“The brain doesn’t just remember. It predicts. And when those predictions are based on trauma, the world feels dangerous even when it isn’t.”

As therapists, we work with clients who are intelligent, reflective, and aware of the unhelpful patterns they carry—yet they remain stuck in the same emotional or behavioural loops. Some can articulate their trauma history with clarity, but still flinch at unexpected sounds or shut down in moments of intimacy and connection.

This isn’t resistance or avoidance. It’s the extraordinary intelligence of a predictive brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect them. When the system has learned to expect danger, even safety can feel unfamiliar—too new, too unpredictable, too risky.

At the heart of human experience lies a remarkable neural process: our brains are constantly predicting what will happen next, constructing reality not just from what’s in front of us, but from the templates of past experience. While this predictive system enables us to thrive, it can also keep us trapped—especially when shaped by early neglect, chaos, chronic threat, or damaging relational patterns.

This experiential training with Tony Buckley—internationally recognised for translating complex neuroscience into practical therapeutic tools—offers a powerful way of understanding why some clients find it so hard to loosen the grip of negative predictive loops, and what we can do to help. Drawing on neuroscience, trauma theory, and somatic psychology, the session equips you with body-based strategies to help clients shift their internal models and rediscover what safety, connection, and change can feel like.

The Five Peas in a Pod: A Framework for Predictive Processing in Therapy

Adapted from experience, perception, and prediction theories proposed by philosopher Andy Clark (2023), Tony’s “Five Peas in a Pod” model offers a clear and immediately usable clinical lens. It breaks predictive processing into five interlinked components you can assess and work with in the therapy room:

🔹 Priors – Deep, emotionally charged templates formed through early experience, often unconscious but shaping how clients react and behave.

🔹 Perception – The present-moment experience as filtered through the body, senses, and beliefs.

🔹 Prediction – The brain’s continuous, often implicit questioning: “What do I expect to happen next?”

🔹 Prediction Error – The internal signal when experience contradicts expectations—often felt as confusion, disorientation, or emotional intensity.

🔹 Precision – The update mechanism that allows more accurate internal models to form, leading to calmer and more adaptive responses.

You’ll explore each of these through real clinical examples, gentle somatic exercises, and a strong therapeutic focus on how change happens—not by confrontation or interpretation, but through new, trustworthy experience that the nervous system can safely integrate.

Why Somatic Awareness Changes Everything

Cognitive insight rarely reaches the deeper layers where trauma-based predictions live (van der Kolk, 2014). Real change requires what Tony calls felt-sense precision—the capacity to notice micro-signals of safety, novelty, or mismatch in the body and respond with skill and presence.

You’ll learn how to:

🔹 Recognise when prediction error is showing up as confusion, shutdown, or disorientation in session
🔹 Use interoceptive and exteroceptive awareness to amplify corrective experiences
🔹 Support repetition and embodied practice so that new neural models of safety can take root

This approach invites us to think beyond narrative and insight—and instead toward patterns, expectations, and embodied revision. The brain doesn’t change because we convince it to. It changes because it senses something new, precise, and trustworthy.

What You’ll Take Away

By the end of this workshop, you’ll have:

🔷 A clearer map of how prediction drives trauma responses
Understand how predictive processing theory applies to trauma, attachment, and developmental wounds—so you can reframe stuckness as protective intelligence at work.

🔷 Sharper tools for identifying outdated internal models
Recognise when clients are operating from historical “priors” by observing language, affect, and somatic cues—especially in moments that seem puzzling or disproportionate.

🔷 Strategies to work with prediction error in real time
Learn to identify and respond to moments when experience contradicts expectations—supporting clients to stay present without overwhelm.

🔷 Refined somatic skills to support nervous system updating
Help clients tune into subtle sensations of novelty or threat—guiding them through micro-adjustments that allow integration rather than collapse.

🔷 Embodied interventions rooted in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Use movement, posture, breath, and sensation to offer the nervous system new reference points for safety, regulation, and connection.

🔷 Language that translates complex neurobiology into practice
Take away simple, digestible ways to explain predictive processing to clients—so they can better understand and relate to their own experience.

How the Training Works

This three-hour live online session weaves clinical insight, experiential learning, and direct therapeutic application. Through engaging teaching, real-world case examples, and somatic exercises, you’ll develop both a conceptual and felt understanding of how predictive processing operates in your clients—and in yourself.

You’ll leave with practical tools for your very next session, and a deeper grasp of why some clients seem “resistant” to change—and how to work more effectively with their nervous system’s attempts to keep them safe.

Why This Training Matters Now

We live in a time when our clients’ nervous systems are under siege—from news cycles to social media to chronic uncertainty. The more activated or traumatised the system, the more rigid its predictions become. As therapists, we need more than insight—we need precision-based tools that support real-time nervous system updates.

Whether your clients are recovering from trauma, repeating relational patterns, or struggling with subtle disconnection, this framework will reshape how you understand resistance and help you facilitate true, lasting change.

© nscience 2025 / 26