About the author.
The person
Neo Courtyard is a pseudonym created to protect a private life in a professional environment where such privacy would seem out of place. Readers of trauma books understand this instinctively; privacy is not a flaw but part of the territory.
The person behind the name is a corporate professional in his early fifties, based in Europe, with a successful career spanning more than twenty years in business.
The journey
Publicly, he appeared competent, performance-driven, and progressive. Internally, however, something had been quietly simmering since hewas twelve. By his late forties, that strategy stopped working.
A Netflix documentary on psychedelics was the initial step into a twenty-month journey of careful, methodical work, pursuing the question he had never considered before: perhaps his way of managing his inner world was not the only option. That curiosity opened the door.
He moved through talk therapy and Internal Family Systems work, then neurofeedback to address hypervigilance and nervous system dysregulation. Personal experiences with MDMA, Ketamine, and Ayahuasca followed, outside clinical settings.
Although not recommended, they were documented because they happened and allowed the surfacing of previously inaccessible emotions.
Neurofeedback and Somatic work came last: addressing what the body had held long after the mind began to understand. Fourteen months in, a pivotal moment occurred: the change was real — not dramatic, but definitive. No longer did he feel his decisions were a subconscious consequence of his trauma. That absence of need was the signal that the work was complete.
Why the book
Looking at others navigating similar terrain after completing his own journey, he saw a lack of structure for how to proceed, minimising the effectiveness of the healing.
Individuals he met understood their trauma deeply but had no system for translating their knowledge into action. People cycling through individual therapies without a framework to connect them, stuck in the gap between knowing and changing.
The system he had built for himself was not designed as a book. It was designed to get him from one place to another. But viewed from the outside, it had a structure others could follow.
This book is that structure. It is not a memoir, though it contains parts of one; not a clinical guide, though it references the clinical literature. A field manual: the practical document he wished someone had handed him at the start, written by someone who made the journey and returned with the map.
The therapeutic frameworks in the book have been reviewed by licensed professionals. The foreword is written by Jeanine Souren, a psychiatrist specialising in trauma management.
Book reviews
Daniela, 36, Graphic Designer
I have read every major trauma book published in the last decade. This is the first one that told me what to do on Monday morning, not in theory, but with a specific exercise and a clear reason to do it first.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur. Nulla nisl eget laoreet aenean donec tellus. Nulla quam pellentesque quis vestibulum vitae feugiat at. Viverra euismod vitae sem nibh mattis id adipiscing. Aenean mi.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur. Nulla nisl eget laoreet aenean donec tellus. Nulla quam pellentesque quis vestibulum vitae feugiat at. Viverra euismod vitae sem nibh mattis id adipiscing. Aenean mi.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur. Nulla nisl eget laoreet aenean donec tellus. Nulla quam pellentesque quis vestibulum vitae feugiat at. Viverra euismod vitae sem nibh mattis id adipiscing. Aenean mi.