Facilitating spaces, particularly for women, has become a significant part of my work over the past two years. It wasn’t something I set out to do with a clear plan or vision; but simply evolved organically from a desire for connection and community, even before I fully understood how much I needed those things myself.

Along the way, I have come to recognise both the privilege and responsibility that come with facilitating spaces where people gather, connect, and sometimes experience powerful emotions. It is work I take seriously, not because I believe I have all the answers, but because I am constantly learning. Every event, conversation, and piece of feedback teaches me something new about people, group dynamics, and my role.

I am also aware that my approach will not resonate with everyone, something I am increasingly comfortable with. But questions have come up throughout this experience. Questions about responsibility, expectations, emotional safety, and the limits of what a facilitator can reasonably provide.

Recent feedback following one of my events prompted me to reflect more deeply on those questions, particularly where the line sits between facilitating a meaningful experience and being expected to hold responsibilities that belong elsewhere.

Reflections on Facilitating Wellness Spaces Without Being a Therapist.

At one point during a recent women’s “Rage in the woods” event, one woman was laughing so hard she was doubled over. Another was whooping from the sidelines. Someone else had gone quiet, focused entirely on dismantling the pallet in front of her.

The space held a mixture of energy: joy, release, nerves, excitement, concentration.

As I looked around, I remember thinking that everyone seemed to be finding their own way into the experience, and the energy was zinging. Had you asked me when the event ended how it had gone, I would have said it was a huge success, and that I left buzzing from the experience.

It was only later, after receiving some feedback, that I found myself reflecting on a bigger question: what exactly am I responsible for as a facilitator, and where does that responsibility end?

The Expanding Expectations of Wellness Spaces

I have noticed that therapeutic language has become deeply embedded in wellness culture in recent years.

Words and phrases such as “holding space,” “nervous system regulation,” “trauma-informed,” and “safe space” are now common across everything from retreats and workshops to fitness classes and community gatherings.

In many ways, this is positive. It has encouraged greater awareness, sensitivity, and consideration for people’s lived experiences. At the same time, I wonder whether it has also blurred important distinctions.

Not every emotional experience is therapy.

Not every facilitator is a therapist.

And not every difficult feeling that emerges during an event is evidence that something has gone wrong.

Human beings bring their histories, expectations, sensitivities, and personal circumstances into every space they enter. The same experience can feel liberating for one person, confronting for another, and meaningful for someone else.

A facilitator can influence an experience, but they cannot control how every individual will respond to it.

Trauma-Aware Is Not Trauma Therapy

One thing this experience caused me to think about is the way trauma-related language is often used interchangeably.

There is a significant difference between being trauma-aware, trauma-informed, and trauma-treating.

I believe it is important to be trauma-aware. I recognise that people may arrive carrying difficult experiences. I believe in creating environments that are respectful, thoughtful, and supportive. But that is not the same as offering trauma therapy.

I am not a therapist. I do not advertise therapeutic treatment. I do not claim to be equipped to process every emotional response that might arise in a group setting.

In fact, I increasingly believe that one of the most responsible things a facilitator can do is remain clear about their role.

I facilitate experiences. I cannot diagnose, treat, or heal.

The fact that emotions may emerge in a space does not automatically transform that space into a therapeutic one.

Can There Truly be Emotional ‘Safe Spaces’?

One piece of feedback centered around my comments about the phrase “safe space.”

At one point I made light about finding the term a little nauseating due to being heavily overused. I feel that it has become so widely adopted that it can sometimes lose its meaning.

What I intended to communicate was that I feel uncomfortable with the promise implied by the phrase. What was heard, however, was that I was mocking people who require safe spaces.

That wasn’t my intention at all.

I absolutely care about creating environments where people feel welcomed, respected, and able to participate on their own terms.

What I question is whether any facilitator can honestly guarantee complete emotional safety.

People can feel challenged, emotional, vulnerable, excited, empowered, uncomfortable, inspired, or nervous; sometimes all within the same experience.

The presence of discomfort does not automatically indicate a lack of safety.

Maybe what I struggle with isn’t the need for safety but the implication that safety can be promised and is expected.

What I can offer is boundaries, care, and choice.

What I cannot offer is a guarantee that no participant will ever feel uncomfortable or emotionally affected.

No facilitator can.

Impact, Intent, and Interpretation

This experience also reminded me how easily communication can be interpreted differently.

Facilitators should absolutely care about impact. If someone tells me that something I said landed badly, I will listen and reflect on that. But there is also a difference between impact and responsibility.

I am responsible for communicating with care.

I am responsible for considering feedback.

I am responsible for reflecting on whether I could have expressed myself more clearly.

I am not responsible for every assumption someone makes about my values, beliefs, or intentions.

The goal cannot be perfection. The goal is openness, reflection, and a willingness to learn without accepting ownership of every interpretation.

Professionalism Doesn’t Require a Personality Transplant

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this experience was noticing that some of the criticism seemed connected not to what I was facilitating, but to how I facilitate.

I am someone who naturally reads a space. I pay attention to the energy and emotions circulating.

I notice whether people are nervous, playful, reserved, emotional, excited, or relaxed, and I adjust accordingly.

Sometimes that means being more structured.

Sometimes it means making a joke.

Sometimes it means speaking in a more informal way when the atmosphere is light and the group is connecting freely.

For me, this isn’t a lapse in professionalism. It’s a facilitation choice.

I don’t believe professionalism requires the suppression of personality.

Yet there can be an unspoken assumption in wellness spaces that the more serious, measured, and therapist-like a facilitator appears, the safer they become. That is not my belief.

I can be both playful and responsible.

I can laugh with a group and still be boundaried.

And I can allow my personality to exist in a space without viewing it as a flaw that needs correcting.

Participation Is a Shared Responsibility

Increasingly, I find myself asking not only what a facilitator is responsible for, but what a participant is responsible for too.

When someone is quiet, reserved, or hesitant, my instinct is usually not to push. I might create opportunities for contribution. But I don’t believe it is my role to pressure people.

Perhaps that’s a blind spot. Perhaps there are moments where a gentle challenge would be beneficial to someone. Or perhaps there are more benefits in allowing people to engage on their own terms.

I’m still exploring that question.

What I do know is that participation cannot be placed entirely on the shoulder’s of the facilitator. At some point, attending an experience requires a willingness to meet it halfway.

Not everyone will want to speak. Not everyone will want to share. Not everyone will engage in the same way. And part of holding space is trusting that observation and listening, are valid forms of participation too.

Participants have a responsibility to make choices about their own involvement, communicate their needs where possible, and respect their own boundaries.

Facilitators have a responsibility to create opportunities, offer clarity, and foster an environment where participation feels available, not forced.

The problem is when one side begins carrying responsibility that belongs to the other.

Reflection Without Self-Erasure

None of this means feedback should be ignored. I am deeply reflective, even without feedback.

I believe in considering where improves can be made (there always are some). I also have learnt to recognise that growth often comes from discomfort.

But reflection and self-erasure are not the same thing.

Not every criticism reveals a failing. Sometimes criticism reveals a mismatch.

A mismatch of expectations. A mismatch of communication styles. A mismatch of facilitation styles.

Those are not always problems to solve.

Sometimes they are simply reminders that no facilitator can be the right fit for everyone.

Where I Draw the Line

As I have reflected on this experience, I keep coming back to:

My responsibility is to facilitate with care, integrity, and respect.

My responsibility is to create conditions that support participation and choice.

My responsibility is to remain open to learning.

My responsibility is not to manage, diagnose, heal, or take ownership of every emotional response that arises in the room.

That belongs to the individual.

I want my spaces to be emotionally intelligent, but they are not specifically therapeutic.

I want to acknowledge that people bring their histories into the space while recognising that I am not responsible for processing those histories on their behalf.

And I want to continue facilitating in a way that feels responsible but also a reflection of me.

Not because I believe I’ve got everything right, but because I don’t think the answer to criticism is becoming less human.

I think it’s becoming clearer about who you are, what you offer, and where your boundaries sit.

Perhaps the most caring thing a facilitator can do is be honest about the limits of their role whilst standing firm in who they are.

Gentle somatic movement, nervous system regulation, trauma-informed yoga, breathwork. These practices have become increasingly prominent within the wellness industry, particularly in spaces marketed towards women.

But I keep finding myself asking a question:

Is the relentless focus on calm just another way to keep women compliant and quiet?

Full disclosure, before I go any further: I find this kind of work deeply beneficial. I’ve attended several somatic exercise sessions this year and genuinely value what they offer. I’m fascinated by the emerging discussion around fascia, and although this work is still relatively new to me in practice, I’ve experienced first-hand how powerful it can be for relaxation, self-awareness, and emotional processing.

And yet, despite all this increased awareness, despite the wide variety of resources dedicated to healing, regulating and reconnecting with ourselves, the women around me are angry.

They’re angry about politics. About the economy. About education systems that are failing their children. About the invisible mental load. About inequality. About world affairs. About watching incompetent men rise to positions of power while capable women continue to be overlooked.

And anger doesn’t simply disappear because we learn how to breathe through it.

We know that chronic anger can have very real physical consequences. It can contribute to inflammation, elevated cortisol levels, increased blood pressure, muscle tension, headaches, digestive issues, and more. The body keeps score, as the saying goes.

Have we become so focused on the physical consequences of anger that we’ve forgotten to ask what purpose it serves?

Anger is often treated as something to be managed, reduced, or eliminated. Yet anger is also communicating something. It can tell us that a boundary has been crossed, an injustice has been witnessed, or a need has gone unmet. At its healthiest, anger signals that something matters.

I don’t think the problem is that women are angry. I think the problem is that women are often expected to bypass anger before processing what it is trying to tell them.

What’s particularly interesting is that while we often hear the rhetoric that men suppress their emotions more than women, the reality is slightly more nuanced.

There is unquestionably a men’s mental health crisis. Men are less likely to seek support and experience significantly higher rates of suicide. Those facts are well established.

However, research published in 2025 suggested that in day-to-day life there may be far less difference between men and women in overall emotional suppression than previously thought. What differed wasn’t how much emotion was being suppressed, but which emotions (Sels et al., 2025).

Men were more likely to suppress feelings such as fear, sadness, and vulnerability.

Women, on the other hand, were more likely to suppress anger and aggression.

That feels entirely believable to me. Female anger remains one of the least socially acceptable emotions a woman can express. A woman who displays anger risks being labelled difficult, dramatic, hormonal, rude, unstable, or simply “too much.” A man displaying anger is often excused. He was stressed. He lost his cool. He’s passionate. He cares deeply.

In professional settings, angry men are frequently perceived as committed and driven. Angry women are more likely to be viewed as emotional or unprofessional.

I personally witnessed an example of this several years ago. A father asked a driver to slow down as he passed by some children walking. The driver stopped his car, got out, and punched the father to the ground in front of his children, without saying a word.

The man’s colleagues rushed over and said, almost apologetically, “He gets like this sometimes.”

It was framed as a regrettable moment. An unfortunate consequence of stress. A lapse in judgement.

I often wonder how differently that incident would have been perceived had the perpetrator been a woman.

So, if women are socially conditioned to suppress anger, and if many women are carrying perfectly legitimate reasons to feel angry, why are so many wellness offerings aimed at women centred almost exclusively around calmness?

Why is the goal always regulation, softness, mindfulness, surrender, acceptance, and peace?

Those things have enormous value, of course, but where are the spaces that acknowledge anger as a healthy, rational, and potentially transformative emotion?

It’s notable that many activities traditionally marketed towards men involve physical exertion, competition, intensity, and socially acceptable outlets for aggression. Women, meanwhile, are frequently encouraged to soften, stretch, and let go.

What if some emotions don’t need to be softened, but instead need to be channeled?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that rage rooms have become increasingly popular. Did you know that an estimated nine out of ten customers at UK rage rooms are women?

That statistic made me think.

If women are carrying anger that has few socially acceptable outlets, perhaps it makes sense that they are actively seeking spaces where they can express it without judgement.

And it got me wondering whether our approach to emotional wellbeing has become too one-dimensional. What if regulation isn’t always about becoming calmer? What if, sometimes, regulation requires expression before softness?

Those questions have inspired an experiment.

I’ve created an event that combines elements of a rage room with nature therapy. Not because I think anger should be encouraged indefinitely, but because I wonder what happens when it is acknowledged, given space, and physically expressed rather than immediately soothed away.

Participants will be invited into a woodland setting where they can engage in nature-based activities designed to explore frustration, anger and physical release. Afterwards, we’ll shift into slower practices: forest bathing, sensory awareness, reflection, and a fire ritual intended to symbolise letting go.

The intention isn’t to choose between rage and regulation. It’s to explore whether both belong in the same conversation.

Because maybe true emotional wellbeing isn’t about suppressing some emotions in favour of others. Maybe it’s about creating enough space to feel all of them.

In a culture that is constantly asking women to calm down, I think the more interesting question is this:

When was the last time we asked what they’re angry about?

References:

Sels, Laura & Debeer, Dries & Kalokerinos, Elise. (2025). Men Do Not Suppress Emotions More than Women in Everyday Life: Evidence from Large Scale Experience-Sampling Data.

Photo credit www.chapterthirtysix.co.uk

My first Substack. I’ve been craving a space for more meaningful conversations, or simply the space to put my thoughts down and make sense of them. I’ve never really been someone who journals, but so much has come up for me since starting my business 18 months ago, and having a creative outlet for that has become important.

Instagram, my social media of choice, doesn’t allow for long-form thoughts, trains of consciousness, or the random ponderings. After a particularly inspiring (not quite the word I’m searching for, but it will do) networking morning, the suggestion of a Substack was banded around… so here I am.

Networking itself has been a huge surprise since my business began. I don’t take part in traditional networking, and had only experienced it in one form: someone (who has since become a friend as we’ve both navigated new-business-ship) asked to host a different kind of networking event at the woodland site I rent. I was keen to collaborate, but didn’t think much more of it at the time. Networking wasn’t something I ever thought would be relevant to me, or something I’d get much out of. But so much has come from being involved in these events.

Passion is infectious

Something these events have reaffirmed is how much I love listening to people talk about what makes them tick. It can be anything, and whether or not I personally have interest in the topic doesn’t really matter. Something shifts when people speak passionately about their thing - it makes me love it too.

Karate isn’t something I have any experience in, but listening to Sarah talk about becoming a black belt after taking it up at 48 is just… so badass. Seeing Joanne light up as she shared her spiritual journey and how it redirected the whole trajectory of her business. Listening to Ellie excitedly reel off her many business ideas, with no idea where to start but a desire that she wanted to do it all. Hearing Nikki share her passion for creative writing and how it can support both children’s and adults’ wellbeing.

There are always crossovers in people’s stories - elements you can relate to or see in yourself. But even when there aren’t, people who speak to their passions pass something on to the listener too: a new perspective on a topic, or simply excitement for your own passion project.

Well-connected vs. connection

A conversation came up recently with a friend who described being “well connected” because of who we’ve met through these networking events. It’s like having an internal address book of incredible women who solve problems in their own unique ways.

You’ll be speaking to someone in your life and they’ll share a situation, and suddenly you know someone who could help. Whether that’s Fiona the professional organiser, Katie the photographer, Emma the childminder, or Louisa the EFT practitioner.

But what’s particularly interesting is that it’s not really about job titles or business names; it’s about getting to know the people behind them, their stories, their why. That’s what makes this kind of networking so special. It isn’t surface level, and it isn’t really about what you provide - it’s much more about who you are. They are These are the women I’ve been drawn to, and have connected with beyond a single meeting in the woods. More than anything, that feels like where the real value in networking lies. It’s not about faceless businesses offering a service; it’s about real people - their stories, their why, and the things that truly matter to them.

That feels like where the real value of connection lives.

Instagram @nuturenetworkevents