Yvette Norris

Lawyer, policy reform advocate, and founder of SOMA.

SOMA grew from Yvette’s own recovery — a slow return to body and safety after years of living in survival mode.

Through trauma-informed care and grounding practices, she learned how the body can become a place of restoration again.

Her experience revealed how invisible recovery can be, and how dignity, beauty, and care are often missing from the way we respond to women in pain.

Domestic violence doesn’t end when the danger is gone.

The body still carries what happened — the vigilance, the exhaustion, the quiet need to feel safe again.

Too often, that recovery happens alone: behind closed doors, in silence, without understanding or softness.

The world moves on, but those living in the aftermath are left to navigate the slow, private work of finding safety again — often with stigma and shame as their only company.

SOMA was created to change that — to bring visibility, beauty, and dignity to recovery; to remove the stigma from survival; and to offer refuge where there has only been isolation.

It is an invitation to see recovery not as a weakness to be hidden, but as a profound and ongoing act of care.

While SOMA began in the context of trauma recovery, its rituals are for every body that has known stress, overwork, or exhaustion — the quiet accumulations that build over time.

The same principles that restore safety after crisis also restore balance in daily life.

SOMA exists for anyone learning to listen to their body again — to soften, to rest, to begin returning to themselves.

Like many women, Yvette once lived by pushing past her body’s warnings — exhaustion, sleeplessness, tension — without understanding what her nervous system was trying to say.

When her health collapsed, she realised how little we are taught about the body’s language of stress and protection, and how understanding it can quietly transform the way we live, work, and heal.

SOMA reimagines beauty and ritual as tools of nervous-system repair — objects that bring steadiness, safety, and belonging back to the hand.

Each piece is designed to reclaim visibility in recovery — covetable companions that deserve to be seen, not hidden away.

It is also a quiet form of advocacy.

For every five kits created, one is donated to a women’s shelter — extending beauty and dignity to those rebuilding safety and stability.

It’s a small gesture of shared care, a reminder that safety must never be treated as optional, but recognised as a fundamental human right.

When recovery is met with beauty and dignity, it has the power to reshape how we value safety — and how society understands care.

That is where change begins — not in asking women to be stronger, but in creating systems that meet them with respect, softness, and visibility.

SOMA — beauty as refuge, design as recovery.