We spotlight NeuroAffective Touch graduate and faculty Sue Bell, OBE. Through her charity, Kids Inspire, she and her team provide mental health and trauma recovery support – including NATouch – to thousands of children and families in the UK each year. Her interview shines a bright light on how NATouch can be adapted to a practitioner's specialty, be it working with children or adults as a therapist, social worker, body-centered practitioner, or any type of healer or caregiver.
Jenn: You started as an educator, became a therapist, and founded Kids Inspire in 2007. How did your career unfold and develop?
Sue: Initially, I taught drama and performing arts, which allow young people to express their emotions. Rather than an end product, I taught a process to help support expression. I attracted kids that no one else wanted to teach—they were hard-to-reach kids, but they loved coming to the drama studio.
There was one critical day when a girl came in at the end of the school day. It was pouring rain, and she didn't want to go home. She was suicidal. As a teacher, I felt quite out of my depth. I didn't feel teaching had given me the skills to support her as well as I wanted. I sat alongside her and listened. She'd come back fairly regularly to see me, and that was my first realization, "My goodness, I create a space for these young people to express what's going on in their lives, but I'm not sure I have enough skill to respond in a way that's going to be helpful to them."
The school where I was working funded my first psychodynamic counseling training, and the goal of that training was to work with adults. It gave me a really good foundation to understand the individuals I was working with.
Then, I wanted to combine my arts skills with my counseling. When I talk about the arts, it's not just painting but all the different art forms: puppets, clay, sand tray, movement, everything that taps into our creativity. So, it felt natural to go on and train as an integrative arts child and adolescent psychotherapist.
I realized that I wanted to have a broader impact than what I felt I could have in the classroom and so when an opportunity came to join the special needs and psychology service in our local government, I took it. I became an outreach therapist specializing in working with children at risk of being excluded from mainstream school. They were quite tough kids, and it turned out that all of them had experienced trauma. From the beginning, my role required me to design and deliver training for school leaders, teachers, and teaching assistants. Since then, creating and delivering training packages has been part of how I support others in understanding the young people that concern them most.
A theme throughout my career has been the drive to pass on little golden nuggets of information to those supporting young people, which might make them think differently about what a young person's behavior is telling them. I used to do a biannual conference called What Lies Beneath, which explored the question: "What does the child's behavior actually communicate?" It is my passion to help people understand that their behavior is an expression of hurt, trauma, and attachment wounds and that when we come from a place of understanding together, we can make a more significant difference. With this understanding, as adults, we have more options to remain regulated, and there is then more possibility to co-regulate.
From a child protection perspective, I attracted kids who had complex trauma histories or challenging behavior. I repeatedly found myself in positions where I had an official government badge but no power because the system was, and still is, quite broken around services for children. I had a child who was sleeping with a knife under his pillow because he didn't feel safe and another who was being abused by a family member. The official response was, "They're old enough to take themselves to a place of safety." The whole system was against what I was trying to do. I got fed up with hearing myself moan about how awful things were and decided to set up Kids Inspire.
I was working in local schools and approached a couple of head teachers who are still involved with Kids Inspire today: "I've got this idea. What if I set up a service with the child at its center and, in supporting the child, we looked at how to support all the adults and systems in that child's life? Would you be interested in purchasing a service like that? And would you support me doing it?"
In the first year, 15 schools bought in. That was the start of Kids Inspire. I was so naive – I thought, "I'm setting up a charity. I don't need to charge people. I'll do it all for nothing." I quickly recognized I had a steep learning curve to become a businesswoman and make a profit so the organization could sustain itself and grow.
For the first two years, two friends and I worked as volunteers. One of them was a systemic family therapist, and the other was a child psychotherapist. That first year, we went from 25 referrals to 250. Now, we have a team of over 120 people and 9,000 beneficiaries a year.
Jenn: That's tremendous.
Sue: In the beginning, I felt like I was playing with toys that were too big for me. I've always reached out to others to help me get to where I felt things needed to be. That's part of the success of Kids Inspire. It's about recognizing my limits and finding the right people who can do what I can't do.
Jenn: Kids Inspire offers a range of therapies and interventions: creative arts therapy, systemic therapy, group therapy, CBT, occupational therapy, clinical psychology, and trauma resolution therapies, including NeuroAffective Touch. How did you initially come to NeuroAffective Touch?
Sue: I found out about Aline through the book Healing Developmental Trauma. Also, Aline is an artist, and I work therapeutically through the arts. I was at a training assisting Anki Karr, who brought NeuroAffective Touch to Oslo in 2018. She said, "I really want you to meet Aline. I think her training will be perfect for you."
From day one, I found NeuroAffective Touch simple and profound. It was the missing piece of my jigsaw. I have done many trainings because I'm constantly searching. I felt out of my depth with the young people in the beginning, and that experience repeated – something was still missing until I found NeuroAffective Touch.
Jenn: Is there a story you can share with us about your "Day One"?
Sue: There was a little boy who had swallowed bleach, and as a result, his stomach was moved into his chest. He was eight years old, had an artificial esophagus, and had to eat every five minutes in tiny amounts to keep the nutrition up. At our first meeting, I said, "Place your hand on your tummy," and he placed it over his chest. I mirrored, "OK, so it feels like your tummy is in your chest." And he said to me, "It is in my chest." We used the mind-body dialogues and the Nurture Surround, and I also worked with his mom with him. My style of using Neuroaffective Touch often involves the adults in the child's life.
This was my very first case using NeuroAffective Touch, and it had a huge, profound impact on this little boy's becoming embodied. He was eight and saw himself as an alien because of the surgeries and because he was different. He just blossomed. I couldn't have done it without the skills I learned in NeuroAffective Touch because he needed to be touched. He needed to feel, and he needed to be held. He needed to have those conversations with the gut area that no longer had his stomach, he needed to grieve. The mind-body dialogues were perfect, alongside feeling my hands and teaching his mother how to hold him in a really supportive way. And that was it! I realized this is really different, and this really works, and there's no way I'm doing anything else anymore. If I do something, I do it seriously. I felt an instant connection with Aline, and it felt very natural to train and teach with her.
Aline: I'll add that I'm not a child therapist. Sue brings complex cases, and we creatively think together: "How can we take the NeuroAffective Touch principles and bring them to these little people who are beginning life at such a disadvantage, with such deep trauma?"
Sue: Aline and I have discussed many children. I still attract the most complex cases. It's almost as if I have something on my forehead that says, "Come to me. I can do this." Each time, I feel I don't know how to approach it because it's so complex.
Aline: Then we start talking and exchanging ideas. Pretty soon, a creative solution emerges.
Sue: I'm thinking about another young person I worked with who had been tortured, quite literally, as a baby — he had his feet burned and had physical and emotional scars. Initially, he didn't like to be touched. The thing for him was the Nurture Surround. We did it on a big, fluffy rug, and in this session, he said, "Sue, I can feel all my bad leaving me." It was transformational for him. I thought I'd have him as a client for years because of the amount of trauma he'd had. I saw him for 20 weeks, and the work was complete. So that's what I mean — it's simple yet profound.
Jenn: I think of how touch goes beneath the level of cognition and can go deep quickly.
Sue: What makes it so effective is the mind-body dialogue. It's not just touching, but touching and asking, "Let's hear what that part wants to say." Healing happens between the different parts of the body and mind. Creating collaboration. It's not just about the touch.
Jenn: A spiraling feedback loop is created between the mind and body that keeps getting stronger and more integrated. I'm taking the training this year!
Sue: The other piece I find really effective is integrating the arts. I recently had an adult client whose back was seizing up, and she had no words. I told her, "OK, you have a blank canvas. What are you going to paint?" What came to her was a woodlouse. Woodlice, when exposed, curl up into a ball, and their back protects them. Just saying to her, "What are you going to paint?" totally opened up the meaning of what her back was trying to tell her.
Aline: I agree the arts are really important. I came to this work through years as a professional artist. I did study psychotherapy and many forms of bodywork and trained as a psychoanalyst, but underneath, what comes through is my connection with imagery.
Sue: Sometimes, in sessions, we start with the arts, then go to the table, or we might pause when the body needs a rest and do something creative. It might be movement or sound. What Aline has created is something that people can be really creative with. It's not prescriptive. It's, "These are the principles; now use them." That's such a gift.
Jenn: Sue, I read that Kids Inspire is expanding.
Sue: We're growing. We're in Essex, Southend, and Suffolk and are now creating a South East hub. We started a pilot in January.
Aline: You have received incredible financial support for Kids Inspire.
Sue: Absolutely. We started with £10,000, and we're now a £2.6 million organization. We've been successful with National Lottery funding. It's quite hard to get. We'd had it already for six years and had been told we would not get it again. So we put in an application that supports our growth strategy, and the All England panel funded us a million pounds over five years towards our growth and the continued development of our trauma work.
Aline: I'm curious about how you recruit and train therapists. One hundred twenty therapists are many folks to take in, vet, support, and mentor!
Sue: Applicants have to share our values: the child is at the center, and we help all the adults around the child, and that includes schools, parents, and whoever else is involved in the child's life. When recruiting people, we check their values through the questions we ask.
As we've grown, we have built our infrastructure. There's a structure in place for when it will be appropriate for me to step away and let others move the organization forward. The Kids Inspire staff are all trauma-informed and somatically informed, which has been important. My ambition is that the whole team will eventually learn NeuroAffective Touch, but that's got to be a stepped approach.
Aline: What is your direction as you begin to give Kids Inspire more autonomy?
Sue: NeuroAffective Touch is my direction! I've found something so precious. I want as many people as possible to have the skills and the confidence to use it because, for me, it is the treatment of choice for developmental trauma.
I also want to do my doctorate and do some research that supports my deep feeling that NeuroAffective Touch is the treatment of choice.
Aline: You've already started your doctorate…
Sue: Yes, it's a D.Psych in Professional Studies. This program is forging me forward to be somebody who finds evidence. I'm at the stage of asking, "Am I going to research children and families, or am I going to do a wider piece of research that looks at how the training has made a difference to other people, how therapists integrate it, and what they're noticing." I'm at a crossroads, working out which will get the best results.
Jenn: Sue, you're talking about research with a specific focus involving NeuroAffective Touch. That is going to be important.
Sue: Definitely. And the other part, regarding my direction, is to teach Neuroaffective Touch.
Aline: You recently taught foster carers. Tell us about your teaching.
Sue: I deliver training to communities and professionals, particularly social workers. About two years ago, I had the confidence to tell them, "I'm not teaching this training for you unless you let me talk about touch." Surprisingly, they agreed! They've been really open to it because they can see it works.
I led a recent training with residential care workers. The way the care system is set up, in terms of touch, is all about physical restraint and managing behavior. I said, "No, this needs to be about nurture, care, holding, and containment." The course I created is a 2-day introduction. Aline very generously let me use her slides on oppressive parenting and shame. I did a whole section on shame because, with people who work on the frontline, their own shame spiral gets triggered when they're struggling to connect with challenging children and young people. Helping them work with their shame felt really important. The feedback from that training was brilliant. It really landed.
Jenn: I'm wondering if there is less need for physical restraints because they proactively receive nurturing and positive touch, and a more stable baseline is being nurtured.
Sue: There's something about helping frontline workers recognize that they have a parental role. That's the missing piece. The young people who end up in these residential care homes have experienced failed foster placements. For whatever reason, they can't live with their biological families. Their trauma wounds are really deep, and their attachment wounds are even deeper. That is what needs healing, and that is what NeuroAffective Touch addresses beautifully.
The challenge at the start is always about how much they can take in and how much we can support them to take in. That's the hardest part, not just for children and young people but for anybody who's beginning to heal developmental wounds.
Jenn: The bracing is intense and unconscious… it's the protection of the self.
Sue: That's the other part where NeuroAffective Touch was a bit of a breakthrough for me. The fact is that bracing is the body's way to protect the self. So many people fear it or want to push it away. But we say, "Let's really be with it, honor it, and celebrate how it allowed you to survive." Then, we can look at how the body might want to do it differently now that the threat is over. The way NeuroAffective Touch works is to make friends with the bracing.
Aline: Bodywork is often about getting rid of tension and bracing. But bracing is one of our protective mechanisms. We can learn more efficient ways to protect ourselves, but we also need to know that bracing will be available when needed.
Sue: Another course through Kids Inspire that has really taken off and has about 300 participants is Trauma Through the Lens of Neurodiversity. That's another area in terms of introducing touch and mind-body dialogues. That client group has such a fear of touch. We run this as a public course for parents, carers, and professionals.
Jenn: Kids Inspire also offers mentoring, coaching, holiday clubs, a youth forum, and volunteering. Your offerings are broad and deep. What led you to offer all these services?
Sue: Therapy isn't the be-all and end-all. Again, the child is at the center. What are the needs of the child? What else do they need in their lives? What else do their parents need? In 2008, we started training mentors because some children are not ready to be in therapy but do really well with a positive adult role model who can take them out and give them different experiences. It's all about that holistic approach. Also, we don't want to "do to," we "do with," and that's how Kids Inspire work aligns so beautifully with NeuroAffective Touch, which is not doing to but doing with.
We wanted to hear our young people's voices, so we set up The Voice, which is our young people group. They meet and eat pizza fortnightly and talk about all things mental health — what helps them and what they need. It feeds back into the way we develop our services. We're constantly looking at how needs change and how we can reflect that in how we work.
Jenn: I love that. That's so attuned. You talk about how NeuroAffective Touch works to address misattunement, and you bring attunement into your organization as well!
Aline: Sue, as we come to a close, is there anything you'd want all of us to know — a message you'd like to deliver to our community?
Sue: I think about the therapists who come to my consult groups. One of the very first things I try to encourage them to do is to go for it. Don't think about it too much. Follow your intuition. Use what you're learning, and go for it; be creative with it. Trust that it works. When I say "it," I mean NeuroAffective Touch. It's something about finding your autonomy.
When people first start the training, they want protocols. They want to know what to do. I prefer the encouragement — "Yes, you have that, but try and let go of it and be with your energy and notice how your energy mixes with the other person's." For me, this work is so spiritual and energetic. The real beauty is that you're working with all the systems, not just the nervous system. The only way to do that is to be authentic in yourself and not try to be like somebody else. Not copying you, Aline! Find yourself in it!
Jenn: I have one more question. Do you have a vision for Kids Inspire 5 or 10 years from now, even if you're not at the helm?
Sue: Kids Inspire is always about filling gaps. Ultimately, it would be brilliant if Kids Inspire didn't need to exist. But the reality is that as 17 years have passed, the gaps have gotten bigger. Our ambition is to continue to fill gaps.
At the moment, we are very much about measuring our impact. We have a team with a research assistant and data analyst looking to evidence the difference we make. Where is our sweet spot? At what point do we get the sustainable outcomes?
We're also looking to develop a national voice and bring about systemic change that influences national policy. It would be amazing to get politicians to think systemically rather than just for the four years they're in office. Having more of that systemic view is what makes the difference. The child quite often is crying out for help on behalf of the family, and if we only give the child therapy, we're not solving anything.
Jenn: That makes so much sense.
Aline: Thank you so much, Sue. I deeply believe that touch belongs in families, in couples, and with parents and their little ones. And that's precisely where you are taking it. Your work is very dear to my heart.
Sue: Thank you. Your work has changed my life. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Illustrations and Kids Inspire logo: Iain Bell