A Return to Self – Pilot Study: By Lizzie Badger

Exploring trauma-informed, multi-sensory skincare for the wonderful people who support, treat or care for others.

Thank you so much for being here. If you’re reading these words, then chances are you are one such beautiful person. Know I am sending you my gratitude and many blessings.

Allowing care to come home…

Throughout this year's Pro-Touch Awareness Month, we have been talking about connection, regulation, cues of safety and the importance of what we ourselves bring into a caring relationship. In my earlier blog, Down-regulate to Co-regulate, I asked a simple question: before your next client walks through the door, ask yourself first - how am I?

There’s another question I’ve been sitting with for much longer…

What happens when we receive our own care first?

Therapists, counsellors, wellbeing practitioners, carers, support workers, volunteers, foster and adoptive carers - so many of us become extraordinarily practised at noticing other people's needs. We hear the change in a voice. We notice tiredness behind a smile. We make the cup of tea, remember the appointment, adjust the room, offer the extra five minutes, send the message afterwards and wonder on the drive home whether somebody is going to be all right.

Somewhere amongst all that noticing and kindness, we become rather good at putting ourselves further down the list. I know this not only through my work supporting therapists, but through my own lived experience with PTSD.

For much of my life I could understand safety intellectually without necessarily experiencing it in my body. Discovering, much later, how profoundly long-held trauma had shaped my own nervous system. I began to realise that thinking and even knowing we are safe, and actually feeling physically safe, are not the same thing.

It also made our new Face The World strapline - Feeling safe in your own skin - become something profoundly more meaningful to me than the skincare alone.

Could something ordinary become something more?

Skincare is already part of many people's day. We cleanse. We moisturise. We might put on an eye cream, night cream or mist our face. Sometimes we might do it lovingly. Other times we perhaps do it mindlessly alongside brushing our teeth, answering a message or thinking about tomorrow's to-do list, or replaying conversations in our busy mind.

My question is this: What if those few minutes could become something else?

What if an ordinary evening skincare routine could also offer an accessible opportunity to pause, settle our nervous system, reconnect with ourselves and truly receive some of the care we so readily give away?

That question has gradually become A Return to Self.

At the heart of the project is an evening experience we are developing called A Journey of Love. It brings together our first three Face The World skincare products with our unique combination of aroma, music therapy, breathwork, gentle self-touch, guided meditation and visualisation. We then introduce comforting, sometimes sacred, language as we have gently created the conditions in which somebody feels more settled, regulated and safe.

What I want to understand is whether combining familiar, multi-sensory forms of care in a regular evening routine can create a meaningful moment in which somebody feels able to stop doing, stop giving, and simply receive. I’m not claiming that skincare can heal trauma. It can’t. Nor can a guided journey replace counselling, medical care or professional mental-health support.

However, the products and their guided journeys could play an important supporting role. What we are exploring is what may happen when they are brought together and experienced in this unique way.

What does this explore?

I know there are no promised outcomes at this stage. This is something we are keen to test, listen to and learn from.

The ultimate question for this particular study is whether a regular evening skincare routine can also become a meaningful and easily accessible way to support nervous-system regulation, self-care and feelings of self-worth - and whether, with repeated longer-term use, this may also support better sleep and begin to soften some of the inner stories we carry about ourselves.

Could repetition itself begin to matter? Could a familiar aroma, our gentle global lullabies, a self-paced sequence of soothing touch and a set of comforting words gradually become associated with the end of the day - with permission to deeply rest, receive and offer ourselves loving care and attention?

Could somebody who spends much of their life being useful to other people begin, for a few minutes each evening, to experience what it feels like to offer some unconditional love and kindness to themselves?

That is precisely why we are testing it.

Starting small - and closer to home

Earlier this year, I had hoped to take A Return to Self directly into a larger national pilot, supported by grant funding. Thank you to everyone who kindly voted for us back in May. We didn't secure the grant this time. I was naturally disappointed - but as so often happens in life, the closed door made me look again at what we were actually trying to build.

Instead of rushing straight into something larger, I decided to begin locally: with a smaller testing and development group here in Wolverhampton. This will give people the experience so we can listen carefully to what does and doesn’t work, and refine it before we take the next step nationally.

On reflection, I think that will turn out to be a gift.

I have been testing and developing the journeys on myself - Participant Zero, if you like - because I don’t want to ask other people to enter an experience I haven't been willing to sit inside myself - knowing my own internal “triggers” and stories so well.

The local work is not intended to prove that A Journey of Love 'works'. It is helping us understand the experience: what people respond to, what they would change, what feels meaningful, what feels uncomfortable, whether the length and rhythm are right, and what we need to learn before inviting a larger group to take part. Hopefully, if you’ve read this far, that will include you.

Helping the larger pilot happen

The national pilot is still very much where we are heading. The difference is that, without the grant, we need to find another way to help make places accessible. That is one reason our current activity in the Face The World Facebook group matters so much.

The special product offers, Golden Tickets, giveaways and other fundraising activities are not simply about selling skincare. As we gradually evolve the Face The World range, October and beyond give us an opportunity to release funds tied up in existing stock and put those funds back into the next chapter of our social-purpose work.

Our aim is to use the funds we raise to help match-fund as many places as possible when the larger A Return to Self pilot opens.

If you have bought something from us this October, joined in, shared a post or helped us spread the word: thank you. You are helping us take this from an idea developed quietly behind the scenes into something we can learn from properly. Please feel free to pop into the group and have a look at what’s on offer or enter a competition.

Would you like to be part of what comes next?

The local testing and development work comes first, so what we learn there can help shape what follows. After that, would you like to be included in the national study?

If you support, treat or care for other people - professionally, voluntarily or personally - and A Return to Self speaks to you, I would love to hear from you.

You can email me directly at liz@face-the-world.co.uk with RETURN TO SELF in the subject line, and I will make sure you are among the first to hear more as the next stage develops. We also hope to have a ‘waitlist’ available when our new website is ready

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Coming home to ourselves

There is something else I have learned through my own recovery: caring for ourselves doesn’t always have to look impressive or cost a fortune. It might not need to be a retreat, an hour-long practice, another qualification, another appointment, new therapy or another thing we fail to fit into an already full day.

Sometimes it might begin with a beautiful, deeper breath; a familiar piece of restful music; our own hands resting tenderly and with care on our own skin…

…and listening to kind words, sent with Divine Love, that we are finally ready to hear.

Caring for ourselves doesn't always need to become another thing we have to find time for. Sometimes, it can begin with something we were going to do anyway.

So perhaps, little by little, that can become a way of truly coming home to ourselves.

Liz Badger

Founder, Face The World CIC & Pro-Touch Movement