A trauma–sensitive healing framework

Held Within Capacity™ is a living, relational framework rooted in nervous-system awareness, trauma-sensitive care, and embodied pacing.

It speaks to the knowing that healing, integration, and becoming unfold only within what the body and nervous system can safely hold — not through urgency, force, or performance, but through safety, choice, and presence.

Approach

This framework understands birth not only as a physical event, but as a profound nervous system experience. When birth involves fear, loss of control, unmet needs, or moments where consent and safety are compromised, the body adapts in order to survive. These responses are not signs of weakness — they are signs of intelligence.

Healing, in this approach, is not about fixing what is “wrong.” It is about restoring safety, choice, and relationship with the body, at a pace the nervous system can hold.

Orientation: A Trauma-Sensitive Approach to Healing

Held Within Capacity™ begins with a simple truth: your responses make sense.

In this methodology:

• Birth trauma is understood through lived experience, not medical outcome alone

• Trauma responses are seen as adaptations, not pathology

• Regulation is relational before it is individual

• Healing unfolds within capacity — not urgency

• Context matters: medical systems, power, culture, and isolation are named

There is no expectation to move on, reframe, or resolve.

Healing is allowed to be gradual, cyclical, and human.

Foundations of the Methodology

  • At its heart is Safety and Containment.
    Before insight. Before meaning. Before movement forward.
    There must be enough safety for your body to soften, even a little.
    Enough choice to feel agency again.
    Enough consent to let the present moment be different from the past.

    Healing is not something you push toward.
    It begins when your system senses it is no longer alone.

    From this centre, the work unfolds along interconnected pathways.
    There is no right place to begin.
    You may arrive through one door, pause there, return later, or move gently between them as your capacity allows.

  • Embodiment invites the body back into relationship—
    not through force or performance,
    but through trauma-sensitive, choice-led practices that value pacing, permission, and rest.

  • Nervous System Literacy offers language for what your body has been doing all along.
    For activation and collapse.
    For vigilance and numbness.
    Not as failures to overcome,
    but as wise responses shaped by what you lived through.

  • Meaning-Making creates space for story.
    For reflection, grief, anger, tenderness, and shadow.
    Here, your experience does not need to be explained away, justified, or relived.
    It only needs to be witnessed.

  • Relational, Social and Systemic Context reminds us that trauma does not live only inside individuals.
    It lives within birth rooms and systems.
    Within cultural expectations and silences.
    Within relationships that held—or failed to hold—at critical moments.

  • Above these pathways are Moments of Expansion— connection, insight, expression, integration.
    They are not milestones to chase.
    They arise naturally when enough safety is present.
    Some days they feel close.
    Other days, unreachable.
    Both belong.

  • Beneath everything is Support and Context— the quiet holding of co-regulation, community, and compassionate presence.
    Much of healing happens here, unseen and unnamed,
    yet deeply felt.

To Whom

Held Within Capacity is designed for:

• parents and mothers healing after birth trauma

• those navigating postpartum trauma

• birth workers and perinatal practitioners

• yoga and pilates teachers working with postpartum bodies

• clinicians and birth workers seeking trauma-informed birth support frameworks

How This Work Is Offered

Held Within Capacity may be shared through:

• individual or group embodied sessions

• reflective and educational workshops

• postpartum and birth-trauma-specific programs

• written and audio-based resources

Professional use of this methodology requires appropriate training, ethical responsibility, and scope awareness.

Scope & Care

This methodology is not psychotherapy and does not replace medical or mental health care. It is offered as an educational and supportive framework that may complement other forms of support.

Participants are always invited to engage at their own pace and within their own capacity.

Healing is never rushed here.

This is living framework for restoration, agency, and belonging. Embodied practice, narrative repair, and collective care.

Intellectual Property & Authorship

Held Within Capacity™ is an original healing methodology developed by Juliana Salgado.

While this methodology is informed by established research and practices—including trauma-sensitive yoga, nervous system science, narrative approaches, and relational healing—it represents a unique synthesis, structure, and application created specifically for work with birth trauma and the postpartum experience.

The name, framework, written language, and structure are her intellectual property and may not be reproduced, taught, adapted, or distributed without written permission.

This methodology does not claim ownership over existing theories or therapeutic models. Instead, it offers an original, birth-specific integration developed through professional practice, lived experience, and ongoing study.

All rights reserved.