I was the kid and adult you're afraid your child will become.
I was the difficult one in grade school. I was the one who didn't listen. I was the one who wasn't able to stay calm or obey rules. But I was also the one who was fed unprocessed sugar and caffeine in excessive amounts, raised in chaos by the people I trusted to protect me.
From the outside, it looked like a defiance problem. On the inside, it was a translation problem.
My nervous system had been running the show for as long as I could remember. When my mother walked into the room, tension spoke in her body, and my body already knew it before my mind could comprehend it. I'd start the meltdown before she said a word. She'd look at me and see disobedience. I'd look at her and see weather.
My mother dissolved while I was watching. Single, working numerous jobs, a ghost in her own house. She lost herself when the lines blurred between her identity and motherhood. Nobody offered her the humanity of herself. Not even before motherhood.
By the time I was thirty-two, I was facing twelve charges. Eleven gun charges. One drug trafficking charge. A life that had been quietly building toward that moment since the chaos was first written into my body in the house I grew up in. A nervous system that had mapped itself to the wrong baseline and never been given the chance to remap.
I left the underground life within twenty-four hours, physically. The underground life took years to leave me emotionally.
In 2018 I moved to Vancouver. No plan. I started teaching Hip Hop to kids, which cracked something open in me. Their innocence made visible what I had lost in myself. That's when the real looking inward started. The pandemic stripped away the remaining noise. Nowhere else to look but inside. Years of therapy, movement, yoga, and work I didn't expect to matter as much as it did.
I went deep into how conditioned responses form and why willpower does nothing to them. CBT. NLP. Hypnotherapy. Life coaching. EMDR, which turned out to matter most, because it made the body's role in stored patterns undeniable and impossible to think my way around.
Eventually I found Lisa Feldman Barrett's work. It opened a layer of my own emotional intelligence I didn't know I was missing. Body signals. Body budget. Emotional granularity. The idea that our experiences and what our bodies are doing have more to do with our emotions than I'd previously understood. That wasn't replacing what I'd found in polyvagal and classical theory — it was adding depth to it. And it pointed to exactly where in the sequence I could actually do something. Earlier than I'd been looking. Before the story locks in. Before the reaction fires.
Somewhere in my mid-thirties, sitting with my own nervous system, I started reading the signals my body had been sending me for over thirty years. Jaw. Chest. Breath. I named them. They started organizing differently.
Why I built this.
I teach parents what nobody taught my mother. Something earlier than when she became a parent. Something I believe could have changed things for her before she ever got there.
I show parents how to notice what their own body is teaching their child before their mouth says a word. The work is called The Nova Method, informed by what I found in Barrett's work on body signals and emotional granularity, alongside perceptual systems, polyvagal theory, and classical theory. It's for parents of nine to twelve year olds who've already tried gentle parenting and still find themselves losing it at bedtime.
I'm not a parent. I'm not a therapist. I built this because I wish someone had handed these tools to my mother before she was a parent. I'm here to give them to you so your kid doesn't have to spend over thirty years figuring out what went wrong.
The body teaches before the mouth speaks. What the body teaches is what the child carries.
A note on my name.
My legal name is Alex Noval. I write and publish under Alex Laurel, which is my author name. I use it consistently across the programs, the toolkit, and the children's book series. Both names are mine. If you've seen either, you're in the right place.
Training & background
- · Practitioner certification in CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) — Achology
- · Practitioner certification in Hypnotherapy — Achology
- · Practitioner certification in Life Coaching — Achology
- · Practitioner certification in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) — Achology
- · Personal transformation with EMDR therapy — the turning point in understanding the nervous system and the body's role in stored patterns
- · Independent study in interoception, exteroception, and sensory awareness
- · Applied study of Lisa Feldman Barrett's constructionist theory of emotion
Worth being clear about
I am not a licensed therapist, psychologist, or medical professional. Axel's Emotional Foundations is an educational resource, not a clinical program. If you are dealing with a mental health condition or crisis, please seek qualified professional support.
Start with the free guide.
The Reactive Parent Reboot is the simplest entry point into this work. A practical tool for the moment between a feeling and a reaction. Free, usable today.
Get the free guideAxel's Emotional Foundations is an educational resource for parents. It is not therapy, medical advice, or a substitute for professional care.