Rebecca’s Contact Details
rebeccamaryporteous@gmail.com
We experience everything, including what’s going on in our minds, through our bodies. These experiences can leave their traces in the form of physical and mental patterns or behaviours that, while useful at the time, may not always help us in the long-term. With Yoga, the Trager® Approach, Somatic Experiencing and Integrative psychotherapy as the keystones of my work, I help my clients develop conversations with their embodied selves that give them more choice about how they might engage with and respond to the world around them.
I work with acute and chronic pain and discomfort, both physical and psychological, including that which arises with anxiety, depression, PTSD and developmental and systemic trauma. I usually start with what is going on in a person’s nervous system as a way of understanding suffering, whether it is experienced mentally or physically.
Yoga, Trager® Approach, Somatic Experiencing and Integrative Psychotherapy
I have learned the therapeutic use of Yoga, the Trager Approach, Somatic Experiencing and Psychotherapy in that order. For many years they were distinct in my mind when I was working, but over time my style has become increasingly integrated. I would now be hard-pressed to identify a clear differentiation between them in any given session. What is common to every session however, whatever the focus, is that together we bring our attention to the feelings, sensations, images and thoughts that arise in you. Slowly and safely, states of overwhelm or freeze are encountered and negotiated, allowing for the innate inclination of every living system towards restoration and resilience to make itself felt and understood. Old patterns of holding and reactivity, with their associated discomforts and behaviours, can then let go, leaving room for a newfound curiosity, aliveness and receptivity to the world.
Another aspect common to every session is the joyous recognition that in every living system there is more that is functional than dysfunctional. We are working with how we’ve survived rather than how we are broken.
Areas I work with:
- Anxiety and panic attacks
- Chronic pain
- Grief and Loss
- Transitions
- Phobias and other avoidance behaviours and patterns
- PTSD, Complex PTSD and Developmental Trauma, including sexual trauma
- Systemic trauma from social and political oppression
- Intergenerational trauma
My Journey
I had been teaching an individualised, Scaravelli-inspired style of Yoga for ten years, was training to be a Trager practitioner, and raising my family in Downtown Cairo when the Arab Spring rose up on my doorstep in 2011.
By 2012 I was suffering from physical symptoms which I eventually addressed through a combination of trauma-informed body-based work and psychotherapy. As the revolution ebbed and flowed around us, I set about learning how to use my new-found understanding of trauma and the body to help others, initially through my skills as a Yoga teacher and Trager practitioner, then adding Somatic Experiencing and psychotherapy to my tool-box.
I have worked in Arabic and in English, both in Egypt and in the UK, with people of all ages, genders and from many backgrounds. Issues I am familiar with are early childhood trauma, particularly in the context of domestic and sexual violence, incest, systemic trauma particularly at the hands of the British prison system, and surviving political violence, including the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I have worked with second- and third- generation immigrants to Britain, particularly from the Arab and wider Muslim world, and a good proportion of my clients are from the LGBTQ+ community.
I work in English, Egyptian Arabic and have a comfortable working knowledge of French.
“Am I suffering from trauma?”
It took the excitement, fear and drama of the Egyptian uprising of 2011-13 for me to recognise that the coping strategies my body and mind had developed for managing stress were not always working in my best interests. It was at least a year before I learned to recognise the physical symptoms I was suffering from as ‘trauma’.
In many ways the label was irrelevant, except that it helped me find the therapy that worked for me, and to develop a more effectively therapeutic way of working with my clients and students. But we don’t have to have gone through ‘trauma’, to benefit from developing a more articulate and coherent relationship with our bodies and minds; how they hold and process our experiences and how we might have more choice about that.
My Training
- Yoga teacher training with Mary Stewart, London 1999-2001
- Registered Senior Yoga Teacher with Independent Yoga Association, until it closed in 2022
- Licenced Trager® Practitioner, 2013, Registered with Trager® UK and Trager® Egypt
- Principles of Yoga Anatomy with Leslie Kaminoff, USA, 2013-14
- Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Training with Bessel van der Kolk, David Emerson and Jen Turner, USA, 2014
- Yoga Therapy and Mindfulness for PTSD with Heather Mason, London, 2015
- One Year Foundation Certificate in Psychotherapy, Counselling and Coaching from the New School of Psychotherapy and Coaching, London, 2017
- Somatic Experiencing Practitioner 2020, Training assistant since 2020, Session provider for trainees since 2023
- PG dip in Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy at University of East London 2022-2024
- Registered member no. 406799 of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, 2025
- Specialized emergency mental health intervention training with Healing for Gaza, 2025
Before pursuing my fascination with the stories our bodies tell, I worked in the London publishing industry as a literary editor and project manager.
Contact:
Please email me
rebeccamaryporteous@gmail.com
Rates:
£95 for 50 mins
£120 if you would like to contribute £25 towards a concessionary session for someone else.
Concessionary rates make up more than 30% of my practice.
Sessions:
In-person sessions at Barnsbury Therapy Space:
Friday mornings
Directions to Barnsbury Therapy Space