There’s a question that has been driving me mad for about fifteen years.
How do I know if this is actually working?
Not “do people feel better today?” – feelings are notoriously unreliable. Not “do they say nice things afterwards?” – people are polite. I mean: is the inner work actually doing what it claims to do? Is something genuinely shifting? Can you measure it?
This question started a very long, very strange journey. And it’s why I’m sitting here in March 2026 with a Clearance Club app I built myself, two books I haven’t properly promoted, a co-founded measurement company, a filmmaker in my inbox, and a story I’ve never told in full.
So let me tell it properly. From the beginning.
2009. A miscarriage I felt relieved about.
I was terrified of pregnancy and birth. Not “a bit nervous” – I mean the kind of terror that made me want to be swallowed up by the earth. I didn’t know it had a name then. I know now it was tokophobia – a severe anxiety disorder around pregnancy and birth. I just knew I couldn’t face it.
When I had a miscarriage, I felt relief. That was the moment I understood something needed to change.
So I spent the next year doing inner work – healing my own anxiety using an early version of what would become Head Trash Clearance. A method I was developing because nothing else worked.
By January 2010, when I found out I was pregnant again, something had shifted. I still wasn’t okay with the thought of being pregnant. But this time around I had the courage to face it. That distinction matters more than it might sound.
My daughter was born in September 2010. I had a completely pain-free home birth; and incredible experience that i never could have imagined was possible. At the start of that pregnancy I’d been demanding a c-section with all the drugs. By seven months in, I’d changed my mind entirely.
I knew something significant had happened. Clearly it had. I just couldn’t yet explain what.
2018. Five balls and a book.
In the years that followed, I kept working with people using Head Trash Clearance. And I kept watching them change in front of my eyes.
That’s not a poetic description. It’s a literal one.
When you’re using a method that works as fast as Head Trash Clearance, change isn’t gradual. It’s not like watching grass grow – it’s more like watching a pot come to the boil. You can see it happening in real time. I’d have a weekly session with someone, and their language would be completely different. They’d use words they’d never used before. Things that had been enormous the week before simply wouldn’t bother them anymore.
Hannah came to me for tokophobia healing. She filled in her intake form – fear of losing control, fear of pain, fear of uncertainty, fear of vulnerability, difficulty speaking up. The full picture. Two weeks later I checked in with her.
“Oh well, that was how I felt back in the old days.”
“Do you mean two weeks ago when you filled out the form??”
“Oh yes! Gosh, is that all it is?” [in the best Welsh accent I’ve heard in a while]
“Losing control, pain, uncertainty, being vulnerable, taking risks – you don’t feel scared about these now?”
“No, not at all. I just don’t connect to those feelings anymore. That’s not me. I’m fine about those things. They don’t bother me.”
Two weeks. That’s all.
Because I was seeing changes like this – literally week by week – I had a front-row seat to something nobody else was witnessing. Rapid, visible transformation. I started mapping it. Noticing the patterns. Tracking how people moved through different stages as they cleared.
In 2018, when I published Clear Your Head Trash, I described this for the first time as the Head Trash Clearance Journey – and gave the stages names. Conker. Washing Ball. Bouncy Ball. Snooker Ball. Glitter Ball. From dense and stuck and prickly, to flowing and magnetic.
I knew what I was seeing. I didn’t know what it was exactly and I didn’t yet have the numbers to prove it.
2023. The book that gave me the missing piece.
In 2023 I discovered Dr David R Hawkins and his Map of Consciousness. I read Power Versus Force. When I read it, I remember thinking “how have I missed this? – this is totally up my street!”
Here’s what I need to be clear about: When I read Hawkins’ work it wasn’t that I was discovering a new idea. I was seeing something I’d already mapped myself years earlier. The Conker-to-Glitter Ball progression – that was mine, built from years of watching people transform in front of me. Hawkins validated it for me, but I’d already seen it and understood it intimately.
What Hawkins gave me was something different. Something I hadn’t realised I was missing.
A number.
He’d mapped consciousness as a measurable scale, and he described using muscle testing to take calibrations. I’d been using muscle testing for years – I use it constantly in my clearing work to check when energy has shifted. But it had never occurred to me to use it to put a number on where someone is. To track their position over time. To watch the baseline move.
I’m a spreadsheet queen. I spent twenty years in corporate marketing – brand manager, product manager, marketing director – justifying everything with ROI, defending budgets with data, measuring every campaign. Numbers are how I think. And in the world of healing, there were no numbers. Just feelings. Are you feeling better this week? You don’t know where you stand with feelings.
When I read Hawkins, I went a bit mad (in a good way).
I started calibrating everything I could get my hands on. Books. People. Different moments in my own life. I went back to my pregnancy journey – 2009, 2010 – and took retroactive readings. Tuning into those moments in time and measuring where my consciousness had actually been.
What I found made me sit very still. I may have gaped and stared for a while.
Before my first pregnancy: I was below 200. Deep in the territory of grief, despair, fear. Tokophobia expressed at the level of the nervous system.
After a year of healing work: I’d made it just above the 200 mark. In the frequency of courage. Enough to face what I couldn’t face before. Which was exactly how I felt.
By seven months into my second pregnancy, after two months of intensive clearance: 303. Willingness. Optimism. That’s why I changed my mind about the c-section. It wasn’t a conscious decision – it was a reflection of where my consciousness had shifted to.
Hawkins says the average person moves about five points on his scale in a lifetime.
I had moved myself by over a hundred points. In months.
The cease and desist I’m grateful for.
Not long after I started writing about this on my website, I received a letter from Hawkins’ estate. His wife. Copyright concerns.
It forced me to step back, which turned out to be a gift.
Because when I looked carefully at his model, there were parts that didn’t quite match what I was seeing. His work was brilliant validation. But it wasn’t my model. I found Frederick Dodson writing about the same territory in Levels of Energy. Caroline Myss using an apartment building as a metaphor for the same progression. The same idea kept appearing in the work of major thinkers across different fields.
I stopped referencing Hawkins and doubled down on my own framework. The five balls stayed. The model became fully mine.
The investors, the IP, and the one thing I wouldn’t move on.
Around this time I was approached by investors.
Some context: I’m not new to the corporate world. I spent close to twenty years in marketing before building Head Trash – brand manager, product manager, marketing director. I’ve run a management buyout. Secured half a million pounds to relaunch a brand into Europe and doubled revenue. I know how investment conversations work.
So when they valued my business at £10 million and offered £750,000, I wasn’t dazzled. I could model what it meant – we were projecting £60 million in turnover within three years if we could build the app. The platform I’d been wanting to create since I understood what Head Trash Clearance could do at scale: a place where people could do this work themselves, without needing me in the room.
Three months of meetings. Board members, PR agencies, app developers. A £100,000 budget just for the build.
But they wanted my IP. All of it. The books, the method, everything.
I wouldn’t move.
They lost interest.
It wasn’t dramatic. Two positions that couldn’t be reconciled – they fizzled. But I’ve had time to think about why I held that line so firmly.
Head Trash has always been about giving people the power to own their own mental and emotional health. Not to be dependent on a therapist, a system, or someone else’s agenda to stay level. Handing the IP to a board felt like a fundamental contradiction of the thing I was trying to build.
The pandemic was in full swing. We moved countries which meant moving the family seven times in two years. Three months seriously ill. The app vision went on ice.
The beta nobody knew was a beta.
Here’s what I did instead.
I couldn’t build the platform. But I could test whether the core idea worked. Can people do clearances on their own, without me in the room? Can I put everything I know into a digital space and let them get on with it? Will they get real results?
That’s what the Clearance Club has been. A scarppy beta. For years.
I had my answer early.
Megan found me when she was at rock bottom – spending most days in bed, curled up in the foetal position, numb. Panic attacks were constant. She couldn’t leave the house. The thought of pregnancy sent her body into complete shutdown.
She was in therapy. It wasn’t helping. Her therapist didn’t even know what tokophobia was.
“Leaving her office terrified me. I knew I was on my own until the next appointment. She didn’t know how to help me.”
She found my book. She started doing Head Trash Clearance on her own. But she needed more. She couldn’t afford to work with me 1:1, so told her about my new scrappy beta. I wasn’t sure it would be right for her. Hearing how she was I was sure that the only thing that would really help her was personal attention and support.
I explained this but she was desperate for any help she could get. So she joined the Club. Within a couple of months, she emailed me:
“I need to cancel my subscription”
I remember thinking “Oh well! Maybe I was just being too optimistic. I might as well get some feedback on why she wants to cancel” So I messaged her to find out more.
“I’m better! I have cleared nearly all of my fears! Thank you for changing my life!!!”
I was gobsmacked.
She had cleared over 40 fears. She went from daily panic attacks and not leaving the house to – in her words – “a normal amount” of nervousness about pregnancy.
Years later, I emailed to ask if I could include her story in a book. Her reply:
“I’m typing this as I rock my second baby to sleep. I have a two-year-old son and a newborn daughter. I was just telling my wife how far I’ve come from the terrified woman I once was.”
Two months of daily clearance work. That’s what it took.
The method worked without me. I just couldn’t build the platform it deserved.
Until six weeks ago.
The prototype that made me cry.
On a whim, I dropped my old app brief into Claude Cowork. The brief I’d written six years ago when we were planning the £100,000 build.
Within an hour, I had a working prototype on my screen.
I’m not going to pretend I didn’t cry. I absolutely did.
The vision I’d been holding in my head for five years. There it was. Working.
This time, I’m building it on my terms. No investors. No board. No compromises on IP. Just the method I’ve spent sixteen years developing, and tools that finally make it possible.
The Clearance Club is being rebuilt from the ground up. 700+ clearances across 25+ life domains. Progress tracking built in. And assessments powered by the measurement framework I always knew this work needed.
The spreadsheets finally become a company.
Because the other thing I’d been doing quietly – while building the beta, while tracking the calibration data, while watching clients shift in ways that couldn’t be explained by conventional models – was building the measurement infrastructure.
My Untethered 1:1 programme became the container where I started tracking clients’ consciousness properly. Month by month. Energetic makeup across all five levels. Upper and lower ranges. Real numbers. Tracked over time.
Rachel came in at 249. Eight months later: 504. That’s 255 points.
Hawkins says five points in a lifetime.
Jenn: 183 to 512.
Alex, more recently: 206 in January. 435 by March.
I have charts. I have spreadsheets going back years. I have data nobody in the personal development industry has – because nobody else has been watching change happen this fast, or tracking it this obsessively.
In November 2025, and I founded Ladder of Growth – the company built to make this measurable properly. Not just for my clients. For anyone doing inner work who wants to know: is it actually working?
The Clearance Club now has Ladder of Growth assessments built in. Members track their own progress independently. Not marking our own homework.
And JJ and I are launching a podcast. It’s called Is It Bloody Working? – because that’s the question the personal development industry has spent decades avoiding. Because to answer it honestly, you’d have to measure something. And measurement is uncomfortable when you’re selling a feeling.
Two books. Almost no promotion.
Betrayed By Your Biology came out in November. Clear Your Anxiety For Good in December.
I’ve been too deep in the build to promote either properly.
This week, a filmmaker got in touch. They want to make a short film about Betrayed By Your Biology.
I’ve sold about thirty copies.
I don’t say that to be self-deprecating. I say it because it’s the perfect illustration of what happens when you’re heads-down behind the scenes in the work for too long. The work keeps producing things. The front end goes quiet. People don’t know what you’re doing or why.
That ends now.
Why I’m writing here.
This Substack is where I’m going to tell the full story. Not the polished, brand-appropriate version – the actual one.
The decade of spreadsheets nobody saw. The investment that fizzled because I wouldn’t give up my IP. The app that took an hour to prototype after five years of waiting. The measurement obsession that became a company. The books. The filmmaker. The clearances that keep producing results that shouldn’t be possible.
I run several brands. Head Trash. Fearless Birthing. Ladder of Growth. Each has its own audience, its own world.
This is the thread that runs through all of them.
The question underneath everything I build is still the same question it’s always been.
Is it actually working?
And now – finally – I can show you the answer.
Alexia
Developer of Head Trash Clearance | Co-founder of Ladder of Growth | Author of Betrayed By Your Biology & Clear Your Anxiety For Good | Sixteen years of inner work, one obsession