Method developed and refined since 2010, across 1,000+ clearance sessions. Training practitioners internationally.
A while back I was catching up with someone I’d worked with years earlier. He was going through a rough patch and telling me about it, and my head trash radar went off about four sentences in. So I said what I’d say to anyone: sounds like there’s some clearance to be done here. This is about building a clearance practice, not booking a course of treatment.
He said: “Well, I’ve done head trash clearance already. You remember? We did some a couple of years back.”
And I realised I had explained the method to him perfectly well and had never explained the most important thing about it.
The gym problem
Say two years ago you decided to get fit. For a month you went to the gym three times a week and ate properly. You felt the difference, you were pleased with yourself, and then it stopped being part of your life.
Today you’re thinking you could do with getting back in shape.
What you don’t think is: “Well, I exercised for a month two years ago, so I’m not sure why this isn’t working.” Nobody thinks that. It’s obvious that you’re out of shape now because the healthy thing stopped being something you did.
Everyone accepts this about bodies. Almost nobody applies it to emotional wellbeing, and the reason is that the whole surrounding culture is built on a treatment model: you have a problem, you get a course of something, you are discharged. A clearance practice is not that shape.
What a clearance practice actually is
A clearance practice is cutting the sugar and fat out of your emotional diet. It removes the material that’s dragging on you and no longer doing anything useful.
That often starts with a burst of intensive work. A period of going hard at the accumulated stuff, the long-standing patterns that have been generating your stress and anxiety for years. It’s the equivalent of hiring a personal trainer and a nutritionist for a month and making serious inroads.
Then, as with training, you don’t stop. You come off the intensity and settle into something sustainable. Something that fits around your actual life, because a practice that requires heroics is a practice you’ll abandon by March.
The intensive burst does something else worth knowing about. It makes clearing second nature. Once you’ve done thirty of them, you spot new material early and deal with it before it has time to organise itself into something bigger. That’s the real return on a clear-out: not just the stuff you removed, but the fact that you now notice.
What the practice looks like month to month
It depends where you’re starting from and what’s going on in your life. Same as exercise: some people are in the gym at 5am daily, others run three times a week, and both are a practice.
Where it differs from exercise is that life ramps the demand up without asking. A new job, a relationship ending, a house move, a bereavement. Those don’t just create stress, they surface parts of you that had been sitting quietly for years.
When I moved countries with the family I hit so many new layers of fear and uncertainty that I had to crank my own clearance right up for a while. As soon as things settled, I pulled back.
In a normal month I’d say I do three to six clearances. Clients who’ve been through an intensive tell me roughly the same. That’s the scale I mean when I say this should be a clearance practice. Not daily discipline. Three to six times a month, when something comes up.
Why this matters more if you’re a practitioner
Two reasons, and they’re separate.
The first is that you cannot hold this work for other people if it isn’t running in your own system. That isn’t a moral position, it’s a practical one. You absorb material in this job, and a practitioner without a clearance practice of their own will find certain client themes are quietly unavailable to them. I’ve written about why self-healing stops being optional here, and it’s the reason the Level 1 certification requires twenty documented self-clearances rather than a watched-the-modules tick.
The second is that this is a thing you have to actively teach clients, because they will make exactly Alfie’s mistake. They’ll do the intensive work, feel transformed, and file the method under “done”. Then eighteen months later something knocks them sideways and they conclude the work wore off.
It didn’t wear off. They stopped going to the gym.
Setting that expectation at the start of an engagement is one of the highest-leverage things you can do, and it costs you one conversation. What was cleared is gone. New material will arrive, because you are alive and things happen to you. Here is how you handle it when it does.
Where to go next
- What Head Trash Clearance actually is
- Why self-healing is a non-negotiable for coaches and therapists
- Burnout, and what to do with the load you’ve already absorbed
- Everything we’ve written about the method
- The practitioner’s practice
- The training pathway
If you want to learn the method for yourself first, the book is the cheapest way in, and it’s over on the client side at head-trash.com.
If you’re a practitioner and you want this in your practice, book a fit conversation.
About the author
Alexia Leachman is the creator of the Head Trash Clearance Method: a fast, self-led, measurable modality refined over 16 years and more than 1,000 clearance sessions. She developed the Absolute Healing Process and founded Ladder of Growth, the measurement framework that makes emotional change visible. Author of four books, host of the Fear Free Childbirth podcast (2M+ downloads), and trainer of HTC practitioners internationally. Her work begins where therapy and mindfulness leave off: removing what is actually driving the pattern.