Anastasis
Anastasis: a working model for overcoming developmental and relational trauma
Welcome in. This is the first of thirteen short pieces in which I want to walk you through the model I have spent years building — and to invite you to consider learning it with me.
▶ Watch the film — Communion and Committee Opens on YouTube in a new window.
Dear beautiful human, welcome to Anastasis. I am so glad you are here.
If you work therapeutically with people who carry deep, early wounds — the survivors of neglect, abuse, and the kind of long, pervasive hurt we have come to call developmental and relational trauma (DvRT) — then you will already know something I learned the hard way: that good intentions and a warm heart are not, on their own, enough. These clients have often been through the system. Some arrive as what I gently call counselling refugees: people who took the brave step of asking for help and found that their experience of therapy was not very therapeutic. They do not need to be asked “and how does that make you feel?” after every disclosure. They need to be met by someone who understands the territory, and who will not be overwhelmed by what they bring.
Anastasis is my attempt to map that territory. It is a working model — and I do mean working, because it is still growing, as I am — for understanding and accompanying people towards the overcoming of DvRT (NB, not all relational trauma is developmental, but all developmental trauma is relational). Over the next twelve posts I will take you through it piece by piece. In this first one, I simply want to introduce it, tell you a little of where it came from, and explain why I am turning it into a Level 7 training course for experienced practitioners.
What the word means
Anastasis is an ancient Greek word. It means rebirth or resurrection — a going through pain, and sometimes through a kind of death, into a new beginning. Another word for it might be revival: to live again. I chose it deliberately, because it carries a hope that words like recovery or coping do not quite reach. It says that trauma does not get the final word. It says that overcoming is more than survival, and that a person can come not only through their suffering but into a fullness of being that is as unique as they are.
I do not offer that lightly, or as a slogan. I offer it as someone who has lived it. I am, in the common phrase, a survivor. I have known event-based trauma, and I have known the deeper, more pervasive kind — the early experiences of harm at the hands of people who were entrusted with my wellbeing, which challenged my very sense of myself as someone valuable, safe and loved. My own Anastasis has brought me to a life I never believed I could live: full of joy and sorrow, laughter and pain, all of it part of an abundant life. The skill, I have come to think, is not in escaping the hard feelings but in holding them in balance with other truths — and that takes constant awareness and adjustment.
Trauma is caused not by the events themselves, but by the way we experienced them — as a threat to our existence, our safety, our very survival.
Why “developmental and relational”
I use both words on purpose. Our adult relationships are always, in some measure, repetitions of — or reactions to — our earliest attachments. Whatever we learned about love, safety and trust in our first relationships becomes a template we carry forward. So the trauma is developmental, because it shaped us as we grew, and it is relational, because it happened in relationship and it lives on in relationship. That is the hard news. The hopeful news is that, because relationship is where the wound was made, relationship is also where the healing can happen.
This is why I do not say that I work with trauma, as though trauma were a thing on a shelf. I work with people who have been traumatised. I work with persons, not issues. Everything in this model is built around that distinction.
The shape of the model: five Dynamics, five Domains
In its simplest form, Anastasis is made up of five Dynamics and five Domains. I will give each of them its own post, so here I will only sketch them.
The Dynamics are the forces that affect our progress and change — the inner and outer currents that variously enable and inhibit our healing. There are five: Communion (our relationships with others, and with the Source); Committee (our relationship with ourselves, with all the inner ‘voices’ we carry); Labyrinth (the winding, single-path journey of recovery, which takes us through rather than back); Omnibalance (the art of holding our polarities and contradictions without falling off the bike); and the Vortex (those overwhelming, dissociative episodes when the past floods the present).
The Domains are the distinct spheres we journey through — the landscape itself. Again, there are five: Autobiography (telling and re-hearing our story), Accountability (untangling healthy guilt from toxic shame, and putting responsibility where it truly belongs), Amnesty (releasing ourselves from the bondage of hatred, resentment and the desire for payback), Archaeology (regulation, reclamation and the digging-up of buried parts of ourselves), and Alchemy (the refining of base experience into gold — acceptance, post-traumatic growth, and becoming who we were made to be). The Domain Map is the picture that holds all of this together, and it too has its own post.
Crucially, this is not a staircase. We do not complete one box and move tidily to the next. We walk the Labyrinth in and out of the Domains many times over, which is why recovery so often feels like “two steps forward and three steps back,” or “Oh no, not here again!” We may be in the same Domain, but we are never at quite the same place — because we are further along the path, and we see it now with fresh eyes.
I should say plainly that Anastasis is not a rejection of established theory — quite the opposite. It is an integrative model, and it stands on the shoulders of a great deal of well-respected work: attachment theory from Bowlby and Ainsworth; the developmental stages of Erikson and Freud; the core conditions of Carl Rogers; functional and structural models from Transactional Analysis; the trauma-informed insights of Stephen Porges, Richard Schwartz, Bessel van der Kolk and Babette Rothschild; John Bradshaw’s perspective on the nature of shame; and a positive-psychology emphasis on flourishing and post-traumatic growth (the wealth of information is not exhaustive). What the model adds is a frame — a shared language and a map — that holds these threads together in a way survivors can actually walk through, rather than a reading list they have to assemble for themselves.
Faith, and the freedom not to share mine
I am a person of faith, and the model is honest about that. It makes room for our connection with Spirit — the Source, the Creator, God, the Numinous, that which cannot be explained — because, in my experience, there is a safety and healing available there that cognition and human connection alone cannot reach. But I am not in the business of telling anyone what to believe. Wherever you stand, you are welcome, and I will always invite you to bring your own point of reference rather than borrow mine. Respectful open-mindedness and curiosity are part of the work.
Why I am teaching it
I value and respect this profession, and I want it to offer services that are robust, informed and full of integrity — especially to the most deeply hurt people, who are so often the least well served. I trained as a therapist after my own healing began, and went on to teaching, supervision, and an MSc in Applied Positive Psychology. Anastasis is the distillation of all of that, and of many years of deep relational work with survivors.
So I am opening it up. Over the coming posts I will share the model freely, because I believe it can help. And for those who want to learn to practise this way — to extend the availability of genuinely trauma-informed, advanced therapeutic work — I am running it as a Level 7 Diploma, beginning in October 2026. There is more about that below.
For now, simply come and connect. Let us walk together for a while.
A few questions to sit with
- What first drew you towards trauma work — and what, if you are honest, is still difficult about it for you?
- Where, in your own practice, do you sense the edge of your current understanding?
- What would it mean for you to be progressing in your own Anastasis to enrich your offering as you accompany others on theirs?
About the course
The Anastasis Model sits at the heart of a Level 7 Diploma in trauma-informed, advanced therapeutic practice — written for accredited counsellors and psychotherapists who want to work more deeply with developmental and relational trauma, and who are moving towards senior accreditation (SCoPEd Column C).
It runs online, with three in-person residentials, over fifteen months: October 2026 to December 2027. The group is deliberately small — capped at twelve — so no one is ever just a face in a crowded screen. The fee is £5,250, with payment plans available.
To enquire, email training@authentictandt.uk or call Annie on 07949 677405. We shape the cohort together through conversation, so do get in touch early.