Our story

While volunteering and mentoring at Lifeline, Fiona and Jackson realised that while there was support preparing for shifts and debriefing afterwards, there was little focus on how to remain calm and connected during the calls themselves.

To address this unmet need, we developed our experiential professional development workshops — Somatic Self-Regulation for Crisis Supporters and Counsellors. Drawing from evidence showing that calming our bodies results in calming our minds, the techniques we teach are simple to apply and highly effective. These enable crisis supporters and counsellors to remain calm — enhancing their capacity to provide support and protect their own wellbeing.

As Jackson and Fiona are now experienced somatic psychotherapists and counsellors in private practice, they know what it’s like to be present with and connected to challenging people in need. They are also have extensive backgrounds in workshop-based teaching.

Holding the Line workshops make use of Jackson’s and Fiona’s unique combination of skills and experience to teach these simple but powerful techniques. Created especially by and for crisis supporters and counsellors, this training will benefit all help-line teams and other customer-facing call-centre professionals.