About
Alexia Leachman: founder, methodologist, practitioner.
Sixteen years developing Head Trash Clearance. Trained coach, NLP practitioner, and Thought Field Therapy practitioner.
Methodologist and practitioner, never one without the other.
Alexia still sees clients every week. That is a deliberate decision, not a leftover from an earlier stage of the business. The methodology evolves because it stays in contact with real client work. The practice stays sharp because it is constantly being pressure-tested against the architecture of the method.
These two identities work together. A methodologist who stops practising begins to over-theorise. A practitioner who stops developing the method begins to plateau. Nothing gets baked into the method without being road-tested first: tried on herself, then with clients, then refined and fed back in. A constant loop of testing, improving, and testing again. That is how the method stays sharp, and how clients and trainees get someone who is still on the tools, not just teaching them.
Before HTC: the career that shaped how the method was built.
Sales and marketing: fifteen years
Alexia spent fifteen years in consumer sales and marketing across retail and consumer brands, including time as head tutor on Oxford University’s disruptive digital marketing programme. Marketing isn’t something bolted onto the method. It’s the lens she has seen the world through since studying it at university: she can’t help turning something into a product that many people can use, built once and shipped, rather than a beautiful one-off. That lens is why HTC is built around measurement, structured for scalability, and designed with brand architecture from the start.
Coaching: the pivot from corporate
When Alexia decided to leave the corporate world behind, it was because she wanted work with more meaning than the health and beauty industry was giving her. So she trained as a coach. Her first coaching work blended marketing with coaching (personal brand coaching) and grew from there into leadership and business coaching.
That is where the head trash first showed itself. You can apply every marketing tactic in the world to a personal brand, but if the person doesn’t believe in the vision of their brand (in what they are actually capable of) none of it sticks. Mindset was the blocker. That realisation took her to NLP, and from there to Chris Milbank and Thought Field Therapy.
The marketing thread never left. In marketing you don’t do anything without starting with an objective, and coaching works the same way. So does HTC: what’s the goal, what’s blocking it, what do we clear? And when clients’ results started sounding too good to be believed, demonstrating them stopped being optional. Measurement became a necessity.
The lineage: Chris Milbank and Reflective Repatterning
HTC’s lineage begins with Reflective Repatterning, created by Chris Milbank: a Master NLP practitioner, Master Thought Field Therapy practitioner, and lead trainer for TFT founder Roger Callahan (his right-hand man). The structured sequences and acupressure-based interventions at the method’s beginnings are his. Alexia worked alongside Chris for years in the method’s early days and trained in TFT under him, which gave her the technical grounding to keep developing the work. When Chris became ill, he handed her guardianship of the method.
She has developed it ever since: shaping, refining, keeping what worked and discarding what didn’t, then building the Absolute Healing process and the Ladder of Growth on top, and wrapping the whole thing in the measurement, structure, and ecosystem her marketing and coaching background demanded. This is why she calls herself the developer of the method, and not its creator.
Renaming it was deliberate too. Anyone who wants to train in Reflective Repatterning should go and find Reflective Repatterning; what Alexia has built on top of it needed its own name. And she’d had enough of acronyms. RR, NLP, TFT: they mean a lot to the people who created them and nothing to the person who just wants help with their anxiety. Head Trash Clearance does what it says on the tin. What are we doing here? We’re clearing head trash.
Where the method was forged.
Head Trash Clearance took its shape during Alexia’s pregnancy, when she was confronted with tokophobia, an extreme fear of childbirth. She needed a way to clear the fear, and every constraint of the situation forged the work she’d inherited into the method that eventually emerged.
She had to do it herself; there was no practitioner available who could help. It had to be fast, because pregnancy has a hard deadline. And it had to work in an emergency, because she used it in labour itself: around ten clearances through the birth, including one between contractions just as her baby’s head was crowning, with roughly three minutes to clear the fear and the ambulance crew waiting in the next room. That clearance is the difference between the home birth she got and the emergency C-section she was heading for.
Those constraints became permanent design features of the method:
Self-led
No dependency on another person. You have agency: you are in charge of your own healing.
Fast
Real change in a single session, and in minutes when life demands it. Fears cleared between contractions, and in hospital corridors.
Flexible
An in-depth clearance when there is time, an emergency version when there isn’t. Either way, no compromise on results.
What started as a survival mechanism became a methodology. The constraints that came from necessity turned out to be the features that make HTC distinctive, and the reason it holds up against the hard edge of real life.
How the method has evolved.
What began as a single clearance process has matured into three strands (two depths of work, plus measurement) each addressing a different layer of internal architecture.
Foundation
Clearance
The core work. Recalibrates the emotional charge driving patterns, blocks, and reactivity. Structured, repeatable, and fast: a single session can produce measurable shift. This is where every trainee starts, and the tool most practitioners use most often.
Deeper work
Absolute Healing
Resolves wound-level architecture: the inherited, biographical, and systemic material that clearance alone cannot reach. Developed after years of working with clients whose surface patterns kept regenerating from deeper structural sources. This is where the method addresses root-level material.
Measurement
Ladder of Growth
The psychometric measurement system that tracks internal shift over time. Comparable in shape to DISC or StrengthsFinder, but applied to your emotional architecture. Gives practitioners and clients structured baseline-and-retake data: not self-report, not subjective impression.
The Head Trash ecosystem.
Head Trash operates across three main contexts, with a specialist layer that runs through all of them.
Professional training
This site, headtrashclearance.com. Training, certification, and ongoing support for practitioners who want to deliver HTC in their own work. Level 1 through Level 3, the Practitioner Network, quarterly workshops, and the full methodology architecture.
Self-healers
head-trash.com: for people clearing their own head trash. Anxiety programmes, wound-healing programmes, the Clearance Club, the Head Trash Quiz, books, and self-guided resources. Where clients find the work before they ever meet a practitioner.
Workplace
Head Trash inside organisations: leadership and business coaching built on HTC, work with management and sales teams, and training in-house teams so the capability lives inside the business rather than being hired in.
Perinatal: the specialist layer
Fearless Birthing applies Head Trash Clearance to pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood. It runs through all three contexts above: professional training for perinatal specialists, self-healing for parents-to-be, and workplace applications too.
A note from Alexia.
I built this methodology because I needed it. That is the honest origin. I was pregnant, terrified, and nothing available worked fast enough or gently enough to help me. So I built something that did.
Sixteen years later, the method has two depths of work, a psychometric measurement system, four published books, three podcasts, and a growing network of practitioners who use it every day in their own work. It has been applied to anxiety, wounds, birth trauma, executive burnout, business fears, and ancestral material I did not know existed when I started.
I am still building. The architecture is designed to outlive me: to be teachable, measurable, and transferable in a way that does not depend on any single person delivering it. That is what the training exists to do. Not to create followers, but to create practitioners who carry the method forward in their own contexts, with their own clients, on their own terms.
If you are reading this and wondering whether this is the right fit for you, book a conversation. Thirty minutes for a genuine discussion about whether your work and this method belong together. If it’s not the right fit, neither of us wants to spend time pretending otherwise.
Alexia
Connect with Alexia.
Fit conversation
Private 30-minute conversation to talk through whether HTC is right for the work you do.
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Monthly Q&A
Open Q&A session for prospective trainees and the practitioner community. Once a month, live with Alexia.
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