Felt Sense – and the night everything I knew about pressure stopped working
I am writing this at the end of the first year of my PhD, in what feels both literally and otherwise like the very first week of spring.
I have been coaching for over eight years now. Writing about trauma-informed practice, high performance under pressure, and what actually happens in the body when capable people find themselves stuck. Researching it: my MSc systematic review published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, and now doctoral research into the hidden experience of families supporting young people in psychiatric care. Sitting with clients, week after week, watching the moment when something that has been held very tightly for a very long time begins, quietly, to release.
Eight years is long enough to notice some things clearly. Long enough to know what works, what doesn’t, and what most people, including most coaches, are still getting wrong about why capable, self-aware, genuinely motivated people keep running into the same wall.
It is also long enough to have done a considerable amount of my own work in this territory. Not as a theoretical exercise. As a necessity.
This is the story of where that necessity came from. And what it taught me about the limits of everything I thought I knew about pressure.
I have stood in a room and been told that people might die if I got the next decision wrong.
Not metaphorically. Not as a leadership development exercise. Actually.
I was twenty-one years old, freshly commissioned from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, one of the first women to complete the Common Commissioning Course on the same terms as the men, and I was commanding fifty people. I had been trained, rigorously and relentlessly, to perform under pressure. To think clearly when everything around me was unclear. To lead when I was frightened, to decide when I didn’t have enough information, to hold myself together so that the people around me could hold themselves together.
For nine years, that training worked. Iraq. Large-scale multinational exercises. The particular daily pressure of being one of the first women through a system built, for centuries, without women in mind. I learned what pressure does to people and what it can produce when the conditions are right. Clarity, sometimes. A kind of competence forged in circumstances that don’t allow much room for pretending.
I was good at this. I say that not out of pride but because it matters to what comes next.
None of it prepared me for the night my daughter was born.
She almost died. That sentence still sits differently in my body than any other sentence I know how to write.
I won’t reconstruct the clinical details. What I will tell you is what happened to me, a trained, experienced, demonstrably capable handler of high-pressure situations, in those hours. Every tool I had stopped working. The training that had carried me through a decade of genuine adversity simply wasn’t available. I was reaching for it and finding nothing there. In its place was something I had no name for: a terror so complete that it rewired something, though I wouldn’t understand the nature of that rewiring for years.
I suffered significant physical and psychological injuries that night. The recovery was long, non-linear, and nothing like any process I had been trained for.
And somewhere in the middle of it, I started asking a question I couldn’t stop asking.
Why hadn’t it worked?
That question sent me back to study. It sent me into the research on trauma, on nervous system responses to overwhelming experience, on what actually happens in the body, not just the mind, when someone encounters something beyond the edges of their existing capacity.
What I found changed how I understand almost everything about human performance, coaching psychology, and why trauma-informed practice is not a specialism at the edges of coaching. It is, I would argue, at its very centre.
Here is the short version of what the research says, translated out of clinical language into plain English.
The tools most of us are given in leadership training, resilience programmes, performance coaching and therapy work at the level of conscious thought. They teach us to reframe, to regulate, to choose a different response. They are genuinely useful. But they operate in a particular part of the system.
The part of the system they don’t reach is the part that fires first.
Before you can reframe anything, before any coaching technique, any mindfulness practice, any hard-won insight can engage, the older, faster part of your neurology has already responded. It has scanned the situation, matched it to something in its stored experience, and fired. That response is not a choice. It arrives in the body before it reaches conscious awareness.
For most situations, this causes no problem. But for experiences that were genuinely overwhelming, sudden, threatening, or happening at a moment when we had no control and no preparation, something different occurs. The response that formed in that moment doesn’t update in the normal way. It stays encoded below the level of conscious access and continues to fire whenever the system detects anything that resembles the original conditions.
You don’t need to be aware of the resemblance. It can be a tone of voice, a quality of silence, a particular kind of pressure. The pattern doesn’t require your conscious participation. It simply fires.
This is why the high-achieving, self-aware, genuinely motivated people I work with, people who understand their patterns intellectually, who have often already been in therapy, who can describe in precise detail what they want to do differently, still find themselves doing the same thing. Not because they lack insight. Not because they lack willpower or commitment or self-awareness. Because the pattern that’s getting in their way isn’t living where any of those things can reach it.
But the felt sense can reach it.
That small sentence took me eight years to earn.
The felt sense is not a technique. It is not something you learn to do. It is something you learn to listen to, something most capable, high-functioning people have spent years overriding because there was always something more urgent, more rational, more productive demanding their attention.
What I do in my work, drawing on trauma-informed coaching psychology, somatic approaches, Havening Techniques … and inspired by Gendlin’s texts on Focusing, works at the level where those patterns actually live. Not at the level of thought or intention, but at the level of the body’s own knowing. The body that fired in terror on the worst night of my life. The body that also, quietly and without fanfare, knew how to keep going.
Eight years on, working as a coaching psychologist with clients across law, finance, medicine, international institutions and the military, and now in the first year of doctoral research that has taken me somewhere I didn’t entirely expect, I keep returning to the same observation.
The people who come to me are not lacking capability. They are not lacking motivation or intelligence or self-awareness. They are, in most cases, remarkably equipped human beings who have hit something their existing tools can’t reach.
Learning to listen to what the body already knows changes that. Not dramatically, not all at once. A slight loosening where there used to be tightness. A moment where the old response simply doesn’t come. And then another. And then the gradual, sometimes startling realisation that something has shifted at a level you can feel but can barely name.
That is what I work towards. It took the worst night of my life to show me it was possible.
Spring feels like the right time to say so.
Kate Brassington is a Coaching Psychologist, EMCC Senior Practitioner, ICF PCC and published researcher specialising in trauma-informed coaching psychology for high-achieving professionals. She works with private clients and organisations worldwide from her base in Luxembourg. If this resonated, you can book a free 30-minute discovery call [https://katebrassington.com/contact-me/] to explore working together.