The Girls’ Club – why this work matters now more than ever

The Girls’ Club was created from three places in my life.

The first is my decades of experience working with children and young people.

The second is my own personal healing journey, supporting my teenage daughter through PTSD, and realising very clearly that sometimes stand-alone therapy is not enough on its own. And the third is the past three years of working closely with women who have experienced trauma and needed inner child healing.

Again and again, I have sat with adult women who are successful, capable, outwardly strong, yet carrying the unhealed emotional imprints of their childhood and adolescence. What they didn’t receive then, they are still seeking now. Safety. Validation. Being listened to. Boundaries. Education about their own bodies. Permission to take up space. Language for what they feel.

The same themes keep repeating themselves.

That is when the truth really landed for me: if we do not support girls early, we meet them again later as women trying to unpick what was never tended to.

The Girls’ Club was created as a response to that.

It is a six-week, trauma-informed programme for girls aged 10–13 and 14–17. It is preventative wellbeing work designed for the point in life where so much is changing at once. Puberty, friendships, identity, pressure, comparison, social media, academic expectations, family dynamics. All of that lives in the nervous system, not just the mind.

In The Girls’ Club, we give girls what most of us never had at that age: emotional language, nervous system awareness, body literacy, and a safe, shame-free space to talk openly about what is happening to them and within them. We talk about emotions, self-talk, boundaries, friendships, periods, anatomy, confidence, how stress shows up physically, and how to soothe the body instead of fighting it.

The space is gentle, structured and trauma-informed. No one is forced to share. No one is fixed. The priority is safety, dignity and self-worth. What happens when girls feel safe is extraordinary. They begin to speak. They begin to relax. They begin to see that they are not the only one. They stop apologising for existing. They get curious about their bodies rather than ashamed of them.

For many, it is the first time anyone has ever explained how their nervous system works, why they freeze or cry or shut down, or why their self-talk can feel so loud and cruel. It is also often the first time anyone has spoken about periods and body changes without embarrassment, euphemisms or fear.

The Girls’ Club is not therapy, yet it sits beautifully alongside therapy. It complements counselling, CAMHS, school support and family work. It brings the crucial ingredients so many girls are missing: peer connection, belonging, language, education and compassionate guidance.

After working for years with women healing childhood wounds, I knew I wanted to help girls sooner, before they reached breaking point, before they learned to disconnect from themselves. That is what this work is about. Early intervention. Prevention. Teaching girls to know themselves, trust their bodies and recognise their worth.

The Girls’ Club exists because girls deserve better than surviving. They deserve to feel at home in their bodies, confident in their voice and supported as they grow. If we can give them that now, we change the trajectory of the women they will one day become.

It also takes a huge amount of bravery to show up. For a teenage girl to decide to try something different, to log on to a new group, to meet unfamiliar faces and be willing to take part, is an act of real courage. Many of the girls arrive to the first session feeling nervous, unsure, worried they will be judged or that they will not fit in. And yet they come anyway. That first step is often the most powerful part of the journey, because it is the moment they choose themselves. They choose support, they choose curiosity, and they choose to believe that something could feel better than it does right now.