Welcome to Healing Beyond Bars
We are dedicated to transforming lives within the prison system through trauma-informed training and workshops.
Our work supports both prison staff and those in custody through relational, somatic, and trauma-aware approaches that foster safety, connection, and growth.
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For prison staff: We offer psycho-educational and experiential training that builds trauma-informed awareness, strengthens relational skills, and develops compassionate, confident responses to challenging behaviour.
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For prisoners: Our holistic programmes help individuals address the roots of trauma, reconnect with empathy, and cultivate resilience for life beyond bars.
Unlocking the Key to Compassion
Psychotherapeutic Trauma-Informed
Programs & Training for Prison Staff and Prisoners
"Every persecutor was once a victim."
– Alice Miller (1987, p.249)
Behind every behaviour is a story. For prisoners, those stories often begin in early childhood —abuse, neglect, fear, abandonment. These early wounds don’t disappear; they live in the nervous system, shaping how a person relates to themselves, to others, and to authority. For many prisoners, this can look like anger, mistrust, or shutdown—behaviours often misread as defiance, but rooted in survival.
But staff carry stories too. Those working in prisons are expected to hold intense emotional behaviour every day. High-stress environments, relational strain, and accumulated trauma responses can build up in silence, impacting confidence, wellbeing, and how staff relate under pressure.
This is where compassion and understanding trauma becomes a key. At Healing Beyond Bars, we support both staff and prisoners to explore the impact of trauma, and survival responses.
Through psychoeducation, body-based skills, and experiential learning, we help people recognise their own triggers, regulate emotional responses, and build safer, more human connections, without compromising on boundaries or safety.
For staff, it begins with the body, understanding their nervous system, their stress cycles, and the protective strategies they’ve learned to cope. It’s about shifting from “What’s wrong with them?” to “What happened to them?” and sometimes, “What’s happening in me?”
For those in custody, it’s about separating identity from behaviour. Understanding that what they’ve done is not all they are. And beginning to reconnect with parts of themselves that have long been hidden, shut down, or hardened by pain.
When both sides of the wall begin to relate differently to themselves and to one another, something shifts.
The system becomes more human. And healing becomes possible.
Our Misson
Healing Beyond Bars exists to transform the culture of prisons, through trauma-informed, psychotherapeutic, and relational work with both staff and prisoners. We believe that recovery, resilience, and connection are possible, even behind bars.
Whole-System Healing
We work with both staff and prisoners, because lasting change happens across relationships, not in isolation.
Relational Safety First
Trust, attunement, and emotional safety are the foundation for transformation, connection, and meaningful rehabilitation.
Bridging Trauma & Practice
We bring together trauma-informed psychotherapeutic understanding and body-based awareness to support real, sustainable change in everyday interactions.
From Surviving to Thriving
Our programmes help individuals move beyond reactive survival states into a space of self-awareness, connection, and growth.
Compassion as Culture
We embed compassion into every interaction as a practice that softens shame, builds accountability, and fosters humanity.
Our Core Principles
Everything we do at Healing Beyond Bars is built on a foundation of psychological safety, compassionate connection, and a deep understanding of trauma. Our approach brings together evidence-based theory and embodied, human-centred practice to support change from the inside out.
These five pillars shape every aspect of our programmes—whether we’re working with staff or people in custody:
Addressing Root Causes of Offending
We recognise that offending is often a symptom of deeper, unresolved trauma.
Our work explores early adversity, attachment wounds, and survival responses to help individuals make sense of their past and build a different future.
Trauma-Informed Training for Staff
We offer experiential, psychoeducational training that equips staff with the knowledge and relational tools to work with compassion, confidence, and curiosity—even in high-stress situations.
Compassion Cultivation
We support both staff and prisoners in developing compassion for themselves and others—not as a soft skill, but as a powerful form of accountability and emotional resilience.
Mindfulness and Emotional Wellness
Our programmes develop nervous system regulation, emotional literacy, and embodied self-awareness—helping individuals move from reaction to reflection, and from survival to choice.
Psychotherapeutic & Somatic-Oriented Practice
Rooted in neuroscience and trauma theory, our work integrates body-based (somatic) and psychotherapeutic approaches to help people process trauma, reconnect with themselves, and relate more safely with others.
The masks I wore, being loud, angry, hard, were just ways to protect the parts of me that were hurting. This group gave me space to take them off, bit by bit.
- Prisoner, The Many Faces of Trauma Programme
I thought I understood prisoner behaviour, but this training helped me really see what’s behind it. Understanding the impact of trauma has changed the way I respond—and made me feel more confident in my role
- Prison Officer,
Three Day Training
I’ve spent years acting tough, shutting everything down. This programme helped me see that was just a mask—something I put on to survive. I never realised how much pain I was carrying underneath it all
- Prisoner, The Many Faces of Trauma Programme
Our Training and Workshops
Get Involved: Join Us in Creating
Trauma-Sensitive Change in Prisons
Ready to Introduce Trauma-Informed Practice at Your Prison?
Healing Beyond Bars programmes are offered by request and delivered in partnership with individual prisons.
If you’re interested in booking staff training or running the 16-week programme with a group of prisoners, please get in touch to discuss availability, suitability, and next steps.
