Meet the founder

Suzannah's Story

The raw, unfiltered version. The one that explains why I do what I do, and why I believe so deeply that healing is possible.

I used to wonder why, no matter how hard I tried, things just wouldn't shift. My business was stuck. My emotions were stuck.
I felt like I was spinning my wheels and getting nowhere. It took me a long time to connect the dots between everything I'd lived through and the blocks that were quietly running my life.

This is that story. The whole, unfiltered version. I'm sharing it because I know that somewhere in here, you might recognise yourself.

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

01 Growing Up in Chaos

My childhood was chaotic, and the word chaotic doesn't quite cover it. My dad was an alcoholic, and the ripple effects of that touched everything. I remember being about 8 years old, packing up all my things because we were being evicted. We were saved on the day we were due to leave by a kind elderly couple in our village who paid our rent arrears. I felt vulnerable, scared and quietly furious with my dad.

He hadn't just been not paying the rent. He'd been breaking into our electricity meter and taking the money out to buy booze.

"Mum! The leccy's gone again!" We'd shout it into the darkness as the house went quiet. As a kid it was actually kind of exciting, sitting around with candlelight. As an adult, I understand what it really meant.

We couldn't afford a car, so we rarely left the village. I was often sent to the local shop to put things 'on tick', take the goods now and pay on payday. Food was hit and miss. Money was always the thing that wasn't there.

Despite all of that, there were good memories too. Being the eldest girl, I loved playing mum to my three younger brothers. Mud pies in the garden, picking blackberries, catching tadpoles at the stream, building dens. That part of childhood was lovely.

As a pre-teen I was exposed to drugs when my dad brought strangers back from the pub. I remember running with my mum in the early hours to the dental surgery where she was the cleaner, using her keys to phone the police in secret. It was the kind of thing no child should be navigating.

Eventually someone reported my parents to the NSPCC, and we were referred to social services. The drinking didn't stop, but at least we had a social worker coming to help.

My dad died aged 50 from alcohol-related illness in 2000. I grieved for the father I had glimpsed in better moments; the man who grew vegetables, who could make a room laugh, who worked hard and wanted to provide. I was frustrated and angry that he couldn't overcome his addiction for us. He never got to meet my children, and I'll always carry a sadness about that. As an adult, I've come to understand how completely addiction can take hold of a person.

No Safety Net

02 No Fixed Address

When I was about 14, my mum finally left my dad. The family split. My two eldest brothers chose to stay with him. I was relieved to escape the chaos, but I was stepping straight into a different kind of upheaval.

The council wouldn't rehouse us because they deemed we'd made ourselves intentionally homeless. So we lived in a tent for a few weeks, then a caravan for a few months. I had an outreach teacher come to the caravan to tutor me occasionally. That was my school for a while.

We moved through various B&Bs, had to be out after breakfast each day and couldn't return until 4pm. Eventually we were housed in a flat. It was a roof over our heads. That felt like enough.

I scraped through school with a handful of GCSEs and went straight to work at 16. My first full-time job was as a Grill Chef in a local cafe. Over the next few years I worked in retail, factory work, lived in London for a time. At 21 I met my husband and moved back to Devon. We married in 2001 in Mombasa, Kenya.

Love and the unexpected

03 For Better, For Worse

A couple of years into our relationship, my husband was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis. He'd had lung conditions throughout his life but because he has a milder form, it wasn't picked up until adulthood. A locum GP finally connected the dots and sent him for tests.

I think we were both in denial at first. We didn't fully grasp what it would mean for our lives long-term. CF means a strict daily medical routine, regular hospital stays and periods where he's so unwell I need to care for him. Those times are genuinely tough. They've also made me deeply grateful that I built a way of working that flexes around my family.

I don't share this to invite sympathy. I share it because living alongside serious illness changes you, quietly and permanently. It teaches you what actually matters. And it adds a layer of stress that accumulates over years in ways you don't always notice until it's everywhere.

Through all of it, the one thing I kept coming back to was family. Building the kind of home I never had as a child. That hope never left me, even when it was tested in ways I wasn't prepared for.

The hardest kind of hope

04 Becoming a Mother

We both came from big families and wanted lots of children. Three or four, maybe more. It didn't work out that way.

After years of trying with no good news, we found out we couldn't conceive naturally. People said all the things people say. Go on holiday. Just relax. Stop trying and it'll happen. It wouldn't. There was no chance of it happening without help.

We spent over £25,000 on IVF, ICSI and various treatments across different hospitals. We missed holidays, family events and normal life because we were either saving money or I was in the thick of treatment and couldn't face being around pregnant women or friends with new babies. I hated feeling that way, but I was never going to give up.

After more than seven failed cycles, I got pregnant. In 2005 my son was born. The labour was 37 hours, back-to-back. After he arrived he was rushed to special care with pneumonia contracted in the womb. I asked the doctor if he'd make it. She said "I don't know." I felt like the floor had given way beneath me.

He made it. The NHS were extraordinary. When he finally came home, I could breathe again.

Eighteen months later we tried again. One pregnancy ended in miscarriage. We tried once more, and in 2007 my daughter arrived by C-section, pink and healthy and perfect.

We tried for a third, but at 38 my hormone levels were too low. Three cycles failed. I was heartbroken, but I know I am lucky. My two are amazing.

Before I Had Words For It

05 The Thing Nobody Talked About

My struggles with mental health started early. I didn't have words for any of it. I just knew my brain worked differently.

What I now recognise as anxiety and OCD showed up when I was about three years old. A fear of swallowing that had me spitting into stacking cups. At seven I was shoving fluff from blankets up my nose, a comfort thing, a sensory ritual my brain had latched onto. My parents had to call the doctor out. He pulled the fluff out with tweezers and I sneezed the rest. I'm sure they were baffled.

Later came a compulsion around things dying, a need to touch my alarm clock every night to keep the people and pets I loved safe. My brain was constantly scanning for danger and inventing rituals to keep it at bay.

As a teenager I self-harmed. I had no intention of dying. But there was something about the release of it that I couldn't find anywhere else. I understand now what I was trying to do; I was trying to regulate a nervous system that had never been taught how to settle.

I've had suicidal thoughts in the past, fleeting moments when things were at their worst. I've never wanted to act on them, but I know how dark that place can feel.

The Part I'm Not Proud Of

06 My Worst Kept Secret

For years I used alcohol to escape. To relax, to sleep, to cope. I was most definitely addicted.

Every weekend, without fail. And more and more frequently, it spilled into weeknights. There was always a reason. Bad day. Good day. Hot day. Stressful day. Birthday. There was always something. I remember driving home after a day out and mentally inventing reasons to stop at the supermarket so I had an excuse to pick up a bottle of wine.

I never drank during the day. I had alcohol-free evenings during the week. But I knew it was a problem when I started waking up in the morning feeling guilty. There were nudges from the universe, quiet ones and louder ones, telling me it was time to stop.

Giving up was genuinely hard. But I did it. And the clarity that came afterwards was unlike anything I'd experienced before. I think that decision was the real catalyst. It made me look honestly at everything, including my business, my money stuff, and the patterns that had been running quietly underneath everything for years.

The moment everything shifted

07 The Breakthrough

All of it, the chaos of childhood, the scarcity, the evictions, the homelessness, the infertility, the debt, the drinking, had quietly shaped the way I related to money, to success and to my own worth. I had a lack mindset baked in from childhood. I defaulted to victim mode. I secretly hoped someone would rescue me, a lottery win, a wealthy relative, a successful entrepreneur who'd spot me and swoop in.

In business, I kept hitting the same wall. Stagnant. Self-doubt. The feeling I was actively repelling the very thing I was trying to build.
Eventually I got the memo. Heal the trauma. Clear the blocks. Stop waiting to be rescued.

I spent around 18 months going all-in. EFT Tapping, journaling, self-hypnosis, meditation. Day after day, consistently, even when nothing seemed to be shifting.

Then one evening, my husband and I sat down to go through our business finances. This was normally the moment I'd spiral. Heart pounding. Sick feeling. Tears, confusion, shutdown. He dreaded these conversations because my emotional responses were so unpredictable.
That night, we opened the laptop. Got out the paperwork. And I just... looked at the numbers. Calmly. Clearly. No charge. No panic. No tears.

"You do realise you didn't get triggered?" my husband said.

And I burst out laughing. Because he was right. Something had actually shifted. The thing I'd been working on for months had worked. And I knew then, with complete certainty, that if I could clear that trigger, I could clear any of them.

Where I am now

That was the turning point. Everything that came after has been building on it.

I didn't come to this work through a textbook. I came to it the long way. Through chaos, anxiety that started before I had words for it, self-harm in my teens, alcohol later, and years of wondering whether I was just wired wrong.

I'm not going to tell you I'm completely healed. That's not how this works, and I wouldn't trust anyone who said it was. What I can tell you is that I'm in a better place than I've ever been in my life.

Anxiety doesn't run the show any more. Money doesn't send me into shutdown. I can sit with hard things without falling apart. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because I found something that actually reached the root, and I kept showing up for it.

I've since helped thousands of people experience their own version of that shift. Not a magic fix. A real one, grounded in how the nervous system actually works.

The Tapping Association is trauma-aware, practitioner-led, and built from lived experience. No pressure. No performance. No promises of a shiny new life by Tuesday. Just a safe, supportive space to start feeling better, at your own pace.

Are you an EFT practitioner looking for client resources, scripts and protocols? There's a space for you here too.