From Silence to Strength – Unveiling the Power of Resilience in Leadership (Part 2)
- Brainz Magazine
- 5 days ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Written by Sam Mishra, The Medical Massage Lady
Sam Mishra (The Medical Massage Lady) is a multi-award winning massage therapist, aromatherapist, accredited course tutor, oncology and lymphatic practitioner, trauma practitioner, breathwork facilitator, reiki and intuitive energy healer, transformational and spiritual coach, and hypnotherapist.
In Part 1, we explored how trauma-informed leadership begins with personal healing and nervous system regulation. In Part 2 of this powerful story, we dive deeper into therapeutic innovation, community-driven care, and the impact of specialised training.
Light at the end of the tunnel
Today, my work is reshaping how massage therapy is viewed. Integrating modern scientific understanding with time-tested healing practices has been crucial to my success. I have created innovative treatment protocols that aid women in their physical and emotional recovery after breast surgery, one of these being my post-mastectomy breast massage program. Assisting the body in processing emotions and trauma is equally important as physical recovery. It is a fine line to walk, but I have done my best to make sure my methods incorporate the most valuable aspects of each approach.
Additionally, I have been an innovator in the treatment of trauma-induced anxiety and depression, as well as in specialised services for a wide range of medical issues. I am able to treat both short-term symptoms and more chronic conditions by combining traditional medical massage with cutting-edge scientific knowledge. If a customer has to pick between conventional medicine and alternative therapies, this all-encompassing method will go much further in achieving their therapeutic goals long term.
Through my training programs, I want to stress how crucial it is that therapists push the boundaries set by both society and the industry. I believe therapists should aim to dismantle stigma while enhancing their abilities through specialised, advanced training. It is insufficient to complete a single course and declare oneself a therapist. The role carries the privilege and responsibility of caring for people’s health, with the potential to create genuine change both in the industry and in clients’ sense of agency. I often reflect on the words of Maya Angelou, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Practical skills may allow someone to carry out massage, but knowledge holds the power to transform both the practitioner and the client. This philosophy fuels my dedication to offering training courses. I train others not just to perform a technique, but to understand the body and the person in front of them. It is a blend of compassion and science, of experience and purpose.
One of my most meaningful contributions has been a massage course designed for children with cerebral palsy, inspired directly by my daughter. As a parent of a child with special needs, I experienced firsthand the difficulty of finding effective, affordable, and accessible treatment. When clients from distant locations sought my expertise, I discovered there were very few therapists in the United Kingdom equipped to provide similar care. This realisation led me to create a training program to prepare more therapists to serve children with disabilities.
These courses fill crucial gaps in traditional massage education, offering practitioners the chance to learn from my knowledge of surgical nursing, midwifery, and holistic therapy. My commitment to education has led to the training of hundreds of practitioners across the UK, expanding access to specialised care and ensuring that the next generation of therapists can apply medical knowledge alongside traditional massage techniques.
Where many therapists or educators stop at theory, I also offer practical, tangible guides. My self-help series spans from the highly clinical, comprehensive manuals on endometriosis and PCOS that marry medical science with lifestyle strategies, to the deeply personal, including intimacy guides for couples navigating touch after trauma and a primer on understanding trauma itself. These are not sterile resources, they carry the unmistakable fingerprint of someone who has lived what she teaches. When I write about CPTSD, I write not only as a clinician but as a survivor who knows the struggle of explaining the inexplicable to those untouched by trauma.
Contribution to community and resilience in leadership
Perhaps the most striking dimension of my work lies in my commitment to community. Community service and human connection are at the heart of everything I do. It is not enough to help individuals, we must address systemic issues to create lasting change in healthcare access and awareness. Community work has played a significant role in my journey over the last few years, leading to my receiving the Global Recognition Award, in part, for my contributions to community service. Community service remains central to my practice, particularly supporting charities that work with vulnerable populations.
I believe that my consistent community engagement and fundraising, combined with my professional achievements, therapeutic innovation, and educational leadership, demonstrate the lasting impact of my work on both individuals and the wider community. John Donne said, “No man is an island entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent,” and I often emphasise that a significant part of my own recovery from trauma has come through my work with clients, learning from them as much as they learn from me.
I am very much involved in philanthropic activities, in addition to my practice and educational endeavours. To date, I have raised over £12,000 for organisations supporting vulnerable communities, including The Survivors Network, Bloody Good Period, Savera UK, and the Helen Bamber Foundation. These charities support important causes such as period poverty, honour based abuse and female genital mutilation, and support for victims of sexual assault, domestic abuse, torture, and trafficking. Whether it is through national charities or local community initiatives, such as donating over 2,000 sanitary products to a food bank, community engagement forms a central part of my work and focuses on organisations that support vulnerable populations.
By offering free therapy, raising awareness, and sharing my story, my hope is that other survivors of abuse recognise their potential to move from victimhood to resilience. My mission is to help them gain confidence, regain their self-worth, see themselves as survivors, and, ultimately, be empowered to support others in similar circumstances.
In addition to offering community sessions to support survivors of domestic abuse, refugees, and disadvantaged youth, ensuring that therapeutic care remains accessible to all, I accept charity referrals, extending care to those who might otherwise be excluded from therapeutic spaces. This is no small feat, it represents not only professional dedication but a moral stance. Healing in my hands is not a privilege but a right. This approach reflects my commitment to making therapeutic care accessible, ensuring financial circumstances do not limit access to quality support.
I developed a charity referral program offering free trauma-related treatments for six months, removing the financial barrier that often prevents survivors from accessing help, especially those who have experienced financial abuse as part of their domestic violence.
The impact has been profound. By getting to survivors early, ideally within the first few weeks, we can potentially prevent PTSD from taking hold. Even when full prevention is not possible, we can help regulate their nervous systems so that they can think more clearly, sleep better, and have a greater capacity to deal with everything else they are facing.
Abuse brings disconnection from our bodies as a survival mechanism, triggering fight, flight, and freeze responses that become our default mode. The overwhelmed nervous system buries this trauma in our cells, which eventually emerges as somatic symptoms, chronic fatigue, persistent muscle and joint pain, and weakened immune response.
True healing requires reversal of these dominant stress responses, reactivating the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest response that allows for healing and growth. Trauma-informed massage offers something that talk therapy alone cannot. The opportunity to heal trauma where it lives, in the body. For survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, therapeutic touch in a safe environment can be transformative. The massage therapist becomes a non-judgmental confidant, bearing witness to the client’s darkest emotions, providing refuge and healing with someone who can be trusted. Trauma massage allows survivors to reconnect with their bodies and rebuild trust in a safe space with a compassionate, skilled therapist.
For many survivors, human touch becomes a threat, but massage provides a way to reintroduce safe touch, re-establishing comfort levels gradually and respectfully. Just as trauma can be stored in the body, so can feelings of safety and warmth, and both can be reignited.
Touch can reveal hidden trauma through changes in skin tone and muscle tension, providing valuable information about where trauma is stored. Many trauma survivors live disconnected from their bodies, massage helps ground them and create feelings of safety again, with profound implications for their ability to form future healthy relationships.
Massage honours clients for who they are without objectification or judgement, re-educating the nervous system, allowing clients to feel safe in their own skin. Talking therapies have their place, but they do not address the root cause, nervous system dysregulation.
My charity work and trauma-focused practice hold deep personal significance. They symbolise resilience and victory over past struggles marked by a narcissistic mother, abusive relationships, complex grief, depression, self-harm, and chronic pain. Although my story contains elements shared by many women and men who have endured abuse, my contribution has been to transform those experiences into systems of awareness and change. The impact of this work is multiplied through my most popular course in trauma training, where every therapist who completes it goes on to support survivors, and each survivor who heals contributes to breaking cycles of trauma in families and communities.
Transformation is calling
In addition to my work as an educator, I am passionate about challenging stigmas in both the healthcare and massage industries. My podcast, MML Talks, explores taboo topics like trauma, intimacy, and mental health, aiming to provide listeners with a deeper understanding of themselves and their challenges. Through this platform, I continue to push the boundaries set by society, encouraging others to explore and address their own struggles.
I approach subjects that society often prefers to leave unspoken, childhood trauma and its echoes in adult intimacy, the quiet devastation of absent parents on self-worth, the lasting damage of narcissistic abuse, self-harm, and generational trauma cycles of despair. These are not topics for the faint-hearted, but that does not hold me back. I approach them with candour and compassion, inviting listeners to explore their own challenges with curiosity rather than shame. My episodes are less lectures than conversations, a kind of verbal holding space in which listeners can feel both seen and understood.
The podcast is not where my mission ends. Twice a year, I convene my Transformation Workshop, a fifteen-week live online program that attracts individuals from all walks of life who find themselves caught in toxic patterns or weighed down by unresolved trauma. Far from a quick-fix course, the workshop unfolds deliberately, week by week, through exploration of personas, emotional triggers, narcissism, codependency, and the repetitive loops trauma creates. Later sessions dive deeper into inner child work, shadow integration, and reflective exercises that ask participants not merely to learn but to transform.
My approach is holistic. Breathwork, mindfulness, journaling, and paired exercises sit alongside discussion and accountability. What emerges is a kind of apprenticeship in self-awareness, an invitation to stop running from pain and instead interrogate it, to alchemise trauma into growth. I do not promise ease, I promise authenticity. I am also working on a new course addressing intimacy after trauma, a theme I have long recognised as one of the most misunderstood and most necessary in the field of healing.
International recognition
My influence extends far beyond individual treatments. Two years ago, I was invited to contribute to Brainz Magazine. The freedom to write about any subject began with massage but evolved into articles on trauma and mental health, which consequently also became the focus of the MML Talks podcast dedicated to difficult and often stigmatised subjects, both in society and in the massage industry. By addressing these boundaries, I challenged their existence and encouraged open dialogue.
This openness drew recognition. At the start of this year, I received a Global Recognition Award for therapeutic innovation, education, and community service, followed by a CREA award in June, along with numerous regional and national honours. With this recognition came greater visibility, leading more people to learn about my work and mission.
Through my dedication to improving healthcare practices, my offerings as a senior executive contributor to Brainz Magazine, and various features across four continents, I am slowly reshaping the future of medical massage therapy. My advocacy also extends beyond each individual client to the profession itself within the massage industry, a field often trivialised or stigmatised. I have become an outspoken critic of the boundaries imposed by cultural misconceptions. I challenge not only the stigmas attached to trauma survivors but those levied against the practice of therapeutic massage. In doing so, I carve a space where body work and trauma education can coexist with integrity, dignity, and credibility.
Read more from Sam Mishra
Sam Mishra, The Medical Massage Lady
Sam Mishra (The Medical Massage Lady), is a multi-award winning massage therapist, aromatherapist, accredited course tutor, oncology and lymphatic practitioner, trauma practitioner, breathwork facilitator, reiki and intuitive energy healer, transformational and spiritual coach and hypnotherapist. Her medical background as a nurse and a midwife, combined with her own experiences of childhood disability and abuse, have resulted in a diverse and specialised service, but she is mostly known for her trauma work. She is motivated by the adversity she has faced, using it as a driving force in her charity work and in offering the vulnerable a means of support. Her aim is to educate about medical conditions using easily understood language, to avoid inappropriate treatments being carried out, and for health promotion purposes in the general public. She is also becoming known for challenging the stigmas in our society and pushing through the boundaries that have been set by such stigmas within the massage industry.
