Questions we
hear most often

A typical week: Monday is self-directed movement practice — gentle guided somatic movement at your own pace. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings (5:30pm UK) are live group sessions: Hanna Somatics, bilateral somatic work, and Somatic Experiencing respectively.

On top of that you'll have regular 1:1 therapy sessions with your matched practitioner, WhatsApp access to Harry and Niki throughout the week, and the private member community. Everything is recorded if you can't make it live.

Phase 1 — Stabilise & Regulate (months 1–3): Building the capacity to be present with difficult sensations without spiralling. Pacing, grounding, nervous system foundations. Non-negotiable — skipping it makes deeper work either ineffective or overwhelming.

Phase 2 — Somatic Processing (months 3–6): Releasing the body-level patterns holding the survival response in place. This is where the real physical shifts happen.

Phase 3 — Integration (months 6–12): Reintegrating into real life — movement, work, socialising — while maintaining the gains and building long-term resilience. These are rough timeframes; everyone moves at their own pace.

We ask for at least one hour per week — that's the minimum to see consistent progress. In practice, most members attend 2–3 live sessions a week plus their 1:1 session, which comes to around 3–5 hours total.

Everything is recorded, so you never have to miss something permanently. We build the programme around your energy capacity, not the other way around.

We build pacing into the programme from day one. If you hit a difficult patch, you have the recordings, the community, and direct access to Harry and Niki. Nobody has ever been left to figure out a crash alone.

We adjust to your capacity throughout — the programme is flexible by design. Post-exertional malaise is something we understand and plan for, not something that derails the process.

6–12 months for the full programme. This isn't arbitrary — the three phases take the time they take. Rushing phase one to get to the "real work" consistently produces worse outcomes. The depth of the work in phases two and three depends on the quality of the foundation built in phase one.

It varies depending on the level of support you need. Book a free assessment call and we'll walk you through the options that make sense for your situation.

Yes. If after your first 30 days you don't feel the programme is the right fit — for any reason — you can walk away with a full refund. No questions, no awkward conversations. We'd rather you find the right support than stay out of obligation.

Your first payment goes out on the day you join — and your first session can be that same week. We don't hold spots or take deposits. If the timing isn't right, we'd rather you wait and join when it is.

Yes — the payment link we send can be passed to whoever is handling it for you. We just need you to complete the assessment yourself so we understand your situation. Many members are supported by a partner or family member in this way.

"Somatic" means body-based. Somatic therapy works with the physical sensations, tension patterns, and nervous system states in the body — rather than (or alongside) the thoughts and narratives in the mind.

For conditions like Long Covid and ME/CFS, this matters because the survival response isn't stored in your thoughts — it's stored in the body. Approaches that only work with cognition reach less than 20% of the nervous system's processing. Somatic work reaches the rest.

In group sessions you'll be guided through slow, gentle movements or exercises — often lying down, always low-effort. Nothing that will trigger a crash. In Hanna Somatics sessions, you'll work with pandiculation exercises that look a bit like very slow stretching but are doing something different at the motor cortex level.

In 1:1 sessions the work is more personal — you'll be guided to notice sensations, track what's happening in the body, and work gently with what comes up. People often describe feeling calmer, clearer, or surprisingly emotional after sessions — sometimes all three.

No — though we use breathwork as one tool. Yoga and most breathwork practices are done to the nervous system. Somatic therapy works with it — following what's actually happening rather than imposing a structure onto it. The mechanism is different, and the outcomes for people with chronic illness tend to be meaningfully different.

No. We work alongside your medical care — we don't replace it. Many of our members are still working with GPs, specialists, or other practitioners. What we offer addresses a layer that medicine typically doesn't: the nervous system dysregulation that drives and maintains symptoms.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) was originally developed for PTSD. It uses bilateral stimulation — alternating left-right input — to help the brain reprocess experiences that have become "stuck" in the nervous system.

For chronic illness, the relevance is this: the body's physiological response to symptoms — the fear, the bracing, the hypervigilance — can become its own loop, amplifying the very symptoms it's responding to. EMDR can break that loop directly. Our practitioners use a somatic variant that works with where the experience is held in the body, not just the mind.

It varies a lot between people and sessions. Some sessions feel subtle — a gradual shift in how a sensation feels. Others can be more intense — emotions surfacing, trembling, a sense of something releasing. Our founder Harry has described sessions where a piercing brainstem pain physically shifted after processing.

What most people share: a sense of something being different afterwards, even when they can't fully articulate what changed. Often lighter. Sometimes tired. Occasionally euphoric.

No. The word "trauma" in this context is much broader than most people assume. You don't need a dramatic event in your past. What we're working with is physiologically encoded stress — patterns the nervous system learned that are no longer serving you. That applies to almost everyone with a chronic illness, regardless of their history.

Yes — all 1:1 sessions are online, via Zoom. Bilateral stimulation is delivered through tapping or audio rather than eye movements, which is equally effective and has the advantage of allowing you to be in your own space. Many members find working from home is actually better — you're already in your nervous system's "safe" environment.

Yes. Many people with Long Covid and ME/CFS go years without a formal diagnosis — the system isn't well equipped to provide one. What we care about is the pattern: persistent symptoms, nervous system dysregulation, a sense that your body is stuck in some kind of ongoing threat response. A diagnosis is not required.

If you're fully bed-bound and can't engage with even very gentle sessions, we'd generally suggest waiting until there's a small stable window before starting. The programme requires a minimum of engagement to work — even if that engagement is just listening to a recorded session.

If you're in a crash but have some capacity, book a call and we'll talk honestly about whether now is the right time. We'd rather tell you to wait than have you join when you can't benefit.

Most approaches — rest, supplements, brain training, CBT, graded exercise — address the symptoms or the mind. This programme works on the nervous system mechanism that drives those symptoms, from the body up. It's a different layer.

We're honest with people before they join. If we don't think this is the right fit for your situation, we'll say so on the assessment call rather than take your money. That's a meaningful commitment — we've turned people away.

Yes — the programme was built for Long Covid and ME/CFS but the mechanism we work with underlies FND, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, and related conditions too. The survival response stuck state looks different across conditions, but the approach addresses it the same way. See the conditions page for more on each.

Live group sessions run on Zoom. The community is on a private WhatsApp group. 1:1 sessions are also on Zoom. You'll receive a welcome pack when you join with everything you need — links, schedules, how to access recordings.

The setup is deliberately simple. You don't need any special equipment or software. A phone with a camera is enough for most sessions.

Every live session is recorded and shared to the group the same day. Missing a session is fine — the recordings are full sessions, not summaries. Many members watch recordings at times that suit them rather than attending live, especially in the early stages when energy is limited.

Yes — everything is online so you can join from anywhere. Sessions run at 5:30pm UK time, which works well across Europe. For members in very different time zones (US, Australia etc.) we'd talk through what works on the assessment call — recordings mean you're never cut off from the content.