I used to be a nurse. I am one of many who were assaulted at work. This happens daily across the NHS and private sector, and assailants cannot always be prosecuted. I was in mental health nursing.
“Violence toward mental health staff has been receiving national attention in the face of diminishing resources to treat what appears to be an increasingly violent patient population. Assaults by psychiatric patients against mental health care providers are both a reality and a concern, as the effects of violence can be devastating to the victim. Some staff rationalize that violence is an occupational hazard and believe that they are equipped to cope with it.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3074201/
“Any harmful act, physical, sexual, or psychological, committed against nurses in the workplace by a patient or visitor is called workplace violence (WPV) against nurses. WPV is directly related to decreasing job satisfaction, burnout, humiliation, guilt, emotional stress, intention to quit a job, and increased staff turnover.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9536186/
“More than nine in ten nurses and midwives have experienced physical violence while doing their jobs, according to data released by UNISON and Nursing Times today (Tuesday). 90%
The abuse includes NHS staff being punched, bitten, spat at, choked, headbutted and even stabbed – with the violence occurring daily for one in eleven (9%).
Around one in six (17%) nurses or midwives said they’d experienced violence in the previous week. More than six in ten (63%) had been attacked within the preceding 12 months.
The findings are based on a joint survey by UNISON and Nursing Times of more than 1,000 nursing and midwifery staff and students across the UK.
The vast majority (93%) said they had experienced physical violence in the workplace. Almost nine in ten (89%) of these reported that the incidents involved patients, while almost a fifth (19%) had been victims of attacks by patients’ families or other visitors.” https://unison.org.uk/press/2025/03/nurses-and-midwives-subjected-violence-work-daily-basis
I believed that I could “rationalize that violence” as an occupational hazard until it made me ill. I was assaulted a few months before the pandemic, took six weeks off, and returned to work and into lockdown — the perfect storm. Slowly deteriorating mental health, increased frustration and aggression from patients. The wards were locked down too.
Violence was not something I hadn’t experienced before; it was a commonplace occurrence to be threatened, abused, spat at, things thrown, including bodily fluids and faeces. We recorded these, updated patient risk profiles, and got on with the business of care. Few people I know, especially my now-non-healthcare colleagues in my new role, grasp what my job was like and what we did under extremis. I have had to work in a caring role with sex offenders and people whom I would rather never run into on the street. I’m not going to say that I was unlucky; the statistics do not agree: “More than nine in ten nurses and midwives have experienced physical violence”, UNISON. That’s 90% of frontline healthcare staff! But some senior colleagues had a different opinion. “You were just unlucky” became one of the most annoying, dismissive, commonplace comments; I even believed them.
PTSD isn’t always as straightforward as people suggest. On psychiatric wards, we carry alarms. I was already in a situation where a patient was squaring up to me. He had been behaving erratically all day, and the Agency nurses didn’t want to move him to the de-escalation area because it would be too much work. The intermittent alarm was going off. I had set it off, and as the situation escalated, I set off the full alarm and watched my colleagues do nothing:
This is what is known as the freeze response.
I don’t really remember much of what happened next. But I do remember the colleagues lying about what happened in the aftermath. I was rescued by other patients, not colleagues. I wasn’t very pleasant to some of those colleagues, and I think they deserved to be called liars.
When I returned to work after counseling (?), it was straight into the pandemic.
After the pandemic, I was off sick for about a year; then I had CBT therapy, which did not work. I was redeployed to a new role, and that was when I discovered I had what seemed like a brain injury and real difficulty getting a diagnosis, but I was also on the staff psychology waiting list again.
You can self-diagnose PTSD, but it won’t be on your medical record; you can’t get therapy for it. PTSD is a disability, but you don’t get much support apart from priority interviews. If you use it to get a priority interview and your new employer asks for a medical report
Could I Draw A Clock?
Mine looked like “e”, I struggled to learn anything new. I was off work for another year. Then I was treated by a psychologist, and we did EMDR, and I won’t be describing any aspect of this treatment.
I did have a mild brain injury: It gave me a hypersensitive sense of smell.
“PTSD is what happens when traumatic stress doesn’t go away, when it festers and expands and eventually stabilizes into a more enduring state of distress,” Bonanno writes in his book, The End of Trauma. But events themselves are poor predictors of their emotional aftermath. Both trauma and PTSD are “dynamic states with fuzzy boundaries that unfold and change over time”. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/14/trauma-mental-health
The PTSD brain is totally busy and running survival mode, interrupted by flashbacks, loud noises, and sudden movement in your vicinity. Someone shouting in the street can trigger a change in awareness from relaxed to vigilant. Hyper-vigilance is exhausting. The nightmares are exhausting.
My mother developed a dementia related psychosis while I was ill. A failing psychiatric NHS service that is trying to shirk responsibility does not like people who understand 1983 mental health inside out, and that my mother was detainable and it was in her best interest to be assessed. In fact, at Pembury Hospital, a neurologist saw my mother and requested a Mental Health Act Assessment; she was seen by a mental health nurse who discharged her from the service and then rapidly exited through a locked door. Sometimes I understand why relatives become aggressive towards healthcare staff.
Remember, the service’s failures are not the patient’s fault.
The Kent Mental Health services seemed to think it was ok for an NHS member of staff who was mentally ill to look after a psychotic elderly woman in her 90s. We met some real jobsworths in that service. I’m glad to say my mother is now in a nursing home away from Kent.
We have Climate Science and New Age Bullshit
New-Age Neo-Shaman & Self-Styled Healers Say Really Stupid Stuff.
Dr Gail Bradbrook, in an interview with Climate Emergency Centers, suggests “we need the Ceremonialists who tend to climate grief“: She’s Wrong, and Her Opinion is not Supported By Science.
New Age healing methods generally fail to resolve climate anxiety because they treat a systemic, planetary emergency as an individual, psychological malfunction. While practices like crystal healing, manifestation, or energetic cleansing can temporarily lower acute stress, they are fundamentally mismatched with the nature of climate dread. Climate anxiety is not a personal pathology or a “limiting belief” to be meditated away; it is a rational, emotionally healthy response to a real and present danger.
1 New Age healing operates on the premise of self-optimization—the idea that you can curate your own peace of mind regardless of outer conditions.
- The Reality: Climate change is a hyperobject that requires massive, coordinated political and industrial shifts.
- The Mismatch: Trying to cure climate anxiety through solitary self-care isolates you from the collective. It leaves the individual carrying the crushing weight of global distress on their own shoulders
2. Pathologizing a Rational Response
Many wellness and New Age modalities treat anxiety as a flaw in a person’s mindset or a low vibrational state that needs to be “cleared.”
- The Reality: Climate psychologists emphasize that feeling grief and fear over environmental destruction is a sign of high emotional intelligence and deep connection to the Earth.
- The Mismatch: Attempting to transcend or suppress these emotions through forced positivity labels a perfectly healthy, empathetic reaction as a personal problem that needs fixing
3. The Illusion of Consumer Control
New Age spirituality is heavily entangled with modern wellness consumerism—encouraging people to purchase “sustainable” lifestyle items, essential oils, or spiritual tools to find alignment.
- The Reality: Individual consumer choices (like choosing the right eco-friendly brand) account for a fraction of global emissions and do not solve systemic apathy.
- The Mismatch: This shifts the narrative to “micro-actions,” which can trigger intense guilt and hyper-fixation on one’s own carbon footprint rather than channeling energy toward institutional accountability
4. Spiritual Bypassing vs. Active Hope
“Spiritual bypassing” is a common critique of New Age spaces, where individuals use spiritual concepts to avoid facing harsh, distressing real-world problems.
- The Reality: Coping with climate anxiety requires acknowledging the tragedy and converting that grief into agency.
- The Mismatch: Believing that “the universe will handle it” or that a problem can be fixed purely through mental manifestation promotes passive detachment. True resilience comes from “radical hope”—staring directly into the crisis and taking collective action anyway
New Age healing cannot treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) because it lacks the clinical mechanisms required to rewire a traumatized nervous system and often relies on concepts that promote spiritual bypassing or victim-blaming: I’d love to know which bit of the Assault was my fault.
Why New Age Practices Fall Short
- Biological Impact: PTSD is a physiological and neurological injury affecting brain structures like the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. Energy healing, crystals, and manifestation techniques cannot alter these entrenched neural pathways or regulate a chronically hyperactivated nervous system.
- Spiritual Bypassing: New Age frameworks often encourage positive thinking, “high vibrations,” or reframing reality to avoid painful emotions. This prevents individuals from processing core traumatic memories and staying present in their bodies.
- Victim Blaming and Toxic Positivity: Concepts like karma, “choosing your life,” or the idea that everything happens for a spiritual lesson can lead survivors to internalize blame for their abuse or trauma.
- Encouraging Dissociation: Certain ungrounded spiritual practices can worsen dissociation, pulling a person further out of their physical body rather than fostering the somatic safety required to heal trauma
“People have their trauma story which they will repeat over and over again to anyone who they think is listening, and frankly it’s boring. I don’t need to know your story to heal you; you don’t even need to be in the room with me.” Frankly, anyone who thinks like this is not worth talking to and isn’t a therapist; they are a grifter. They will take your money and just retraumatize you.
Soul Retrieval: An expedition into the psyche and subconscious of the victim by a tinkerer with a drum and some pheasant feathers.
Trauma is stored in the body. [Sigh…] “Trauma isn’t stored in the body — not in the muscles, the fascia, or the nervous system. That might sound pedantic, but it matters, because how we think about trauma shapes how we meet it.
Trauma can be understood as an experience that overwhelms our capacity to respond — when what happens feels too much for the resources we have at the time. The causes vary widely: the death of someone close, a physical assault, or the loss of a home. Whatever the event, it brings a wave of distress, fear, or helplessness. Later, situations that echo the original experience can reawaken similar feelings. Because these sensations seem to rise up from the body itself, it can feel as though the trauma has been “stored” there, waiting to be released. But something subtler is taking place.” https://www.peterblackaby.co.uk/trauma-is-not-stored-in-the-body/
For nearly a decade, the idea that “the body keeps the score” has shaped public and clinical understanding of trauma (van der Kolk, 2014). It is an enticing metaphor—implying that experience is literally inscribed in flesh, that the body bears the scars of what the mind cannot face. Yet recent advances in computational and systems neuroscience reveal that this image, while emotionally compelling, is biologically inaccurate. The body proper does not store trauma; the brain dynamically reenacts it through maladaptive inference. What endures after trauma is not a memory lodged in non-innervated tissue but a collapse of flexibility—a loss of metastability, the brain’s ability to fluidly switch among semi-stable network states. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2026.1812957/full
I used to find that flashbacks left me nauseous and exhausted. Before I was treated with EMDR, I had daily, sometimes several, flashbacks. Since treatment and a period of recovery, I can talk about the incident comfortably, but I find myself increasingly not wanting to, because it is uninteresting.
Why Flashbacks Cause Nausea and Exhaustion
- False alarm: Your brain reacts as if the past trauma is happening right now.
- Stress chemicals: Your body floods with survival hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.
- Digestion shutdown: Stress diverts blood away from your stomach, leading to nausea and an upset belly.
- The physical crash: Fighting an invisible danger uses a massive amount of energy, leaving you deeply exhausted when it passes.
Things which helped me recover
- Leaving the NHS and doing something different
- Nature
- EMDR
- More Nature
- Avoiding idiots
- Even More Nature: My psychologist said that I should use my own nature therapy experience on myself and she was right.
The PTSD Brain on Serotonin
Gardening and spending time in nature are powerful, science-backed ways to reduce anxiety and calm the mind.
Why Nature Reduces Anxiety
- Lowers Stress Hormones: Being around trees and plants lowers cortisol levels, the primary stress hormone.
- Brain Reset: Focusing on the colors and textures of a garden gives your busy brain a break from racing thoughts.
- Soil Contact: Touching soil exposes you to a harmless bacterium, Mycobacterium vaccae. This bacterium triggers the brain to release serotonin, which lifts your mood.
- Gentle Movement: Digging, weeding, and watering are light exercises that release feel-good chemicals in your body.
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