Trauma-informed therapeutic coach · Sustainability engineer · Equestrian · Mother · Mentor Coach at the Clear Beliefs Institute

Maike

Bäcklin.

Following the yellow brick road.

I spent years performing capability, success, beauty, brilliance. Until one day - I couldn't.

The Story

I didn't come to this work through a calling.
I came through necessity.

The beginning

My pony was my first teacher of nervous system safety. In the middle of a chaotic childhood, beside her, something in me could rest. I didn't know the words for this back then, I just knew, being close to her made me feel so good I never wanted to leave. Much later I understood her nervous system was soothing mine.

I survived through intelligence and achievement, thirsting for my teachers praise. If I wasn't the smartest - I was nobody. At home I felt like an outsider, worthless. Between my mothers love and my fathers rage, I never knew what to expect. I swore I would never be powerless and poor ever again.

I became a civil engineer, and as I felt a deep connection to nature even then I built a career in sustainability. I worked in the building and housing industry in the public sector for many years. I became reliable, capable, and very good at endurance. From the outside, everything was great.

The unravelling

Becoming a mother brought everything unresolved to the surface. I stared at my young daughter and realised with a sudden clarity - there was nothing I could have done as a child to deserve what happened to me. Titles, capability and praise do not override the nervous system. My world fell apart, bit by bit. I couldn't sleep, I yelled at my small children, screamed at my husband, lost all motivation at work. The strategies that had carried me this far.. the performing, the over-responsibility, the anticipating needs before my own -- were running on empty. I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn't fix. My children's needs were endless, forcing me to finally find a way of setting boundaries. Anger was the only way I knew how, and that was not something I wanted to pass on to my kids.

So I did the work. First out of fear of passing on the generational trauma. And soon because I realised I was finding my way back to myself, and it was thrilling.

The work

I went through therapy, parenting programs, mind-set programs, meditation programs, embodiment programs.. until I found the Clear Beliefs Method. Its a trauma-informed method that works on all aspects of the psyche simultaneously, using the imaginal realm as its playground. It was soothing, relieving and incredibly efficient. Side-effects are true manifestation. Healing through an imaginal world - like fantasy books coming to life. I took the training program and went through 100s of sessions with mentor coaches and fellow students. I learned how to work with the body rather than around it. How to meet the parts of myself that have been protecting me since childhood, inner children stuck in dark places.

It took a very long time before I realized even after doing all that - I was not embodied at all. My body to me was a dangerous place. It stored so much anxiety, stress, bad memories. Meeting myself there was painful. It wasn't something an app could fix. I had to face the stored grief that awaited me there, the anger. I had to forgive myself.

The suffering is real. And so is the joy. And being truly embodied shifted my world from being a place of constant suffering, to a place of constant joy. I am so grateful for my life now and everything in it. I can barely remember what it used to feel like, drowning in the dismay of having to endure life for so many more years. Now it just keeps getting better :)

Now

Today I live in a beautiful home by a river in Sweden with my husband, children and two cats. I have my own palomino dressage horse and that ridiculously expensive Equipe dressge saddle. The life I once dreamed about but didn't believe in - it just came to be, when I did the inner work. Life aligns.

I now coach women like me -- mostly through referrals -- who feel drawn to this work.

Come home!

I don't work with the story.

I work underneath it.

Most of the women I work with have already done significant work on themselves. They have been to therapy. They have read the books. They can trace every pattern back to its origin. They understand themselves deeply.

And the body still responds the same way.

This is not a failure of insight. It is insight working at the wrong level. Understanding why you do something does not change the place where it was formed. That place is older than language. It lives in the body, in the nervous system, in the part of you that learned what was safe before you had words for it.

That is where I work.

Not through analysis. Not through reframing. Through the body, the younger parts, and the patterns running underneath, working at the core, changing it there, and letting the rest of you re-organise around that change.

The philosophy

What I believe about this work.

on the body

I believe the body is where change actually lands. Not in a decision, not in a reframe, not in finally understanding why. In the body. In the nervous system. In the place that holds what the mind has long since moved on from.

And I also believe — with equal conviction — that returning to the body can feel genuinely dangerous for someone who has experienced difficult things. Dissociation is not weakness. It is intelligence. The nervous system learned to leave because staying was not safe. That deserves to be honoured, not bypassed.

We do not storm the body. We approach it slowly, with permission, at a pace it can trust. Safety comes first — always. The work follows from there.

on the parts that protect you

I do not believe the parts of you that hold you back are problems to eliminate. They are childhood heroes — the ones who kept you safe when safe was not guaranteed. The one who learned to please so conflict wouldn't escalate. The one who achieved so her presence could be justified. The one who controlled everything because the adults in the room could not be relied upon.

They did not betray you. They carried you. The work is not to defeat them. It is to find them, thank them, and finally give them rest.

on what it is not

This is not positive thinking. It is not willpower dressed up as healing. It is not another layer of self-improvement placed carefully over what has not yet been addressed. It is not affirmations, and not putting sticky notes all over the place. It is choosing what to believe about yourself at the core of your psyche.

You do not need to earn your place. You never did. Coming home to yourself becomes possible — rather than one more thing to brace for. That hero you were always waiting to come save you? Its YOU! And its time you arrived!

The work that reaches
where insight cannot.

Leading Lady is a six-month private container — 12 sessions, voice support, and the space to finally change what has not changed yet.

discover LEADING LADY

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