. Sessions adapt to shift patterns, time zones and the general reality of lives lived under pressure.
I believe — and the research backs this — that the nervous system retains a real capacity for change, even after very intense or prolonged experience. That capacity doesn’t require willpower. It requires the right kind of attention, applied with patience and precision.
If you feel like your body has been carrying something for a long time, and you’re ready to find out what it would take to put it down — I’d like to hear from you.
Credentials
- PhD in Nursing Studies — University of Edinburgh
- Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner
- SE® Assistant in Training — advanced pathway to assist in international SE® programmes
- MSc in Advancing Nursing Practice
- Registered Nurse — UK and Italy
- Honorary Teaching Fellow — University of Edinburgh, School of Health in Social Science
- Peer-reviewed publications on trauma, burnout and emotional regulation in clinical settings
- Workshop facilitator — NHS Scotland ICU and A&E teams
Start with a conversation.
Free 30-minute call.
No commitment. If it’s not the right fit, I’ll tell you that.