We naturally want the best for our clients, and when we cannot help them in a particular area it can become frustrating for them and ourselves.

When we think about sleep, we understand that there is a huge importance in the quality and consistency needed to achieve a restful night's sleep. As you may have experienced for yourself, not having enough sleep can negatively affect your mental health as well as ability to concentrate and be patient with others.

If a lack of quality sleep turns into an on-going issue of chronic sleep deprivation it can greatly impact someone’s life as a whole. Conversely, some people have had issues sleeping their whole lives and are somewhat used to being able to function on broken or little sleep, not realizing there is a solution for them.

At The Centre for Healing we are of the belief that everyone deserves good sleep and that it is not natural for someone to a) not be able to get to sleep or b) wake frequently creating broken sleep.

When someone approaches us and we discover that their sleep is less than desirable (this is one thing that we ask of a myriad of questions during a Root-cause Therapy session) then most of our practitioners will naturally look at their sleep hygiene and offer perhaps a protocol to try.

This may look like; “No screens before bed”, “Create a night time routine”, “ Try this sleep meditation”, “Try this tea or melatonin”, or “Don’t drink too much water before bed”. Although all of these suggestions are helpful (and we do offer these as suggestions to our clients), if they haven’t helped to the degree that is required then perhaps we need to look at it on a deeper level.

What we often discover are stored beliefs or survival strategies held in the body, deeply embedded from past trauma. Upon utilizing our signature Root-cause therapy methodology, we have seen time and time again that many of our clients are now able to have a deep and restorative sleep, many of whom have not been ‘good sleepers’ their whole lives.

A commonly held program that we find in our clients unconscious mind is the belief that "It is not safe for me to sleep" , which then creates a stuck memory in the tissues. Once this belief is hardwired into the body, a chain reaction ensues: high cortisol levels rise causing the fight or flight response, which then disrupts the body's right brain wave activity, necessary for conducting the correct amount of sleep cycles.

As you can see pictured above, if our nervous system is in ‘fight or flight’ it will not go down into the restorative sleep cycles, and lean more towards the light and awake sleep.


If the nervous system feels it is not ‘safe’ to sleep, then the body will be on high alert, as if there is imminent danger and one needs to be awake and conscious at any moment to protect itself.

This hyper-vigilance, we have found, can be traced to the following root-causes , and once shifted have allowed the inner guards or defenses to go down:

• Sexual trauma, in particular childhood molestation
• Being tickled before bed (although someone laughs there is no sense of control of their own body, hence a type of abuse if not asked for or condoned)
• Sleeping through an important message on their phone from a loved one about an accident or death
• Home being ambushed, broken into and awakened from sleep
• Hereditary trauma or beliefs being passed down
• Being left alone to 'Cry it out' as a baby

As you can see, a lot of the above are quite traumatic experiences. These often get stored into the body and then our unconscious and subconscious mind sets about to remember and protect these people from future danger in order to keep them safe. 

The frustrating part for people is that if the above has not been discovered, addressed or dealt with, they will continue their lives not being able to sleep well and often resort to sleeping medications and/or self medicating with drugs or alcohol to try and induce what they are seeking, what we are all seeking; A restful night's sleep. 

Having conducted many sessions we have seen that by addressing the root cause of an issue and healing the original source of trauma, the quality of life of our clients increases dramatically, such as the body feeling safe to sleep again. 

We invite you to learn how to pinpoint and help heal these kind of issues in yourself and in the lives of many through our online practitioner training.   To find out more click here.