Welcome to Becoming Ourselves
ABOUT PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA & HEALING

Julia Vaughan Smith is an author, reader, teacher and speaker about the impact of developmental trauma and its healing. Her aim is to help people to become fully themselves, free from the entanglements from the past. If they are practitioners in coaching or therapy, additionally to use that in their practice.

What Julia offers
​SERVICES

Talks to book groups/writing groups/womens’ groups
FREE - ONLINE - UP TO 1 HR

Publications
IN ​PRINT AND KINDLE

Daughters: How to Untangle Yourself from Your Mother
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Julia's most recent book is written for daughters who are/were in difficult or challenging relationships with their mother, and for those coaches, counsellors and therapists who work with such daughters. 
AIM: To help readers untangle the relationship and become their own loving mother.

Coaching and Trauma: Moving beyond the survival self

Until very recently, this was the only book that brings trauma awareness to coaching. Many readers have expressed how valuable it has been to their work and themselves. For online workshops and blogs associated with coaching please visit  www.coachingandtrauma.com. 
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Therapist
​into Coach
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Julia wrote her first book in 2005 for counsellors and therapists who wished to become coaches. It is still used in training programmes to this day. Julia says "I would write it differently now with the benefit of a further 17 years of practice but I am thrilled that readers still find it useful." 

Reviews of 'Daughters' book

This is an extraordinary book. It has transformed the lives of so many of my friends and colleagues who have grappled with, and been impacted by, the complexities of their relationships with their mothers. It has brought them understanding where there was resentment, anger, where they were constantly trying & it was never enough, or where constant irritation and tension was the norm - and a wide range of other not-so-healthy-or-pleasant emotions and relationships with their mothers. For some they are now on the journey to much greater inner peace - a relief for them personally - and consequently how they are with their own families, children, friends, colleagues is changing, for the better. An overriding relief for many was to know they were not alone in daughter-mother relationship complexities and they are so appreciative of Julia Vaughan Smith, the author, guiding them  with kindness, knowledge and insights, and her sharing her own experiences along the way.
Gillian Biscoe AM, Adj Professor
​This is a hat trick from Julia Vaughan Smith – her third book, and the best text I’ve ever read on the mother-daughter relationship. Drawing honestly on her own experience, Julia leads the way from the heart - by navigating, without blame, the entangled dynamic between mothers and daughters. 
 
She encourages the reader by being generous and compassionate to both parties and this means that healing is far more likely.  Julia takes complex concepts and presents them in bite sized sections – enabling the reader to put the ideas into practice.  
 
Lucid - Empowering - Releasing - Generous - Compassionate - Healing
Valerie James, Independent Consultant: Corporate Psychologist
There have been other books on the daughter-mother dynamic but this one is unique in neither demonising nor justifying maternal behaviour. The book provides a calm and penetrating insight into the lasting impact of a daughter’s connection with her mother. And if you are personally entangled with your mother, how do you free yourself? Read this astonishing book to find out.
Jenny Rogers, Executive Coach, Author of ‘Are you Listening?’
This is a wise, elegant and impactful book that sensitively explores the complexity of daughter/mother relationships. With her understanding of emotional trauma, Julia doesn’t pull her punches about the devasting impact of some daughter/mother relationships, nor does she vilify mothers. Instead, she shows compassion for the experiences and trauma they may have experienced. Most importantly she offers hope and a means for daughters to shift the relationship dynamics.
Claire Lea, Executive Coach
If you are struggling to feel loving and giving towards your mother in the way that surely all daughters ‘should’ this book provides reassurance. You are not alone, abnormal or wicked. Julia points out that a mother is also a daughter.  Julia uses her extensive experience as a psychotherapist, coach and daughter to guide us carefully to review our relationship with our mother. She encourages us to take responsibility for our adult selves and explore how our childhood experience may be affecting our adult relationships. This is a hopeful book which you will want to dip into again and again. Julia shows it is never too late to begin to unravel some of our tangled webs and gradually become ‘our own good enough loving mother (more of the time).
Julia Steward, Leadership Coach, Author of ‘Sustaining Resilience for Leadership:Stories from Education’
This book is an immensely helpful read. It enables the reader to build a picture of their own life experience alongside those of others. Page by page it sheds light on the shadowy places often found in daughter/mother relationships.  It then helps us to work out what to do to understand our lives and, if we choose, to move our relationships onto a healthier positive footing. It is a book you will want to read and reread.
Liz Cleves, Artist
A book that connects the female universally. Any daughter in the world will be able to find herself in it. Julia comprehensively looks at the female line and the inherited trauma through generations. The book offers an insight into what is our own trauma and which trauma might belong generations before us.  Gentle and generous to mothers and very helpful for being a daughter. A way a daughter might heal her difficult relationship with her mother by understanding the relationship between them.
Susanne Gosling, Psychotherapist
Billed as a self-coaching book, this would be of value to any daughter with a desire to better understand the impact of the mothering they received in childhood and beyond on the woman they are today. It busts the myth of motherhood and the illusion of a happy childhood that many of us cling to. Vaughan Smith manages the difficult task, which so many authors fail to do, of explaining complex psychological phenomena in everyday language. If ‘there and then’ is continuing to impact your relationships ‘here and now’, or if you feel entangled, enmeshed, angry, hating, hurt, silenced, smothered, distanced, dutiful, resentful or responsible with or for your mother, read this.  
Jeanine Connor, Psychodynamic Psychotherapist, Author and eEditor of BACP CYPF 
Wow - such a marvellously well-written book. What an insight into Mothers and Daughters' relationships. Your book was a fascinating in-depth read.  Never realised they were so many complicated, different relationships.  Certainly food for thought. 
 
Your book makes me question my own relationship with my daughter now.  No doubt, discover where I am going wrong!  Perhaps even improve it.  However, am grateful it made me think more of my relationship with my Mother too. I appreciate now how fortunate I was, I took her love for granted, thought that was normal and automatic. So easy, natural to return it, not a duty.   
 
Well done for such a splendid book!
LG 

"It is easier to try to be better than you are, than to be who you are."
Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself

"Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart." 
Rainer Maria Rilke

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