The Nervous System Never Lies

Attunement, the Inner Critic, and What We're Really Missing

Humans are relational by nature. Our bodies are hardwired for connection, and we regulate through co-regulation. When we try to regulate from a place of urgency, to fix ourselves or change something, we might be missing a vital step.

Breathwork and vagus nerve exercises are genuinely useful tools, and they can absolutely support us in the moment. But they are not what a young, developing nervous system misses out on. What gets missed is something far more fundamental: attunement.

Attunement is being seen, heard and known. Being met exactly where we are when we needed help from a caregiver. When we had big emotions, or overwhelmed, when we might have fallen and hurt ourselves, our caregivers were there to soothe us and had capacity to hold our big feelings. From these experiences, from them attuning to us in the moment, lending their nervous systems to soothe ours, our nervous systems develops and grows. When our caregivers did not lend us their nervous system to hold us through experiences that were overwhelming, we didn't receive the attuned attention we needed to learn how to soothe ourselves.

Babies are not born with the capacity to self-regulate. Caregivers lend them their nervous system, through gentle touch, a gentle voice, and responsive presence, and over time, through that repeated experience, the child's nervous system learns that the world is safe. Gradually, they internalise that capacity and begin to self-soothe. If that attuned care was inconsistent or absent, the nervous system may never have had the chance to fully learn it.

Digital Image - Kellie Stirling. Two women mirroring each other offering deep attunement

This is also where the inner critic is born, though it has other contributors too, including cultural and family messaging. The inner critic is often misunderstood as something we need to eliminate. But it usually formed for a reason.

The inner critic doesn't arrive in a single moment, nor from a single voice. It is shaped over time, like rings in a tree. Early relationships often form the core, particularly where attunement was inconsistent and a child learned to adapt in order to belong. But other layers gather around it: temperament, family expectations, cultural messages, moments of shame, and the quiet lessons about who it was safe to be. What we call the inner critic is often a protective ecosystem, one that once helped us stay connected and feel safe, even if it now feels limiting or harsh. It is often an aspect of our inner critic, which emerged to protect us, that shows up in our relationships when we are arguing.

So back to the breathwork and the vagus nerve exercises. These tools matter. But they are not the core of what our deeply relational nervous systems need.

When we learn to practise self-attunement, when we learn what safety actually feels like in the body, something begins to happen that was interrupted early in our development. This work unfolds most powerfully in the presence of a therapist or coach who is trained to hold this kind of space, and who has done enough of their own work to bring a stable, regulated nervous system to the room. That stability matters, because it recreates the very thing that was missing: a regulated system, a compassionate witness to co-regulate with. The body is being met in its experience, not shifted out of it.

From this level of attunement, something remarkable starts to grow: self-trust. We begin to learn how to attune to ourselves, to notice and stay with our inner experience. Another word for this is interoception; our capacity to sense what is happening inside us. As our interoception develops, our own voice starts to emerge. As distinct from the inner critic, which is so often the voice of the caregiver who couldn't meet us.

This is developmental work in the truest sense. We get to grow what didn't get to grow the first time around, so we can move through our lives as empowered, self-aware adults who know how to be in relationship, with others and with themselves.

The nervous system of the high achieving woman

What looks like ambition is often something older and the body always knows the difference.

High achievement is culturally celebrated as a character trait. We treat it as something a person simply is driven, ambitious, goal-oriented. But for many women, particularly those who have spent time in my practice or ones like it, achievement began as something more fundamental than ambition. It began as safety.

A child who learns that performance earns approval, that excellence keeps the peace, that being useful prevents abandonment, that staying busy stops the scary feelings, does not grow out of that lesson easily. She grows into it. She gets very, very good at it. So what happens is the nervous system, which learned early that output equals love, safety and the feeling of belonging, encodes that equation into its baseline operating state.

What you experience and see, when you interact with her is an organised, capable, often extraordinary human. She shows up early, follows through, holds a lot. She is the one people call when things need doing. She probably has a full calendar, willpower in spades, and a level of follow-through that others genuinely admire.

She may also be exhausted in a way that rest isn't fixing. Because somewhere underneath the doing, there is a restlessness she can't quite name a low hum telling her she should always be working on something. She may also find that she has an anxiety that surfaces the moment she tries to stop.

I am not writing this blog about burnout in the conventional sense. It is about what lives underneath the high-achieving pattern in the nervous system, in the body and why the solution is rarely what it appears to be. Whilst I am focusing this on women, I have many men that I work with who have a similar patterns. I also had this pattern myself, so I know it intimately and I know what helped me let go of it.

Digital art - Kellie Stirling

So, where does this begin?

Many high-achieving women were children who were praised for being capable. For excelling. For being responsible beyond their years. In that early environment, a lesson got encoded not as a conscious belief, but as something more fundamental; output brings attunement and performance earns love. Being ‘able’ even when deep inside you were anything but, is what gets you chosen.

So the child learns to produce and she is rewarded for it everywhere she goes. She gets seen when she achieves, supported when she delivers, admired when she holds it together. Over time, the lines blur between what she truly wants and what she chases in order to feel okay.

By adulthood, this has become identity. This is not a strategy that was chosen but an identity that she grew into. Her nervous system, which learned early that output equals safety, encodes that equation into its baseline state. The inner voice never fully quiets. There is always something she should be working on, something that needs to be done, the list is never ending, the brain spins with ideas. Any time she tries to slow down there is a level of anxiety that appears. So busyness keeps that anxiety at bay.

What that busyness is doing though is keeping her nervous system in a constant state of urgency. The body is operating off adrenaline as opposed to genuine life force energy. Deep inside she is desperately craving a break but she has no idea how to physically do that and still feel okay.

Here is a distinction I find myself returning to again and again in my work; there is a profound difference between a system running on urgency and a system running on genuine energy.

From the outside, they can look identical. Both produce. Both deliver. Both show up. But inside, the experience is entirely different. A system running on genuine energy has access to a real sense of aliveness, a felt connection to what matters, to pleasure, to choice and it feels safe to rest when it needs to. A system running on urgency is fuelled by adrenaline and cortisol, your stress hormones. It is staying ahead of something. The busyness is not an expression of vitality, it is a way of managing a low-level dread.

So back to this point of needing, no, craving a break but not knowing how to do that and feel safe. This is not because she lacks self-awareness, but because stopping doesn't feel like relief. It feels like exposure. The nervous system that is organised around doing as safety, experiences stillness as a threat signal. Rest is not neutral. It is where the thing she unconsciously has been outrunning, might catch up her.

So when I work with women like this, there is a real skill I need to deploy about the pace at which we slow down her nervous system. Because if we slow down too fast, her nervous system will contract because it feels unsafe.

The high-achieving pattern is not a personality type. It is a survival strategy that became an identity. if she is not achieving who is she really? The tricky thing about a survival strategy becoming identity is it is very hard to untangle, but not impossible, because doesn’t it feel like you are losing a behaviour it feels like you are losing yourself.

So the inner work isn’t just about doing less or achieving less, it is about connecting with the part of yourself that is still running, still proving and bracing. Waiting in fear that someone realises that you actually have limits. The reality is when you are in this place, you have lost connection with what your limits actually are. You have lost connection with the feeling of when the body says no.

The nervous system is not infinitely elastic. Allostatic load, which is the cumulative cost of sustained stress responses, of chronic activation, of never quite returning to baseline, builds slowly and announces itself late. For years, willpower compensates. Most of the women that come into my practice have willpower in spades and they use it as the dominant strategy to keep working. Until they don't because their body stops and refuses to do anything. All the strategies that worked in the past don’t work anymore; the scaffolding that has held it all together often collapses.

I find that this threshold often arrives at midlife, sometimes with perimenopause, sometimes with a loss or a transition, sometimes with no obvious trigger at all. The burnout that arrives doesn't resolve the way burnout used to. The anxiety seems to come from nowhere and there is a particular hollowness and sense of emptiness that begins to surface after achievements. She reaches the goal, and finds nothing there. Just the question: what's next? Until she gets to the point where she thinks, what actually is the point of all of this doing?

She may think her body is breaking down. But what it might actually be doing is asking a question it has held for a long time: ‘what are we running from?’

The body has been sending signals for years and she learned, somewhere along the way, not to hear them. The accumulation is what finally makes them impossible to ignore.

Back to identity again. The deep existential question comes up ‘who am I?’ or sometimes I hear in my practice ‘I don’t know who I am anymore?’.

For those of us whose self-worth was built on output, this is not a philosophical question. It is a genuinely destabilising one. Slowing down doesn't just feel uncomfortable. It can feel like disappearing. This is why the conventional advice like, do less, set better limits, take a holiday really misses the point, or is too big of an ask for the nervous system. It needs to be titrated. You cannot manage your way out of a survival strategy. You cannot override a nervous system that genuinely believes stillness is dangerous. The work has to go somewhere deeper.

In my experience, the women who move through this most meaningfully are not the ones who learn to slow down for the sake of it. They are the ones who build a real relationship with the part of themselves that is still running still proving, still bracing, still waiting to be found out.

That part was not wrong to develop, it was a survival strategy created by your adaptive child. It was often exactly what was needed but now it deserves to be met, not managed. Turned toward, not overridden. Given the same quality of attention, attunement and care that she has spent her whole life giving to everything else.

As she learns to connect with a sense of safety in her body and connect with this part of herself that does not feel safe to stop, the nervous system begins to find a different kind of ground. One that doesn't have to be earned. It was always there to begin with.

We are not learning to stop achieving. We are learning to attune to the parts of ourselves that were never allowed to rest, and to that deep sense of self that was always more multi-dimensional and complex than what we produced.

Trauma, Joy and the Space between

I was reading the newspaper on the weekend and I saw an interview with Bessel van der Kolk.  It was one of those Q and A style interviews and he was talking about MDMA therapy which is very interesting but he was asked a few general questions about trauma.  In one of his responses he said ‘I don’t know a single person who doesn't have trauma’.  This stopped me and it got me thinking about our definitions of trauma, the clinical definitions and then what we understand about it in popular culture.

We've inherited a story about trauma that is too narrow, too dramatic. We imagine it belongs to people who've survived catastrophe, war, abuse, disasters, big accidents.  Yes it is associated with those things but there are many more categories that we work with in somatic experiencing practice.  What I have noticed with many clients is that we place it at a safe distance from ourselves and from our ordinary yet very complex lives.  The reality is most of us carry something we don't have a name for. A tightness that arrives without warning. A habit of bracing. A way of going quiet in rooms where we used to feel at home.

Trauma isn't the story of what happened to us. It's what happened inside of us in response to what happened or a series of things happening.   It is the imprint it left on your nervous system, the way your body learned to brace, to shut down, to stay small, to stay safe. It doesn't care how big or small the event looks from the outside. It only knows what it felt like to be you, in that moment, without enough support or safety to absorb what was happening.

That's a very different thing and when you understand that it changes your meaning making around the topic of trauma.

Because if trauma is that ordinary, that universal, it means we are all, to varying degrees, navigating life with some part of us still keeping watch, still waiting for something or maybe still braced for what might come next.

Sometimes it is also about things that didn’t happen.  Not being attuned to, not feeling like we are being seen or heard.  Not receiving physical touch.  Not feeling like we belong and having to disconnect from what we feel in our body to survive the environment we are in.  

It widens the lens on it a bit doesn’t it?

There is a huge cost to all of this.  It costs us presence. It costs us the easy pleasure of being in our own bodies. It costs us spontaneity, delight, the capacity to be genuinely moved by something beautiful. Not because we don't want those things but because a nervous system that has learned to protect you from pain will, inevitably, protect you from the full depth of joy as well.

Let me tell you what I know about healing.  If trauma lives in the nervous system, so does healing. Healing doesn’t only happen through processing pain, it lives and grows through joy, connection, pleasure and co-regulation.

We seem to have created this story that healing trauma means processing pain and diving into it which is not strictly correct.  In my somatic world it definitely isn’t.  We’ve over-associated healing with pain processing and under-recognised the role of pleasure and connection. I understand why because trauma often narrows interoception; we feel less, or only certain ranges. But did you know that pleasure expands interoception? We begin to feel more safe and co-regulation gives the nervous system a lived experience of safety in relationships.

So joy isn’t superficial, it is regulating, organising and restorative.

Another really inspiring thing happened last week that motivated me to write this blog.  I was watching the Artemis landing and I had been following the astronauts a little when they were in space.  Jeremy Hansen the Canadian astronaut made a comment:

"Our purpose on the planet as humans is to find joy, to find the joy in lifting each other up, by creating solutions together instead of destroying."

He said seeing the Earth from space helped them all realise this.  This brought tears to my eyes, especially with all the crazy shit going on in the world at the moment.

We are not here to be unaffected. We are not here to have gotten it all sorted. We are here, nervous systems and all, to feel as much as we can bear to feel and to help each other bear a little more.  We are here not just to heal ourselves, but to help each other feel safe enough to come back to experience and feel the fullness of life.

This is what helps us metabolise and integrate the overwhelm that we all experience often each day.

This is what I mean when I talk about integration.  It is not fixing, not erasing, not arriving somewhere unblemished. Integration is the slow, patient process of your nervous system finding enough safety to loosen its grip. To let a little more life in. To discover that aliveness is available to you again.

The signs of that are most often quieter than you might expect. A moment when you actually taste your food. A laugh that surprises you from somewhere low in your belly. The ability to receive kindness or a compliment without immediately deflecting it. A morning when your body doesn't feel like something to manage, but something to inhabit.  A changed reaction to regular dysfunctional behaviour you experience from another on the regular.

Coming full circle on my thoughts at the start of the blog, when you understand all of this it really changes how you view all the people that come into your life each day.  I think it brings us more compassion toward each other and it makes us reflect on what we can do to support each other.

When we understand that everyone is carrying something; that the person who cut you off in traffic, the colleague who snapped at you, the friend who disappeared when you needed them, the parent who couldn't quite get it right.  When we understand that all of them are navigating some version of a nervous system that learned to cope, we start to see and feel our world a little differently.  

I am not talking about excusing what isn't okay. I am talking about a kind of tenderness that makes more room for yourself and others. For the whole complicated, tender mess of being human together.

You can't think your way into feeling

Feeling your feelings is harder than it sounds.

We have increasingly found sophisticated ways not to feel. We've all heard it. Just feel your feelings. It sounds so simple , almost obvious. Yet, for most of us, it's one of the hardest things we'll ever do.

Not because we're weak, or broken, or doing something wrong. But because somewhere along the way, we learned that feelings weren't entirely safe. Then, quietly and collectively, we built an entire world that confirmed it.

The interesting thing about feelings is that they show us one simple truth, the body knows first. You know when you walk into the room and sense the emotional climate? That is what I am talking about, the nervous system reads the room first and we feel it.

Feelings aren't thoughts about emotions. They are physical events.

A tightening in the chest. A hollow opening in the stomach. Heat rising in the face. Heaviness settling in the shoulders like something invisible just landed there. The body receives experience first, before the mind has a chance to name it, frame it, or find somewhere useful to put it. Feelings don't live in your head. They live in tissue, in breath, in the subtle language of your nervous system.

So when we talk about avoiding feelings, what we're really talking about is learning to move away from sensation. From the body's own signal system and most of us have been doing it for so long, we don't even notice we're doing it.

The avoidance rarely starts as a choice. For most of us, it began as an inheritance.

We absorbed it from the culture we were born into, a culture that prizes productivity over presence, resilience over vulnerability, and forward motion over the messy, necessary work of actually processing what's happening inside us. “Push through. Stay positive. Don't dwell”. We've dressed emotional suppression up in the language of strength for so long that many people genuinely can't tell the difference between regulation and repression.

The "good vibes only" movement, for all its cheerful intentions, is perhaps the most recent iteration of a very old story; that difficult feelings are a problem to be solved rather than a signal to be heard.

Image - Kellie enjoying the beautiful Alhambra Gardens, a few years ago. A quiet moment of feeling peace, awe and wonder, …….. with an unexpected new friend.

But culture is just the backdrop. The more intimate teaching happens closer to home.

In many families, emotions, particularly big, difficult ones, were not something that could safely exist in the shared space. Not because parents were cruel, but because they were human; carrying their own unprocessed histories, their own unmet needs, their own nervous systems doing the best they could.

Children are exquisitely attuned to the emotional climate of their home. They feel the tension before anyone speaks. They notice the shift in atmosphere when a particular topic is raised. They learn, with remarkable speed, which feelings are welcome and which ones make the air go strange.

So they adapt. They make themselves smaller. They learn to swallow the tears, contain the anger, perform the calm. Not because they were told to, though sometimes they were, but because they felt what happened in the room when they didn't. The withdrawal. The anxiety. The subtle but unmistakable signal that this was too much.

This is not a failure of the child. It is a profound act of adaptation. The child keeps the peace. The child holds the system together. The child learns that their inner world is less important than the emotional stability of the adults around them. The problem with this is it is not the child’s role in the family system to hold space. They don’t have the capacity in their own bodies to do this. Their nervous systems grow well when they have support and co-regulation for parents and caregivers.

That learning doesn't leave when we grow up. It becomes the architecture of how we relate to ourselves.

For some, this went even further. Perhaps there was a parent who struggled, with depression, with alcohol, with the weight of their own unresolved grief. Perhaps the emotional temperature of the household was genuinely unpredictable, and learning to monitor and manage it became a matter of felt safety.

These children became extraordinarily skilled at reading other people. They developed a finely calibrated sensitivity to mood, to need, to the earliest signs of distress in those around them. They learned to intervene before things escalated. To soothe, to deflect, to become whatever the moment required.

What they didn't learn was how to turn that same attention inward.

When your nervous system is organised around tracking others, when your survival, in some early and embodied sense, depended on getting that right , your own feelings become background noise at best. At worst, they feel like a liability. An indulgence. Something to be attended to only once everyone else is okay.

Which, of course, is never. Because these choices were intelligent strategies that our nervous system made, that helped us survive moments when protection, choice and support was missing. Over time they become habituated responses, very strong neural pathways that keep us alive. Those intelligent responses live in the nervous system and tissues; muscles stay contracted, breath stays shallow and the body stuck in a fight response, prepared for a fight that is no longer happening.

Culturally we started to notice in workplaces that we had a problem with poor emotional regulation and here's where it gets interesting.

Emotional disconnection, burnout, relational breakdown, it became impossible to ignore so we developed a response and we called it Emotional Intelligence.

We built frameworks. Competency models. Training programmes. We gave people a vocabulary for their inner world and a five-step process for navigating it. In many ways, it was very well-intentioned a genuine attempt to bring feeling back into professional and personal life. I want to say I think it is brilliant that organisations started to highlight this because left to their own devices, many people wound never come across this content. As I always say, you have to start somewhere.

But look at what we actually did. We took the most embodied, relational, lived thing there is and…. we put it in a PowerPoint. We made emotion into a skill to be optimised. Name the feeling, manage the feeling, deploy the feeling strategically. Which means it's still, fundamentally, a head operation. You're just thinking about feelings in a more sophisticated way. The body, where the feeling actually lives, barely gets a mention.

Emotions arise from the nervous system particularly the limbic system. This is a different part of the brain to the neo-cortex which is receiving this powerpoint information, which is all about logic and reason. If you want to build emotional capacity you have to work with those parts of the brain where implicit memory lives and you do it through the language of the nervous system, which we call ‘The felt sense’.

This, I think, tells you everything about how deep the conditioning runs. That even our solution to emotional disconnection had to be made safe by intellectualising it. We couldn't let it be messy and bodily and unquantifiable. It had to have a score. A framework. A return on investment.

We looked at the problem of not feeling and responded by finding a more sophisticated way to not feel. There is a huge cost of staying ‘just north of yourself’.

When we consistently move away from sensation, the feelings don't disappear. They go underground deep into our unconscious. They show up as anxiety without a clear source, as a vague flatness, as a body that's always tense for no reason you can name. They emerge sideways in sudden irritability, in chronic pain, in the persistent sense that something is off even when life looks fine on paper.

There's also a quieter cost. When we numb or bypass the difficult feelings, we inadvertently turn down the volume on the good ones too. Joy becomes harder to access. Aliveness feels further away. We go through the motions of a full life while feeling strangely absent from it.

Perhaps most poignantly, when we can't feel our own experience, we cannot feel others’ and we struggle to feel genuinely met by others. The connection we most want keeps glancing off a surface we've spent years polishing smooth. In relationships this is a major driver of loneliness because we cannot connect with our emotions let alone talk about them and share what is deep in our heart with another. That level of vulnerability is terrifying.

The body keeps the ledger, it waits, sometimes for decades, for the conditions to be safe enough to finally put some of it down.

We often talk about feeling feelings as though it's a matter of bravery of simply deciding to stop avoiding and diving in. But that framing misses something important.

Feeling, especially for those of us who learned early to move away from sensation, is a capacity that needs to be built. The nervous system needs to learn, slowly and with support, that it can be with experience without being overwhelmed by it. That sensation can be felt and survived. That there is enough space, enough ground, enough steadiness to actually let something land.

This is the heart of the somatic work I do with people. Not pushing into feeling, but gently expanding what can be experienced without the system needing to flee. It's slow work. It requires patience, curiosity, and a willingness to be a beginner in your own inner life.

It is some of the most important work I know.

Somatic work doesn’t force patterns to disappear it meets them with careful pacing and respect. Healing begins when we attend closely to the physiology and introduce layers of support that were not present in the original moment: co-regulation, steadiness, choice, support and the permission to be and move ever so slowly. Slow is more in somatic healing.

The nervous system begins to soften and loosen. It realises that it is no longer in a fight and the body learns that it does not have to hang on so tightly. The support that was missing is finally here.

If any of this resonates, here's a gentle place to start. The next time you notice an urge to reach for your phone, or to get suddenly very busy, or to launch into problem-solving mode, pause. Just for a moment.

Ask: what's happening in my body right now?

You don't need to feel everything. You don't need to go anywhere overwhelming. Just notice. A breath. A tightening. A warmth. A nothing.

That small, curious turn toward the body, that noticing, is the beginning of coming home to yourself.

This is unlike anything you'll find in a competency framework, nobody can teach it to you from the outside. It has to be lived, slowly, from within.

If you would like some support and learn how to build this capacity so that you have more energy to cope with what life throws your way, come talk to me.

The hidden cost of being the strong one

Did you grow up being the good child, the strong child or the one who kept it all together?

Some people learn very early in life how to carry more than others can see. On the outside, they look fine they are capable, reliable, calm under pressure. They are the ones everyone turns to.  They are often the strong one and the responsible one and the one who holds it all together.

But what most people don’t see is the cost because people who learned to over-give and over-function rarely fall apart in obvious ways. They just keep going, showing up, they keep caring for others and they keep managing what everyone else is feeling.

Who is looking out for this person?

Slowly and quietly, the cost accumulates.  It can look like exhaustion, burnout and loneliness.  Not because they don’t have people in their lives but because very few people actually see them.

People who carry this pattern often recognise themselves here:

• They overthink everything they say or do
• They feel responsible for other people’s emotions
• They struggle to ask for help
• They rarely talk about what’s really hurting inside
• They smile even when they feel overwhelmed
• They put everyone else’s needs before their own

From the outside, it looks like strength however on the inside, it often feels like survival. Over time, they may find themselves disconnected from their own needs, unsure who they are underneath the roles they’ve learned to carry.

Many of them quietly wonder when was the last time that they felt truly understood and seen for who they really are.

For most, this pattern didn’t begin in adulthood but rather in childhood. These children grew up in an environment where the adults around them did’t have the emotional capacity to hold their feelings. So they adapted and became the good child or the strong child. The responsible child, the one who had to maintain the energy in the family to keep the peace. They learned to read everyone in the room by developing a finely attuned radar and so now we might know them as an empath or call them hypervigilant.

Their nervous system learned that staying safe means managing the emotional environment around them. So they become quiet, easy, helpful. They learned how to keep themselves small and shapeshift into the environment around them so they never caused any trouble.

Their emotions weren’t mirrored back to them, so they become the child who understands everyone else but who isn’t truly understood themselves.

Another of their clever adaptive strategies was to learn never to rely on anyone else. They became magnificently independent to protect themselves. This is because when they asked for help in childhood that lead to being dismissed, misunderstood, or blamed. In time, the nervous system learns something important, that it’s safer to rely on yourself.

So these children grow up to become adults who are extraordinarily capable. They become their own parent, protector and stabiliser.

People admire them for their strength.

Underneath all that strength is often a quiet exhaustion, because no one was meant to carry everything on their own.

At its core, this pattern often carries a deep wound of abandonment. Of self-abandonment. They learned to stop listening to their own body, to their own needs, to put everyone else first to stay safe, to receive love and to feel a deep sense of belonging.

However they have a very deep sense of longing not to actually give less but to be seen, known and to be able to be themselves. To be able to receive all of this without having to earn love through caretaking, perfection, or responsibility.

All this requires them to be vulnerable however when someone gets close fear often appears because in the past being vulnerable has not been safe. So connection is longed for and at the same time it is also frightening.

We can heal this pattern when we start to include ourselves in our circle of care. When we find and reconnect with the protective part of ourselves that learned to over-function in order to survive, the wounded inner child who learned if you keep it all together you will be loved. You begin offering that part of yourself something new.

You might say to this child part of you, “I'm safe now. It's safe to rest. You don't have to carry everything anymore’.

Healing might also means choosing relationships that feel different. It might look like choosing people who can meet and hold all of your emotions and feelings. It might mean finding people who can actually see you.

When you focus on healing these wounded child parts, you will find that not everyone will respond the way people did in the past. As you learn that, slowly through experience, you will notice how trust begins to rebuild. One tiny step at a time.

Over time, the same things you once gave endlessly to others, begin to return to you. Care, kindness, patience, compassion and understanding will come your way.

This time it will be different because you have learned to give them to yourself too, not because you have stopped caring about others, but because you are no longer abandoning yourself in order to belong. Slowly, something new begins to grow. A sense of home inside yourself, a place deep in your heart where all your parts are allowed to exist, simply because you are here.

Functional Freeze: When you are coping but not living

For many of the people I work with, they don’t arrive saying, “I’m traumatised.”  They arrive saying things like:  “I’m exhausted, and I am not sure why and I am thinking it might be related to trauma.” or “I am functioning but I really feel flat”.  Others feel like they have lost their spark and zest for life.  Some people know that something is inherently not right, their life looks fine but they feel ‘out of whack’, or sometimes stuck, something about their life is off.

They are holding jobs, relationships, families, leadership roles and often they are capable, intelligent, emotionally aware. Yet, deep inside, something feels stalled or a bit disconnected.

This is what we call, functional freeze.

What is functional freeze?

Functional freeze is a nervous system state where you are operational but disconnected.  Many of us have this in our body. Remember, our nervous system responses are very natural because our Autonomic nervous system (ANS) is our body’s surveillance system.  With functional freeze the brake and the accelerator are both on at the same time.  However, unlike collapse, where everything stops, functional freeze allows you to: keep working, keep caring for others, keep meeting expectations, keep “showing up”.

We can do all this but it comes at a cost.

We often find that the body is braced, that our emotional range narrows. So, joy, desire, creativity, and spontaneity have maybe quietly drained away.  From the outside, life looks fine. On the inside, we can feel numb, effortful, or strangely empty.

Functional freeze serves as a type of camouflage so it can render us, (or a part of us) invisible.  It allows us to be hidden in plain sight, just going through the motions.  The authentic part of ourself, our core essence, is unavailable for participation.

Digital Art, Kellie Stirling

How does functional freeze develop?

Functional freeze often develops in people who had to adapt early.  People who learned, consciously or not, to not be a burden.  They were told to just get on with it, that their feelings had to wait or, if they just kept on going, they would be ok.  It develops in children who couldn’t protest or leave, in relational systems where anger or need was not safe.  So people learn that compliance is a survival strategy.

Metaphorically, we become like the owl, invisible in the tree, feathers blending into the background.  Quiet, but with those big eyes taking everything.  Our flight is quiet and stealthy.  Often when we see an owl in the natural environment we are delighted. They are quiet, wise and all knowing and there are so many we often don’t see because of their expert camouflage. These strategies are not flaws.  They are intelligent adaptations to environments that didn’t reliably support emotional expression, rest, or dependency.

Many high-functioning adults grew up in families or cultures that rewarded: Independence, self-reliance, achievement and emotional restraint.  The nervous system learned to override sensation and emotion in order to keep moving. For a long time, this works.

Until it doesn’t.

Why functional freeze often shows up in midlife?

Midlife is a threshold.  Biologically, emotionally, relationally, the body begins to renegotiate capacity.  So what you could once tolerate, override, or push through starts to feel harder because hormonal shifts change stress tolerance.  This means that  emotional labour accumulates and this happens all in a time in life where caregiving, leadership, or relational demands increase.  Our nervous system starts to have less appetite for suppression and the allostatic load in our body, which is the amount of stress we can tolerate, hits a high.  Our body says “I can't do this dance of squashing everything done anymore, I am exhausted”.  To suppress our emotions and sensations requires an enormous amount of energy from our body.

Those old strategies that once kept you successful now feel unsustainable.

This is why people often experience midlife as a loss of motivation or meaning and where they may experience increased conflict in relationships.  Maybe they find themselves being emotionally reactive or irritable or that they are tired and wired, they have an exhaustion that rest does not fix.  Often there is a sense of “I can’t do this the way I used to’ and also a despair at feeling anchorless and uncertain of where to orient from and to next.

This isn’t failure.

It’s the body asking for a reorganisation, not more effort.

What is important to know is that functional freeze is not laziness or burnout.  It is not a low energy state, it is a contained energy state.  Mobilising energy is present but it is being actively inhibited, our body is working hard to not move.  People in functional freeze are often deeply conscientious.  They care a lot, they try and they keep on going.  What’s happening isn’t a lack of motivation, it’s a protective nervous system state.

Freeze conserves energy when the system has learned that stopping isn’t an option or that help wasn’t available.  It is a very quiet version of survival.

What helps functional freeze begin to thaw?

Functional freeze doesn’t resolve through insight alone.

Understanding why you feel this way can be validating  but it’s not enough.  What helps is gentle, titrated reconnection with the body, often through, slowing down without forcing rest and noticing sensation rather than analysing emotion.  It is about small experiences of choice, agency, and pleasure being experienced interoceptively.  It is about experiencing embodied relational safety and not having to perform anything.

We know when we are ‘thawing’ a bit because we might notice a deeper breath or an emotion coming up spontaneously.  We also might notice a clearer ‘no’ or ‘yes’ in our body when it comes to making choices or that we are able to rest for a moment without feeling guilty. These are not dramatic breakthroughs, they are signs of life returning.

The invitation of functional freeze

Functional freeze is not something to purge or cathartically push out.  It takes slow and gentle work and it is an invitation to stop living from adaptation and start living from presence.  To shift from coping to inhabiting your life.  With the right therapeutic support it is a nervous system state that you can come out of.

So that you can let your body, not just your mind, lead the next chapter.  For many people, this is the initiation of midlife: not becoming better at surviving, but becoming more available to aliveness, truth, and an authentic way of being in the world.

When our inner child is leading the fight

Our relationships can be the most fantastic containers for healing our inner child wounding. When we argue with our partners it is not our wise adult self having the argument it is almost always one of our adaptive childhood parts. These are the parts of us that learned very early how to survive emotionally in our families of origin.

When I work with couples through a systemic lens, I can see the recurring patterns that keep looping and generating conflict, alongside each partner’s adaptive child strategies. Once these patterns become visible, they’re impossible to unsee.

We think our fights are about the dishes, about a shutdown after a small comment, about tension around sex. Or maybe it is someone always needing to be right, or to be in control. Maybe it about someone who withdraws in the middle of tension, they clam up and say nothing. There is always something deeper there.

Artist unknown, From Burning Man

Once you see it, it makes a different kind of sense. The fight isn’t about the housework or the small irritations, those are just the signs. What’s really happening is that an adaptive child has taken the lead. The adaptive children are in the house.

It is our adaptive child that runs the fight. The problem with this is our adaptive child has no place running our adult relationships. It doesn’t have the discernment or capacity to make adult decisions.

The adaptive child is the part of us that learned how to stay connected, safe, or invisible in childhood. This is a very intelligent survival strategy that helped us survive when we were a child to stay safe. The only problem is that when this part is running the show in adult relationships, we don’t respond we react.

So when two adaptive children collide, the relationship quickly becomes a battleground rather than a place of safety.

In Terry Real’s framework, there are three common adaptive child imprints that often show up in adult intimacy. These are:

The Hero Child. This is the person who '“holds it all together.” They learned early that love came through competence, responsibility, or emotional caretaking. They took up a particular role in their family system and it was often either, the good one, the achiever, the surrogate spouse, the family therapist or they calmed things down.

They are often very competent, loyal and responsible people in their adult life. They show up, do their job and they do it well. They are often seen by others as competent, logical and good people.

When they are not good, what does that look like?

Well they can be passive sometimes and they are not particuarly good at being vulnerable because they have had to be good and responsible for a very long time. This means surrender, being open and receiving can be really challenging for them.

In adult relationships, this can look like:

• Over-functioning

• Carrying the emotional load for both partners

• Resentment building beneath “being fine”

• Struggling to ask for help or show vulnerability

When the Hero Child is activated, they often feel: “If I don’t manage this, everything will fall apart.” When they do eventually explode or withdraw, it often shocks their partner because their exhaustion has been invisible for a long time. The Hero child has had to hold a lot in the family system; in fact, they have probably been given more power than a child should have but it has not been based on them as an individual. It has been based on what the parents needed them to do to regulate the family system.

The Scapegoat Child. The scapegoat is the classic rebel or problem child. They learned that conflict, intensity, or acting out was the only way to stay seen. They often have very big feelings and express all that is not being expressed in the family system. They might be the person who fights with one of the parents all the time. Maybe the overbearing parent. They are often overtly or covertly shamed, being seen as the source of all the problems in the family.

In adult relationships, this can show up as:

• Anger that feels bigger and disproportionate to the moment

• Defensiveness or blaming

• A sense of being misunderstood or unfairly criticised

• Feeling chronically “wrong” or rejected

Underneath the reactivity is often a deep fear; fear that they are going to be shamed again. Often the whole family system can be organised around keeping this child in line. So they seem to carry a lot of power because everyone is walking around on egg shells around them. In some ways, they are the truth teller of what is not being expressed.

This child fights not to win but to protect against collapse. They are very emotional and often have big hearts. They are the rebels and the creatives of the world. Sometimes the bad boys. Why do we love the bad boys; because they have big hearts.

The Lost Child. The lost child runs their own race. Behind it is the belief, “If I disappear, I’ll be safe.”

The Lost Child adapted by minimising needs, emotions, and presence. The core wound here is often abandonment and that was learned early when this child went to their parent for co-regulation and they learned quickly that that was not available so they become independent and walled off as they have had to regulate themselves. They went and hid in their bedroom.

In adult relationships, this often looks like:

• Withdrawal or emotional shutdown

• Avoidance of conflict

• Difficulty expressing wants or desires

• A partner feeling shut out or alone

The Lost Child’s strategy isn’t disinterest, it’s self-protection. Their nervous system learned very early that connection is overwhelming or unsafe. There are lots of repressed emotions here because growing up there was no one they felt safe enough to be with to express how they were feeling.

When we eventually find a partner, the person we want to commit to, we often pick a partner that enables us to predictably repeat our role. Hence they saying ‘we marry our unfinished business’. We pair off with people who mirror the experience we received from our parents/caregivers so we can finally heal that pattern.

Why do fights often escalate so fast?

Here’s the key piece, when we are fighting from our adaptive child, we cannot access our Wise Adult self because our pre-frontal cortex, the part of our brain responsible for logical and rational thought, goes offline. We go into a survival response, our limbic system comes online and all our early adaptive patterns are alive and ready to go.

When we can stay in the Wise Adult part of ourselves we;

• Can stay present

• Can hold complexity

• Can self-soothe

• Can take responsibility without collapsing or attacking

But the adaptive child doesn’t have that capacity. Instead, the nervous system is organised around threat, survival and attachment loss. So the fight isn’t about the content. It is about our old unmet needs colliding in the present.

Two children are trying to feel safe, using strategies that once worked, but now damage intimacy. Our adaptive child strategies rarely serve us well in our adult relationships.

From Fighting to Repair

The work of adult relationship healing isn’t about erasing these parts. It’s about learning to:

• Recognise when your adaptive child is running the interaction

• Learning how to self soothe so that you can pause before responding

• Build the capacity to come back online as your Wise Adult

• Speak from the present rather than the past

This is deep nervous-system work. Because you can’t “think” your way out of an adaptive state.
You have to feel your way back into safety first. Only then can true repair happen.

The Quiet Shift That Changes Everything

When couples can see that this isn’t you versus me, but younger parts trying to keep us safe, the nervous system settles. Defensiveness eases, blame falls away, and curiosity makes space for compassion, for ourselves and for one another.

Very slowly, the relationship becomes less about winning or withdrawing and more about learning how to stay connected, even when it’s hard.

Here are some reflection questions for you to sit with.

• When conflict arises in my relationship, what do I notice happening in my body first?

• Do I tend to move toward fixing, fighting, or disappearing when things feel tense?

• Which adaptive child strategy do you recognise most easily in yourself; the Hero, the Scapegoat, or the Lost Child? Do you see see a combination of two or maybe that you as you have matured you have moved from one to another?

• What familiar loop do my partner and I seem to fall into when we’re under stress?

• If this pattern had a job, what might it be trying to protect?

• What old story or fear might be getting activated beneath the surface of our current conflict?

The kings and queens of the push through

I tend to work with a lot of high achievers who come to me in midlife in a quandary. They are either burned out, they have lost their motivation or they have lost their inner compass. They are incredibly capable people. Brilliant creatives, leaders and thinkers, the people everyone relies on to get the job done or come up with the solution.

When they come to me there is something fundamental happening underneath, deep in their system, that they can’t solve or workout. They have lost connection with their deepest needs and desires. Their emotions, what they value, what is important to them has become fuzzy. Something is wrong in their world and they cannot put their finger on it. They are overly tired or have lost their zest. This drives them crazy, they feel like a failure because they are so used to solving all the problems. They love solving problems and creating value.

It is a body in freeze.

For many of us, we are still functioning and functional freeze is the nervous system’s quiet survival strategy: a blend of dorsal vagal shutdown with just enough sympathetic activation to keep you moving, performing, achieving.

You look “fine,” you produce, you deliver, you impress people but you have lost connection with your internal world. You’re upright, responsive, competent but you feel dead on the inside. No real vitality, internal pulse or felt sense of self.

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling, People thawing their freeze

For many overachievers, this becomes the air they breathe until their body says No, not any more. Often it happens at midlife.

So how does this overachieving freeze pattern start?

Well most overachievers learned early in their life that there needs were either: inconvenient, ignored, criticised, overwhelming to caregivers, unsafe to express or simply too much.

So they adapted in the only way their system knew how, they turned down the volume on their body and turned up the volume on their mind. They became brilliant, fast processors, high-capacity thinkers. They became the problem-solvers, the responsible ones, the reliable ones.

But brilliance built on freeze has a cost. We stop listening to the signals from our body. We stop listening to the signs of tiredness, of what a NO feels like in our body. We learn to override our basic impulses. It is not coincidence. Is is a pattern.

Productivity culture is built on functional freeze.

We applaud over-functioning and self-sacrifice. We reward output and speed and we celebrate people who “just keep pushing through”. I think a lot of Gen X’ers learned to do this early, because in their teenage years they spent a lot of time on their own and just had to get on with life.

We call this excellent work ethic, resilience or commitment. But what if much of what we call “productivity” is actually a socially-validated freeze response?

I have had so many clients, mid forties to late fifties, post-menopausal, who make a big career change and then come to me saying, I don’t know what is wrong with me, I just feel out of sorts. I get stuff done, I am a doer. Nothing is wrong with any of them. Their body has just simply stopped cooperating with the override. Or guys who come to me and say they know their life has to change, they are on the precipice of existential change but they don’t know where to start.

When you have spent decades powering through the classic, go, go go. Your body has a way of bringing you back into right relationship with it. As we age, our hormonal cocktail starts to change and menopause has a way of stripping down and highlighting our compensatory strategies. The freeze structure that held everything together began to collapse. Remember the developmental challenge of midlife is radical honesty, come back to the truth of who you really are.

Gently and slowly we work together to slow down. My client's nervous system immediately start to show what they have been trying to outrun. The survival strategies that were created as children to stay safe aren’t working anymore. Their body is setting a boundary. The freeze is ready to be thawed.

This is why burnout in midlife spikes.

Women lose hormonal scaffolding that kept them overriding their body. and men hit existential thresholds where achievement can’t fill the inner void. Our careers peak while capacity starts to decline. Many parents carry the emotional and logistical load for teens and ageing parents. and many of us find the nervous system can’t run the childhood strategy anymore.

People think they’re falling apart. But what’s falling apart is the freeze, not the person. Burnout is both exhaustion and it’s the breakdown of the freeze scaffold. Burnout is the point where the body says, “I’m not going to keep doing this.”

Overachievers don’t lose their motivation they lose their override strategy. When the freeze starts to thaw, we start to feel all the things we have been pushing down for years. The anger, fatigue, hunger, sadness, longing, boundaries, desire and our No.

For many overachievers learning what a No feels like in their body can be a big revelation.

Many overachievers are very creative. They have lots of ideas. They get excited by their ideas, creatively, strategically, intellectually their mind is alive. They can get flooded by them too and want to put them all into action. Not doing so feels like a failure. Something I have learned personally that I help my clients with is our freeze makes us believe these ideas have to be acted on.

Every impulse becomes pressure, every spark becomes a project, every inspiration becomes responsibility something we feel we absolutely must do. This is where burnout can accelerate.

One of the most powerful shifts in my own midlife has been learning that you don’t have to act on every idea. You can feel it, sit with it and let it breathe.

Sometimes an idea is complete simply by being witnessed. Sometimes it is enough to journal it, or talk it through with a colleague or friend. Sometimes you just have to write it down and let it sit for a few months.

This is how you slowly retrain your system, that not every idea has to be acted on. You start to rewire your nervous system and you will notice that the compulsion to act will turn into more capacity. The pressure to act can turn into being present, and the need for action will become digestion.

To come out of functional freeze we work slowly, relationally and somatically. We learn to track micro-sensations and small pulses of movement. We learn how to set tiny boundaries, small steps at a time. We learn how to titrate our life. Small changes 1% more each day. We learn to enjoy receiving the co-regulation from our somatic therapists and/or coaches. We start to notice we are slowing down, 1% more each day and then we can recognise that rest isn’t a weakness it is a signal. We start to notice, that we are noticing how we feel and we let our ideas sit and percolate rather than having to act on them.

Most importantly we learn that our value isn’t earned by producing. Value is inherent because you are here, you are alive. Your body is your home, your garden, your temple. It is not a machine.

Your needs matter.

Fawning: why we mirror, merge and self-abandon

Seven years ago, I read Pete Walker’s book on complex PTSD, and it was the first time I truly understood the nervous system response of Fawning. I had known the behaviour as “people pleasing,” but I hadn’t realised until then that fawning was a protective response our body utilises. As I explored it more deeply, I realised it was everywhere and that it was not a personality trait, but a strategy our system uses to keep us safe, particularly in the face of a power-over dynamic.

How many times had I sat in conversations in the workplace where a person was labelled a people pleaser as it if was a personality flaw with no true understanding or curiousity of what was driving it. Let alone acknowledgement that this person does not feel safe. I realised right then that fawning shows up in so many ways. I see it in people who over-function, some organisations are run off the back of employing a workforce who constantly does this. Entire customer service cultures are built on fawning.

Fawning is a nervous system strategy that supports us to stay in connection when we feel unsafe and we are in a double bind; where there are real consequences for us not to fawn. We all do it. Women are a little more predisposed to it because we have lots of estrogen and oxytocin is the neuromodulator of our body. What that means is that bonding and connection helps us regulate and process our lives. It can come up at anytime because it is a strategy your autonomic nervous system uses to keep you safe. If it doesn’t work you go to fight and flight, then freeze. It is a cascade.

Men fawn too, not to soothe, but to belong. Male fawning often looks like “fitting in,” but underneath is the same physiology. In very masculine coded work cultures you see this all the time. Men fawn to avoid being the odd one out. They mute their sensitivity or complexity, mimic bravado or certainty, abandon their authentic relational needs and shape-shift to avoid being shamed.

Digital Art, Kellie Stirling. Woman merged with nature

When we fawn we shapeshift, so we morph into a version of ourselves that feels the most likely to keep us safe. For some people, fawning looks like becoming more of who they are; more charming, smart, generous, funny or adored. For other people it is about being less of who you are; less vocal, creative, smart, self-assured or even able to set boundaries. Fawning shows up sexually, in money situations or, in the constant emotional regulation of other people.

We all know about fight, flight and freeze. The fawning response is different because it is a hybrid of these. The hyperarousal part of fawning encourages us to lean into relationships that are causing us harm so we to appease the person. The flight response, self-abandoning to stay safe. The hypoarousal part, or freeze part, numbs our connection to our needs and desires, so we don’t feel the effects of the harm we are experiencing.

When we fawn, we mirror or merge with someone else’s desires or expectations of us to stay safe. We do this to defuse potential conflict because that is our best chance of maintaining safety. In most of these situations there is a power over relationship. Someone has power over us. When we merge or mirror, whilst it keeps us safe, we forgo our own desires and agency and become overly accommodating of others. We become shapeshifters moulding ourselves to each scenario and person. We abandon ourselves, what we care about, our opinions, desires and what we value.

Fawning is so culturally imbued in our society that we are conditioned from a young age to do it. Think of these statements: “give your uncle a kiss”, “be the better person”, “take the high road’, “be a team player’, “you have to learn to compartmentalise it'‘, “just go with it”. We say these every day and they normalise fawning.

Fawning is a common coping system for people dealing with ongoing relational trauma. It also occurs in larger systems of oppression or marginalisation where we must let go of aspects of ourselves to secure membership or a sense of belonging. Over time fawning becomes a systemic pattern.

Individuals don’t just fawn, systems induce fawning. Some examples I see frequently include: A leader who is dysregulated will have a whole team fawning to avoid triggering them. A family with a narcissistic parent creates children who become emotional caregivers or family systems with rigid hierarchy. Workplaces where vulnerability is punished. Relationships where one partner regulates through dominance.

Fawning is not a personal pathology; it’s a predictable adaptation to power-over cultures. So you can see it is not about being nice, it is a nervous system adaptation to relational power dynamics.

One of the deepest wounds of fawning I have observed is the disconnection from anger. Many fawners cannot feel their anger; not because it isn't there, but because it has been repressed for survival. Anger felt too dangerous, too destabilising, too likely to provoke retaliation or abandonment.

So internally, they learned that their anger was not safe and put them at risk. The thing is their anger doesn’t disappear, it goes underground. Into the unconscious.

Over time, this suppressed anger can turn into resentment, chronic tension because you are constantly bracing, exhaustion or collapse, health issues particularly autoimmune issues and a fierce inner critic who constantly self blames.

Restoring healthy aggression, the energy of our boundaries, clarity, and self-protection is essential. But it must be done slowly. Really slowly. Because letting that much anger thaw all at once can overwhelm the system that originally buried it to stay safe.

How do we stop Fawning?

Well it starts with finding safety in the body. You can’t talk yourself out of a fawn response nor can you mindset your way through it. Your nervous system needs to feel safe in the body to try anything new.

The work looks like being able to notice the early cues the anticipatory smile, the shallow breath, the scanning of the other person’s mood and gently interrupting the impulse to fix or appease. Learning to feel tiny drops of healthy anger in an incredibly titrated, slow and digestible way. Allowing the internal critic to soften, which often happens naturally when anger can finally move outward instead of being turned inward

Learning to stop the fawn process from being pervasive is the process of reclaiming power-within, instead of surviving through power-over dynamics. Our fawning response is wisdom it is not a flaw. It has kept us safe and will continue to do so, when we need it in the moment. Our fawn has kept the peace and helped us to function in environments that could not hold our full aliveness.

It is profoundly healing for us to notice our fawn patterns (and to continue to be able to notice them in the moment) and gently let them loosen their grip. Over time it becomes a survival strategy we have access to, not our default mode of functioning. When you start to let go of it you are not losing the nice aspect of yourself, you are becoming more You.

Lying in the Dark

One of the things I find most interesting is that we are all, on some level, afraid of the dark. I don’t mean the literal dark, like the night. I mean we are afraid of dark emotionality, dark times, dark moods, that dark place we go when we our life is changing dramatically, death. We are afraid of all that dark.

What I find so striking is that the dark isn’t foreign to us. It’s the first home we ever had. Before we had language, consciousness and identity, we were held in a warm, fluid, completely dark womb.

For nine months, the dark was our sanctuary. We were nourished, protected, and completely connected without ever seeing a thing. We didn’t need sight to feel safe, or light to orient. Our bodies knew how to rest and grow in the dark.

Isn’t it ironic that we spend the rest of our lives fearing the very place we began?

Popular culture treats the dark as something dangerous or disorienting, a space where we lose ourselves. But from a somatic perspective, the dark is often where we find ourselves again. Because the dark asks nothing of us. It doesn’t demand performance, productivity, clarity, or answers.

The dark invites us to rest, to slow into ourselves and just be.

The dark womb is an archetype of profound safety, not because it is soft and easy, but because it strips away everything that is unnecessary. In the dark, we are not seen for what we do. We are held for who we are.

Maybe that’s the deeper truth; the dark isn’t here to frighten us, it’s here to return us to ourselves.

There are seasons in life when everything familiar falls away. Not by choice or spiritual aspiration but because life itself becomes a burning ground. My cancer journey was one of those seasons.

I remember feeling stripped bare, not just physically, but emotionally and existentially. It wasn’t simply the fear or the medical complexity. It was the sense of being dismantled at every layer. The parts of me that used to hold me together stopped working. My usual ways of coping fell away. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide inside myself. In fact, I found the best place to be was in the present. I must admit that it felt like being dropped into the dark womb of the world and strangely, or maybe not that strangely at all, that’s exactly where the healing began.

We all have experiences in life where we feel like everything is being burned down and we are going to fall into our own dark hole. You don’t need to have cancer to experience this. Midlife, menopause, divorce, grief, trauma healing, big career transitions, or sometimes all the above at the same time. The thing is they all bring us to the same threshold.

That threshold is a place where you realise you can no longer be who you were, you feel rudderless, but if you can stick with it you have this deep sense of knowing that you are being carved into who you truly are. You are becoming yourself.

While this process can feel brutal, it’s also profoundly sacred.

Sometimes life breaks us open so the truth can finally be felt. Sometimes life drags us into the dark so we can be remade. Sometimes life strips us bare so we can emerge more honest, more embodied, and more deeply alive.

When we come through the other side of these big life transitions, we often notice that yes we are still here, but we are not the same person we were before. We will never be that person again.

There will be parts of you that survive and are the same, there are parts that are gone and there are new parts of you that are being birthed.

During my treatment I spent my days resting and I read a lot. I came across Meggan Watterson’s Divine Feminine Cards (which are great by the way) and within them I found the archetype of the Black Madonna. I would shuffle the cards and many times she would just drop out.

The Black Madonna, archetypally, represents the power we all have to emerge from dark times transformed. Jungian Analyst, Marion Woodman believes that the Black Madonna represents a new awareness or consciousness toward out bodies. She represents the wisdom we can only gain when we go through the painful fires of transformation.

The Black Madonna is not the soft, glowing mother of the light. She is the fierce mother of the dark.

She is the one who meets us in our descent, not to pull us out, but to sit with us in the shadow until something true emerges. She is the archetype of the underworld, the womb, the ashes, the grief that breaks us open.

By connecting with this energy I can tell you that I felt spiritually held; not by something that promised rescue, but by something that promised presence.

The Black Madonna taught me that the dark is not a punishment. It’s a crucible. A crucible is what alchemists used to melt down metals to turn them into gold. The dark and our grief that often comes with it, are a crucible, a container that holds us.

So what burned away for me? Well a few things, a compulsion to hold everything together and the pressure I put upon myself to be endlessly available, a need to make other people comfortable and identity shaped by survival rather than by my soul. What emerged and was born was a quieter and steadier self with clarity about what actually matters, a deeper respect for the wisdom of my body and its profound capacity to heal, an acceptance in the fragility of life whilst at the same time being able to hold a deep trust in life.

The darkness, the feeling of burning down or being stripped bare, it wasn’t destruction it was actually refinement.

If you are in your own dark season right now, feeling like you are burning down, or you are lying down in a hole and can’t move, I want you to know this. What is burning down or being stripped away was never meant to be there.

Like the Black Madonna, the dark can hold you whilst you let go of whatever you need to. It is not to rush you or rescue you, but to support you and witness your becoming.

Because sometimes the most loving thing life can do to us is strip us bare so we can finally see ourselves clearly.

When Hormones stop hiding the Truth. Perimenopause exhaustion, the reckoning after survival mode

I was having a conversation with one of my sons the other day about parenting now versus what I received. He thought it wasn’t much different accept for the presence of technology and having to navigate the impact of that on children. I said it was different because our parents often had their parents nearby and we were also a part of a community who looked after each other. Today we live in such an individualistic way and whilst in our area we have a strong community, the fact remains that people are really busy and trying to get by the best they know how and having to do it largely on their own.

Then I thought to myself, so many of the women I work with arrive at perimenopause in survival mode. Completely exhausted from all their years of mothering. For many, the years of mothering where we have sleep deprivation, a heavy emotional labour that we carry and years of trying to juggle work and home, the endless giving of energy mean that they live in a constant state of adrenaline and cortisol, just to get through the day. The lack of the ‘village’, of communal nervous system regulation means women are doing it alone all the time.

The workplaces we are in are designed for male bodies that have a linear hormonal cycle, predictable energy no ebb or flow. Not a 28 day cycle that has big fluctuations. Women’s bodies are cyclical, not linear. Energy, focus, and capacity shift across the menstrual cycle, and later in life, across hormonal seasons. But the expectation is “always on,” with no space for luteal slowdown, rest, or recalibration.

As technology innovation, particularly with AI and productivity culture has become the norm we see 24/7 emails and messaging which results in blurred boundaries. The demand is: faster, always available, produce more. Women’s bodies , designed for rhythmic cycles of activity and rest, are being pushed into an unnatural pace. This results in dysregulation, burnout, sleep disruption, and a sense of disconnection from their body wisdom.

As we normalise this we tell ourselves, this is what mothering means today, this is what being an adult woman means today. But the cost is high because our nervous system becomes very frayed and depleted. So by the time perimenopause arrives and estrogen and progesterone are both low, we experience; disturbed sleep, small stressors can trigger big reactions, our emotional regulation is harder, and or body doesn’t bounce back the same way it used to.

Most of us haven’t learned much about the impact of our hormones on our nervous system at all.

So yes, there is a question we have to explore about learning about our hormones and their impact on our nervous system and our behaviour. But for me, the bigger question is; How do we design lives, workplaces, and communities that honour the body, especially the cyclical, relational, deeply intuitive female body? And if you are thinking male bodies aren’t impacted by all of this, think again. Until we address all of this, our health, healing our nervous system, learning to find some regulation, it will all feel like we are swimming upstream.

Perimenopause as Turning point.

The reality is perimenopause often reveals to us the impact of decades living in survival mode. As estrogen and progesterone decline, their buffering affects on the nervous system start to fade. Estrogen is supportive of bonding, it is the soothing and accommodation hormone, it supports oxytocin and the bonding and pleasure from connection that that brings. Progesterone brings us calm. Also these two hormones don’t decline in an orderly fashion during our perimenopause transition. Progesterone declines first and estrogen has lots of ups and downs that makes us feel internally chaotic, as it moves towards its lower levels once we reach menopause. What they do both reveal is nervous system exhaustion and without their support we can no longer mask the cost of being in survival mode.

Art - Visions in Blue

Oxytocin, pleasure and women’s nervous systems

Oxytocin is a key neuromodulator of the female nervous system. For male bodies Dopamine does this. Pleasure, touch, connection and community increase oxytocin, which builds resilience and vagal tone. Reduced estrogen can reduce oxytocin but pleasure can replenish it. Pleasure isn’t an indulgence, it is biology. Every moment of genuine pleasure — a hug, gentle self-touch, laughter with a friend, being moved by music, lying in the sun, safe intimacy, sexual and sensual pleasure — stimulates oxytocin, the neuromodulator that calms the female nervous system. Oxytocin counters cortisol and adrenaline, it strengthens vagal tone (our capacity to return to calm) and it builds a felt sense of safety and belonging. When you look at from this perspective, pleasure becomes medicine for midlife. It replenishes what decades of survival mode drained away.

Vagal Tone and Menopause

Vagal tone measures the activity of the vagus nerve, which regulates the body's "rest and digest" functions, and it's often assessed through heart rate variability (HRV). So Vagal tone is the body’s ability to regulate stress and return to calm. A lower vagal tone = more reactivity, poor recovery from stress, disrupted sleep. Estrogen decline may reduce vagal tone, making regulation harder. There are practices that help: yoga nidra, breathwork, gentle movement, singing/humming, somatic experiencing, safe touch. Yoga Nidra has been a game changer for me and I have found when I do it consistently, I sleep well. My brain also feels more relaxed. Somatic experiencing has many ways it helps but in this context it helps people build their interoception which is their ability to be with their internal experience - feelings, sensations, emotions. So when we become dysregulated it can be so helpful because we have a connection with all our feelings and emotions and have strategies to be with them and let them move through us. Rather than resisting them. All of this isn’t just “self-care”, it’s rewiring the nervous system for the next stage of life.

The bigger question: Lifestyle and systemic change

The real problem isn’t our biology - it is the culture we live in. Lack of community, unsupportive workplaces, and unrealistic expectations push women into survival mode. Women’s cyclical bodies need rhythms of rest and renewal, but society doesn’t recognise or honour them. We are made to feel like something is wrong with us. We are made to feel we are not resilient enough. Menopause is clever in many ways, It is a truth teller that often opens our eyes to dysfunction in our facets of our life. Culturally it reveals this mismatch. It’s not a personal failing; it’s a cultural design flaw. I wonder what would happen if work hours were designed around the rhythms of a female body?

Post Menopause brings Sovereignty

Menopause is not just loss, it’s an initiation into a new stage of power. With nervous system healing, women can access deeper calm, intuition, and authority. Post-menopause can be a time of reclaiming sovereignty, no longer running on survival mode but living in alignment with what nourishes us. Menopause is the autumn season of our life and often involves lots of reflection and review where we are called to let go of what we don’t need anymore. Many women often find their physical and mental health creates a strong impetus for all these changes to happen. It is hard to ignore what no longer works for us.

Menopause is not a medical “problem”it is a cultural opportunity: a chance to change how we live. Every time a woman honours her cycle, chooses rest, or reclaims pleasure, she disrupts the old patriarchal model and helps build a new one. So here we arrive with an invitation. What would it look like if we built a culture that truly supported women’s bodies — not just to survive, but to thrive?

For me the bigger question here is It’s not women’s bodies that are broken. It’s the systems we’re forced to live in that ignore how women’s bodies actually work.

Do you ever wonder why breakups physically hurt even when we are over the person?

I was reflecting recently on something I’ve felt myself and seen in many clients: that even when you know your relationship is over, your body might still ache with a different kind of grief — the loss of the other body. The loss of the nervous system pattern you've known.

You see when we end a long term relationship, whether it be an intimate or close platonic relationship, it is not only the financial and logistical separation and negotiation that happens. Our bodies keep the score and there is a physical separation of nervous systems that have entrained to each other.

Our nervous systems attune to the bodies we live with. Even if the relationship was painful or over long ago, your body might still long for their touch, their presence, even their smell.

This isn’t about wanting the person back — it’s about missing the co-regulation, the shared rhythm your nervous systems built together. It’s why sleeping alone can feel painful. Why your skin aches. Why you cry and you don’t know why.

Entrainment is when two nervous systems get in sync with each other, a bit like two clocks ticking together or two metronomes lining up. When you live with someone, your breath, heart rate, stress patterns, and even sleep rhythms start to line up with theirs. Your bodies learn each other. That’s why, when they’re gone, your body still remembers that pattern — and it can feel strange or even painful until you find a new rhythm.

The entrainment of nervous systems, especially in close relationships, is such a subtle and powerful force. It’s part of why even dysregulated relationships can be hard to leave — because the body gets patterned into that rhythm, even if it’s chaotic or unpredictable. I some times think of this phenomena as co-dysregulation.

In healthy relationships, this entrainment creates a deep sense of safety and grounding. But in any relationship with proximity over time, the nervous systems begin to sync — breath to breath, step to step, sleep cycles, even hormone levels. It's primal. It's ancient. And when it’s gone, the body doesn’t just let go because the mind says it should.

When this stops, the body reacts with disorientation, grief and longing.

This isn’t about missing the person romantically or doubting the decision. It’s about the withdrawal of co-regulation — a physical and energetic loss. Where there was once a warm body, there is now space. The nervous system goes through a recalibration, and sometimes, a kind of withdrawal.

We can experience shame and confusion around this.

Many people feel embarrassed or confused by their grief, especially if they initiated the separation or felt clear. They may wonder: “Why am I crying? Why does my chest ache? Why do I feel so alone? It is important to normalise that this is nervous system memory, not a sign that they’ve made the wrong choice.

What are some practices that can support you?

• Orient to touch — a hand on the heart, a warm wrap, a pillow beside your body in bed.

• Use scent, rhythm, and sound to create new patterns of regulation.

• Let the body feel the grief — let the tears, the ache, the longing move. The body needs to move downward to express grief so sometimes, lying on a soft nest of pillows can be a really supportive way to do this.

• Use nature, animals, breath, or trusted others to co-regulate in new ways.

Remember, relationships ending can be both a liberation and a loss. Our bodies are sometimes slower than our minds when it comes to moving on and they ask us to honour what was, whilst we are moving into what is next for us.

The invitation here is to trust the wisdom of your body and honour this unique grief without judgment.

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling

Co-regulation, sharing joy, awe and wonder

My husband and I go for a walk most days. It’s our rhythm — a way to move our bodies and catch up on the day. Yesterday, something unexpected caught our eye. Tucked along the top of a fence were a handful of tiny plastic ducks, placed as if they'd just wandered into the world on their own. There was no sign, no explanation. Just… ducks.

We both smiled, paused, and shared that kind of gentle, wide-eyed delight you get when something small pierces through the ordinary — wonder, joy, amusement. We giggled and wondered who might have placed them there. There are several schools in the area and we thought maybe one of the high school students. We wondered, is it art? Is it a puzzle? Or, did someone do it just for their own delight? And as we walked on, I noticed: I felt better. Not just because of the ducks, but because of how we felt together.

You see, you could have easily missed these tiny ducks they were as big as an Australian 5 cent coin. If you were caught in your head thinking about some problem, or looking elsewhere, looking at your phone, you would never have seen them. I will admit my husband saw them first, I was looking at some trees wondering when winter will end and when might the leaves start to arrive. As we started looking together, we saw 8 little ducks along two streets over an 800 metre stretch.

That moment we experienced together was co-regulation.

Co-regulation is more than a feel-good moment — it’s a biological necessity. Our nervous systems are constantly scanning the environment and people around us for cues of safety or threat (neuroception). When we feel safe with someone, our ventral vagal system activates — this is the branch of the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for connection, calm, and social engagement.

Co-regulation is the process by which our nervous systems connect and attune to one another, helping each other return to a state of balance, calm, or connection; especially after stress or activation. It’s something we are wired for, from birth. In infancy, we rely on caregivers to regulate our nervous system through touch, voice, gaze, and presence. As adults, we continue to rely on co-regulation in our relationships, though we often forget just how powerful it is.

At its heart, co-regulation is:

• Relational regulation: one person’s regulated state helping another feel safe, grounded, or more connected.

• Non-verbal: eye contact, tone, facial expression, body language, even silence can co-regulate.

• Mutual: it’s not about fixing, it’s about being with.

• Built on safety: when we feel safe with someone, our nervous system can soften and settle.

Co-regulation matters to the nervous system because it is foundational to nervous system health supporting vagal tone, heart rate variability and overall resilience. It supports our emotional well-being because when we share these tiny moments of joy, we feel less alone and more supported, seen and understood. It fosters trust and attunement, between partners, within families, friendships and teams, Co-regulation is supportive of trauma healing. Remember Trauma occurs when we experience too much, too fast, too soon or too little for too long. Healing happens in safe relationships when we can go slowly together. It is fair to say that without co-regulation our nervous system could end up in a constant state of vigilance or shutdown. With co-regulation we slow down, we are more present and we expand our capacity to feel joy, grief, pleasure and connection.

How do we find these moments for co-regulation?

Well every day offers us opportunities of ‘moments of tiny joys’.

We often think co-regulation has to be deep, profound or emotional. It can be, and, it can also be simple and playful too. What matters is the shared presence and the ability to attune to each others experience.

When I was going through cancer treatment five years ago, I decided I wanted to practice orienting to pleasure and what feels good to support my nervous system. You see I knew that small moments of pleasure are very healing for the nervous system. So I used to go for a small walk twice a day. This was during the pandemic, so often I would see my neighbours and we would stop and chat from a small distance; remember we had to social distance, and my immune system was smashed from chemotherapy, so I really had to mind how close I got to people. But what I really attuned to was admiring people’s gardens and the plants and flowers. You see I love gardens. My husband and I really looked forward to these small walks because they helped both of us in our own way and we could appreciate the moments of tiny joy in what was a really tough time for us.

““Being awestruck dwarfs us, humbles us, makes us aware we are part of a universe unfathomably larger than ourselves… Wonder makes us stop and ask questions about the world… whether spectacular or mundane.””

— Phospherescence - Julia Baird

What are some practice ideas for you to find little moments of co-regulation with another person?

Walking rituals: Regular, low-stress time in movement and nature together.

Noticing beauty: Make it a shared game to find one “small wonder” each day — something delightful, surprising, or tender.

Name the moment: Saying aloud, “That’s so sweet!” or “That made me smile” helps anchor the moment and co-regulate more deeply.

Touch points: Eye contact, a hand squeeze, a shared laugh — they reinforce safety in subtle, nervous-system-friendly ways.

You can build a micro-ritual around this — one that supports connection even during stress or busyness.

So here is your invitation to think about what brings you shared delight, awe and wonder?

What are the small and unexpected things that bring you joy?

When was the last time you felt a quiet togetherness in a moment of delight?

Is there someone you could begin a small ritual of ‘tiny moments of joy’ with?

Remember, co-regulation doesn’t require words, big feelings or problem solving. It begins with another.

Grief at Midlife: Letting go of you who you thought you had to be

There comes a quiet moment in midlife—a reckoning, a soft ache that sits beneath the surface of busy lives. It's not always dramatic. Sometimes it arrives like a sigh you didn’t know you were holding. But when it comes, it brings with it a flood of emotion: grief, sadness, even anger. And for many, it’s disorienting.

It is disorienting because many of these emotions get couple and mixed up together so it can feel really overwhelming when we are triggered.

This midlife grief we often feel doesn’t always have a name. It isn’t always tied to a death, a divorce, or a specific loss. It’s the grief of a life lived in service to someone else’s expectations. A life shaped by what your parents hoped for you, what culture told you success should look like, or what you thought you should want.

In your twenties, you made plans. You built dreams based on a vision of the world that was handed to you. You worked hard, ticked boxes, created a life. And maybe from the outside, it looked like you “made it.” But at some point—often in your forties or fifties—you wake up and feel the soul knocking.

And it doesn’t always knock gently.

Sometimes it arrives as a sudden wave of sadness or emptiness that you can’t explain. Other times it shows up as restlessness, irritability, or a low-grade resentment toward your life or those closest to you. It might look like a deep craving for freedom—a need to break out of your current life structure—which can get projected outward in dramatic ways: affairs, spontaneous spending, quitting jobs impulsively, or fantasising about starting over somewhere far away.

You might feel like you’re coming undone. But what’s really happening is that something deeper is trying to come through.

This is the soul’s call. It’s asking you to return to the essence of who you are beneath the roles, the responsibilities, and the expectations. Come back to the truth of who you are and it is asking you, what wants to be expressed through you.

And with that call comes a kind of heartbreak.

Heartbreak that you didn’t listen to the whisper of your own longings when you were younger. Heartbreak that you silenced your true self to belong, to be responsible, to be good. There’s sadness for the years that were spent climbing a ladder that wasn’t even leaning against the right wall. Or maybe you got close to the top of the ladder and realised there is nothing there for you , it’s not the place you want to be. There’s grief for all the parts of you that went underground just to survive.

Sometimes, that grief turns to anger. Anger that no one taught you to trust your inner voice. Anger that you betrayed yourself to meet others’ expectations. And sometimes, it turns inward—an ache of self-blame, of “Why didn’t I know better?”

But here’s the truth: you couldn’t have known better. The conditions weren’t there. You did what you needed to do with the tools you had. And now, something new is emerging.

Midlife is not just a crisis. It’s a rite of passage.

It’s a threshold between who you have been and who you are becoming. And every threshold requires a letting go. This is why grief walks alongside transformation—it clears the ground. It softens us. It prepares us to live a life that is more aligned, more honest, and more intimate with our soul.

This grief is not something to fix or rush through. It’s something to be honoured. It’s sacred.

Because on the other side of it is a new kind of freedom. The freedom to stop performing. To stop striving. To live in deeper integrity. To choose from the inside out.

In this second half of life, something quieter but more enduring begins to take root: a life built on your truth; not the one you inherited, but the one you are here to live. Your are free to be the most authentic expression of yourself and it takes time to grow into those shoes because you have been avoiding those shoes for a while to stay safe, to survive, to get the love your old self wanted.

Grief is the crucible that will allow you to transform into your true self, to let go of all the masks you have had on for many years. One of the hardest things to do is to learn to feel the grief in your body and let it express because so many of us have cut ourselves off from our grief. We are terrified if we lay down and let it flow we may never get up again.

You see this is not just an exercise in thinking about our emotions; it is somatic. You have to learn to feel safe to feel the grief in your body so that it will flow and sometimes you might need some help to do this.

Grief is your friend.

The tears of our grief are the fluid that helps us keep on learning, growing and changing.

When we make space for grief, we are not falling apart—we are making room. Room for new life. Room for truth. Room for becoming.

Because on the other side of grief is a new kind of freedom. The freedom to stop performing. To stop striving. To live in deeper integrity. To choose from the inside out.

The freedom to be your true self.

Healing through relationships

We often think of relationships as places of comfort, connection, and shared joy—and they are all of that.

But they’re also something deeper.

Relationships are living, breathing containers for healing. They are crucibles where our old wounds rise to the surface, not to torment us, but to be seen, held, and alchemised. We always attract our unfinished business. What this means is that we are attracted to partners who reflect to us our unhealed wounding.

A conscious relationship invites us into the heart of our own nervous system. It asks us to become fluent not just in our own responses—our shutdown, our reactivity, our need for space or closeness—but also in our partner’s unique nervous system language. This means noticing when they are in survival mode, not taking it personally, and offering co-regulation instead of criticism.

One of the greatest shifts in partnership is realising that love isn’t about giving what we want to give. It’s about learning what helps our partner feel safe, loved, and seen—and offering that. Sometimes, that means letting go of the fantasy that our partner will love us exactly the way we love them. It’s not about sameness; it’s about resonance.

But perhaps the most confronting truth is this: our relationships will trigger our deepest wounds.

They will unearth the parts of us that were abandoned, shamed, or neglected. The small child who felt invisible. The teenager who felt too much or not enough. The adult who’s afraid to need too deeply.

This is not a flaw in the relationship—it’s the sacred design.

To be in a mature, intimate relationship is to commit not just to the other, but to our own wholeness. It’s to say yes to healing the early imprints that shaped how we give and receive love. It’s to welcome the mirror that our partner holds up, even when it shows us the parts of ourselves we’ve spent years avoiding.

When we stay present in the hard moments—when we learn to pause, to soften, to stay in the body—we begin to integrate the unconscious, exiled parts of self. We stop abandoning ourselves, and as a result, we stop abandoning the relationship when things get hard.

In this way, relationship becomes alchemy. Not a bypass, not a fairy tale, but a soul forge—where two imperfect humans learn to love with depth, presence, and radical responsibility.

And from that place, we don’t just find intimacy.

We find home.

Healing our abandonment wounds

Many of us have abandonment wounds. They are deeply imprinted in the nervous system, often at a very young age. When our early emotional needs weren’t met—when we lacked attunement, presence, or consistent caregiving—an abandonment wound can take root deep within us.

There are many reasons this happens, sometimes it is a really stressed or depressed parent, a parent who is extremely unwell themselves, and unable to connect and attune to us. Sometimes it is circumstance. I have worked with many people who were premature babies who spent their first few weeks in a humidity crib, so didn’t get the touch from their parents in those first few weeks to soothe their tiny nervous system. Even though one of their parents were most likely there with them all the time, sitting by them, they were separated by a little wall.

This is how deeply wired we are for connection and co-regulation when we are tiny. Our nervous system learns through regulation from our parents and caregivers.

Abandonment wounds are not always obvious. Sometimes they show up not as a gaping wound, but as a subtle hum of anxiety in our relationships. A feeling of being "too much" or "not enough." A belief that love must be earned, not received freely.

To avoid the unbearable terror of disconnection, many of us learned to fawn. We became hyper-attuned to the emotional landscape of others. We learned to appease, to over-function, to say yes when we meant no. We self-abandoned in hopes of staying connected.

Fawning is a survival strategy. It’s what our nervous system chose when fight, flight, or freeze didn’t feel safe or available. While it helped us survive, it often keeps us from truly living—because it asks us to leave ourselves behind.

Healing the abandonment wound isn’t about blaming our caregivers—it’s about reclaiming the parts of us that learned love meant losing ourselves.

Attunement is largely body based; eye contact, mirroring through action and language and most importantly, we attune through touch. These are all essential in establishing secure attachment. When these components are missing our nervous system learns to perceive that we will be left on our own.

Art - Giulia Rosa

For female nervous systems, which are more finely tuned to social engagement because we have lots of estrogen, which creates oxytocin, wiring us for connection and bonding - this perceived abandonment can often be felt more intensely. So we fawn to establish connection.

When we fawn, when we please, appease, over-function, we abandon our own needs. We stop asking for what we want, because we know our needs won’t be met. We hyper-attune or hyper-socialise to stay connected and receive the sense of love, safety and belonging that we all need at a very foundational level just so we can function.

Healing self abandonment begins when we learn not to abandon our selves. When we learn to feel our big sensations and emotions and stay in our body, expanding capacity inside of us to be with what what life throws our way. When we learn to self-soothe and have our little strategies to come back to our zone of resilience. This establishes a sense of safety and trust within ourselves and then we learn to trust others.

It starts with learning how to stay with ourselves. To feel what we couldn’t feel then. To expand our capacity to be with emotion and sensation—including the terror that once overwhelmed our small bodies.

Very slowly, as we learn to stay, something beautiful happens; we begin to trust that we will no longer abandon ourselves and that safety, the safety of self-attunement, becomes the foundation for all our relationships.

Why the feminine are the change makers - part 1

I have been doing a bit of work with a biodynamic cranio osteopath on my pelvis. I have had pelvic issues for years, predominantly starting with a car accident as a kid, and things just go layered upon it. I have worked with different body workers over the years and I have to say it is in a pretty good state now. If you aren’t familiar with this modality it is a lot of neuro-affective touch work, and the body in all its wisdom and intelligence, reorganises, because it knows how to heal. It is very similar to the touch work we do sometimes in somatic experiencing.

My osteopath and I have big chats when I am on the table. Last session she asked me “do you think it is trauma that causes all the autoimmune issues in women”. (if you don’t know the stats, something like 80% of autoimmune condition sufferers are female bodies). I said sometimes, but I think it is because as women we carry so much of the relational field and after a while that takes an enormous toll on a woman’s body if there is not enough sharing of the load going on in the family system or she does not have a good circle of support around her. After a period of time the body screams whether it be relational rupture, physical pain or discomfort, illness. It tells us, things need to change now!

So let’s talk about that because there is a price we pay for holding the relational field.

Why do we hold the relational field and how does it prime us to lead change?

Well some of it is biological, some is cultural and some is archetypal.

Biologically and neurologically we are wired for connection. Our estrogen creates the oxytocin that drives us to connect and attune to our children.

Women’s bodies are literally designed to attune:

• Oxytocin, the bonding hormone, is more prevalent in women. It surges during intimacy, birth, breastfeeding—but also during conversation and emotional connection.

• Our mirror neuron systems, which help us sense and empathise with others' emotions, tend to be more active.

• From a nervous system lens, many women are socialised (and biologically primed) to track relational dynamics, often before we even understand we’re doing it.

The social conditioning is strong. From a young age, girls are typically taught to; caretake others’ feelings, keep the peace, maintain connection and be “good,” agreeable, relationally aware. We are socialised to value harmony over truth.

On a deeper level, the feminine principle (not just in women, but especially expressed through them) is associated with; holding, containing, gestating, weaving the web between things

So the relational field—that unseen space between people where emotion, meaning, energy, and nervous system cues travel—is often carried by the feminine. Not because it’s our duty, but because we feel it first, and most acutely.

Women tend to track what's happening in the in-between. This might look like noticing when something feels “off” even if nothing is said, adjusting ourselves to keep harmony, carrying the emotional labour of a relationship or family.

While this conditioning can be limiting, it also hones an early sensitivity to emotional tone, unspoken tensions, and disconnection. We’re trained, often unconsciously, to sense and hold the relational space around us. My neighbour always said to me, ‘if mum is okay the whole family functions well. If she is not the cracks start to occur’. We are the emotional anchor in the family system.

From a more archetypal or somatic-mystic view, the womb is not just a biological organ but a relational centre; a place where life is created, held, and nourished. Even for women who do not have a physical womb, the energetic imprint always remains. The womb and ovaries have a incredibly strong energetic imprint, so even if you have an hysterectomy, the energetic imprint never leaves you.

This womb-space can sense the field like a tuning fork. It picks up resonance and dissonance, and often prompts us to move toward repair, connection, or withdrawal. So even beyond personality, trauma history, or conditioning—there is an embodied deep knowing that many women carry. A sense of what’s happening in the space between.

The big challenge.

Many women hold the relational field at the expense of themselves.

We track everyone else’s nervous systems, needs, moods—and forget our own. We become hyper-attuned, hyper-responsible, and depleted. This is where somatic reclamation, reconnecting with our body, becomes essential. Learning the skills to come back to your body so you can hear it when it is speaking to you. We learn to track ourselves first, then engage from a resourced place. This is what transforms holding the relational field from a burden into a gift.

It is this gift, that tells us when change is needed.

Women don’t hold the relational field because we ‘should’, we hold it because we are tuned to life, to connection, to what moves between. To coherence in the field, to what is working well and what is not working well.

Midlife, when the cost and payment becomes due.

In midlife, the body begins to speak more loudly. Years of holding the field—of tracking, softening, absorbing—can begin to show up as: chronic fatigue, autoimmune conditions, thyroid dysfunction, mystery symptoms, emotional exhaustion and uproar or a sense of grief no one can name.

Many women reach a point where their bodies refuse to keep playing the role. Where the cost of emotional labor has accumulated and the body keeps the score. Not because we are broken. But because we are done.

I often wonder if all of these health issues in midlife or the tough perimenopause journey experienced by some midlife women are the body’s way of saying:

“You’ve spent a lifetime turning against yourself to preserve connection. Now I’m turning inward to get your attention.”

It’s not our fault. But it is our invitation—to begin again, from the inside out

But we’re also being called now to hold it differently; not by abandoning ourselves, but by anchoring into our bodies, our knowing, our rhythm.

That is where true healing begins, not just for us, but for the whole field we’re in.

The healing path isn’t about abandoning our relational gifts. It’s about reclaiming ourselves as part of the field we’re so attuned to.

It’s about learning to: track our own nervous systems first, let others hold space for us, to feel safe saying no, set boundaries without guilt and recognising that we are not here to carry it all alone

This is where deep nervous system healing and somatic work become essential. They help us untangle the pattern of self-abandonment woven into our care.

We were never meant to carry it all.

We are capable of holding so much but we were not meant to hold all of the emotional dysregulation of others, all of the unspoken weight of a relationship. Nor were we meant to hold all of the relational field of a family, the workplace, the world - at the cost and detriment of our own health.

This is a huge price to pay and our midlife transition is the initiation into change we need to let some or all of it go. When this initiation happens it causes change in all the relational fields we are in.

So if you are finding ourself, exhausted or unravelling at midlife, you are not failing, your are awakening. Your body is asking you to step out of the role of ‘holding all the relational energy’ return to yourself.

I work with women who are ready to listen to what their bodies are saying, to come home to their own rhythm, needs, and truth.

Part 2, coming next week…..

The anatomy of life transitions

Transitions are not problems to fix, they are patterns to Inhabit

We often think of change as linear but it is not at all, it is often a spiral, or a network of spirals. Life transitions are the unspoken pulses that shape our lives. Like the changing of seasons, they are natural and inevitable but they often catch us off guard, pulling us into the unknown. Whether it's the end of a relationship, a career shift, menopause or a profound personal awakening, transitions are both a death and a birth — a letting go and a stepping forward.

When big change happens in our life we are taught to treat change like an emergency. Something is really wrong with us. We search for clarity, next steps, and solutions as if something has gone wrong.

But what if transition isn’t something to fix?

What if it’s a pattern to inhabit?

I’ve come to see life transitions not as interruptions to life, but as part of its underlying design. The common model of life transitions is ending, the liminal space in between and then emergence or new beginnings. Whilst I think this is true to an extent, I believe its actually a bit more complex than that. The metaphor that captures this most powerfully for me is the torus: a self-renewing, spiralling field found everywhere in nature—from galaxies to trees, to the electromagnetic field of the human heart.

The Toroidal Field: A Natural Pattern of Change

A torus is a continuous, dynamic flow. It is not linear. It is not chaotic. It is regenerative. If you can’t picture it in your head it is a donut shaped field where energy moves up the middle and around the edges to the bottom and back up again. The heart has a toroidal field. The earth is a toroidal field.

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In nature, we see it in the vortex of a storm, the flow of sap in trees, the shape of magnetic fields, the inhale and exhale of breath. In us, it shows up in the rhythm of emotions, healing, grief, growth, and yes—transitions.

The torus reminds us that everything alive follows a rhythm of emergence, dissolution, and return. This rhythm can help us reframe how we experience life changes: not as problems to solve, but as intelligent patterns we are invited to move with.

The Four Phases of Transition (Through the Lens of the Torus)

Transitions often unfold in four phases, which mirror the toroidal flow:

1. The Known Self (Center)

This is the phase of structure and identity. You know who you are, what your roles are, and how the world responds to you. There is stability, predictability, and sometimes stagnation.

2. The Stretch (Expansion)

Something begins to shift. A role no longer fits, perimenopause starts, a relationship starts to change, a loss arrives, or a new longing awakens. You begin to spiral outward, away from the known. This phase can bring both fear and discomfort one minute and exhilaration and joy the next. It often triggers urgency—we want to know what’s next. We feel thrown off our centre - which we literally are because we are moving to the edges of the torus shape.

This is the start of what feels like a wild ride, it begins to get tough but this is a necessary unwinding.

Resistance often comes up here. Whilst this is to be expected, our nervous system feels very uncomfortable often at this point, it is bound to constrict and pull in with fear or anger as a defensive strategy if we have no context to make sense of what is happening. Or maybe we collapse into sadness and grief. This is the time to ask for help or support.

3. The Void (Outer Edge)

The old story has fallen away, but the new one hasn’t formed yet. This is the liminal phase—a sacred pause. It can feel like floating in the dark, ungrounded. We can feel like we have completely lost our connection with our north star or our rudder is missing. This is where many people feel most lost, because the inner compass that once guided them is no longer available. It can feel like being on a road less travelled—or in some cases, a road never travelled before.

This inner void is like a composting process. What no longer serves begins to break down and dissolve. Old identities, beliefs, or stories decompose in the darkness. And just like on a forest floor, that breakdown nourishes the ground of becoming. It's slow, it's unseen, and it's absolutely essential. Composting isn’t glamorous—it’s earthy, rich, and full of alchemy. Nothing is wasted here.

This space is deeply fertile. This is where integration, rest, and surrender happen. The soil of transformation is richest here. This is the time we often need the most support, to hold space for us through the via negativa, the road of letting go. This can also be the hardest because most of us have never experienced what it feels like to let go, we are afraid we may never get up if we do completely let go.

Again at this point more resistance can come up.

When we resist, it adds turbulence to the natural movement of the spiral out, and that can create loops of stagnation, denial and reactivity which shows up somatically in our bodies as tiredness, fatigue, over-activation, as our system tries to hold onto what is known but dissolving, or alternatively rush hard into what is emerging without allowing time to fully metabolise the middle.

4. The Return (Integration)

Eventually, something new takes shape. Not as a quick fix, but as a deeper coherence. You begin spiralling back inward, bringing with you what you’ve learned. You emerge changed. Not a return to the old self, but a return to your centre—wiser, more whole.

I always say to my midlife clients, the developmental challenge of midlife is to be radically honest with ourselves. So that means there is a lot of busting up belief systems, reconnecting with parts of ourselves we have pushed into our unconscious. It is time to do your healing work and come back to that very core essence of who you are. Let go of all the ego strategies that have got you here that don’t serve you well anymore in your adult life. Come back to the real you. You can see that by using the metaphor of the Torus, the core isn’t just a psychological concept, it is also physically coming back to your core.

I see this also in somatic experiencing because the toroidal field shows a natural expression of our vitality and coherence. What I learned form Brigit Viksnins, who is a pretty fabulous trauma resolution teacher is this. The core in the toroidal field is our life force, our true selves, our inner sovereignty. This supports boundaries, presence and our capacity to be with our own emotions and the emotions of others. It sets our blueprint of health. Trauma disrupts the flow of energy, we fragment, collapse in, leak outward, get disorganised, freeze and get stuck outside of our true centre. Our trauma leaves an imprint that can make it hard for us to get back to our centre.

These four phases are not steps to rush through. They are invitations to inhabit. They are cyclical, often overlapping. You may revisit them again and again in any given transition.

Inhabiting the Pattern

Most of us are conditioned to resist the stretch and rush through the void. But when we orient to transitions as toroidal patterns, we allow ourselves to stay in the flow of life itself.

In somatic work, I see how the body holds these transitions intimately: the contraction of loss, the expansion of grief, the trembling spaciousness of the void, the grounded return of integration. Nature doesn’t rush its seasons—why should we?

Whether it’s menopause, a relationship ending, a career shift, or a spiritual awakening, each transition carries the same energetic intelligence. We are being stretched, softened, and re-shaped. And the more we honour the pattern, the more we can inhabit the change with greater ease.

A New Orientation

If you’re in the middle of the stretch, or sitting in the void, you are not broken. You are in motion. You are in the field. The torus is holding you.

Transitions are not detours.

They are invitations into deeper coherence.

So the next time change arrives, try asking not "How do I fix this?" but instead:

"Where am I in the pattern?"

And then, with grace, let yourself inhabit the unfolding.

Reflection Questions for you

• Where in your life are you being stretched or dissolved?

• Can you name the phase of the transition you are in?

• What might shift if you trusted this phase as intelligent, necessary, and even sacred?

Breaking the cycles of ancestral trauma, a pathway to freedom

One of the hardest growth challenges I have noticed in my family, friends and clients is the coming to terms with our own ancestral trauma that is passed down through family systems. There comes a time in most people’s lives, a stage in adulthood, when we see our parents for the human being they really are. We see their fragility, their own adaptive childhood survival strategies, and for most of us, this point in time is very confronting. Because even though we are adults ourselves, we are still their children.

When we get curious about our own adaptive strategies, we start to see patterns passed down through family systems and there is a particular kind of sadness that comes when we begin to uncover the depths of the trauma that lives within our family systems.

It’s the grief of realising that those who raised us—our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles—may have been deeply disembodied, cut off from their own emotional landscapes, and perhaps unable to truly connect with themselves, let alone with us. We can experience a heartbreak that carries a sense of loss, not just for what we personally endured, but for the generations before us who never had the chance to break these patterns. For what they personally suffered.

The symptoms you may be experiencing, whether they by psychological or physical may not just be your story. They be the voice of an entire lineage of your ancestors - one that never got to grieve, express their anger or speak up freely.

As we peel back the layers of our own survival strategies and touch the rawness of our deepest wounds, we often discover that our parents were children once, too—perhaps trapped in their own survival responses, shaped by environments that never taught them to feel or to fully inhabit their bodies. We come to see how their nervous systems, often locked in chronic states of freeze, fight, or flight, struggled to find a sense of safety, just as ours have.

"You are the medicine, the one who can transform the pain of your lineage into love and liberation." – Unknown

This is what we mean when we say the body keeps the score across generations. When grief wasn’t processed, when rage wasn’t allowed or was punished, when speaking up freely was unsafe - all of those emotions didn’t disappear because the stress cycle was not able to be completed. They become stored in the body. They are carried an often passed on.

This awareness can open a well of grief, a mourning for the parents we needed but never truly had, and acknowledging the parenting they received that wasn’t attuned to their needs. It can be excruciating to confront the emotional immaturity or disconnection we see in those we love, and to reckon with the reality that they may never be capable of meeting us in the depths where we’ve begun to live. This is not just a loss of connection, but a loss of potential, of the kind of love and relationship we yearned for and perhaps still do.

Yet, within this grief lies an invitation to reclaim our own aliveness. As we touch these deep places within ourselves, we begin to unearth the layers of ancestral pain, shedding the weight of unspoken histories that live in our tissues. We can choose to break these cycles, to live more fully in our bodies, to find the connection and safety that may have been missing for generations. This is the work of becoming embodied, of coming home to ourselves even when our family could not.

As we move through this, it’s important to honour the complexity of what we feel. To allow our sadness, anger, disappointment, resentment and grief to rise, to be held and processed, rather than pushed aside. In doing this, we give ourselves the chance to break the cycle, to break free from the survival strategies that once served us but no longer define us. We offer ourselves the possibility of living a life that isn’t just a reaction to the past but a conscious choice toward wholeness and connection.

This is deep somatic work that is required because these patterns that we are carrying are wired into our system down to a cellular level.

This kind of deep work is often cyclical, arising in layers over time, each wave bringing a deeper sense of clarity and a renewed capacity for compassion. It can be heart-wrenching and beautiful all at once—a reminder that, even amidst the heartbreak of what never was, we hold the power to reshape what can be. The pain or despair you may be feeling are your body speaking to you in its language, asking you to take notice, offering you a pathway through. Asking you to feel them, to honour them, to release them.

This isn’t just healing for you, it is healing an ancestral line. Perhaps this is where true freedom lies—in the messy, heartbreaking, awe-inspiring work of becoming more human, more whole, and, ultimately, more authentically ourselves.

The energetics of betrayal

Betrayal is one of the deepest wounds a human can carry — not just because of what happened, but because of the energetic imprint it leaves behind.

When betrayal comes early, it doesn't just teach the mind something — it teaches the body, the heart, and the nervous system. When the betrayal has come from our caregivers the very people who were supposed to love us, keep us safe, and foster our sense of belonging in the world, it teaches that connection isn’t safe, that trusting others is dangerous and that perhaps maybe, trusting myself is dangerous.

The very parts of us that long for closeness are forced to adapt. They learn to duck, weave, armour up, or disappear. They do whatever it takes to avoid feeling that devastating rupture again.

The Energetic Imprint of Early Betrayal

Betrayal creates a deep rupture in the fabric of trust and it doesn’t go away. For many people, the pain of betrayal doesn’t start in adult relationships. It begins much earlier, in the formative years of childhood or adolescence, when someone they relied on — a parent, caregiver, or close friend — didn’t show up in a way that felt safe or consistent.

When betrayal happens early, it etches a kind of template into the nervous system. One that says: “People can’t be trusted.” Or “I have to protect myself because no one else will.” These imprints often live just beneath the surface subtly shaping how we engage, withdraw, or defend ourselves in relationships.

In human terms, that energetic scar can show up as:

• Hypervigilance, constantly scanning for signs of disloyalty or danger.

• Emotional ducking and weaving , avoiding directness for fear of being hurt.

• Self-sabotage, abandoning ourselves or others before they can abandon us.

• Self-betrayal , silencing our needs and instincts in an effort to stay “safe.”

• Avoidance of connection, having relationships that are light or transactional to avoid getting hurt.

• Constant fawning an over-functioning to stay safe within relationships, over attaching, ignoring our own boundaries to avoid further harm.

At a body level, betrayal activates the primal fear of annihilation: "If the people I'm attached to hurt or abandon me, I might not survive." Many people with this wound feel misunderstood and lonely in relationships.

Early friendships and our first lessons in trust

While early caregiver betrayal leaves a profound mark, it's important to recognise that peer relationships — especially in late childhood and early adolescence — can also create powerful energetic imprints.

Many years ago, I was at a Trauma conference lead by Bessel van der Kolk. We were talking about how tween years developmentally, are important when it comes to relationships because they are the first experience we have with betrayal. He explained that the 9–12 year-old stage for kids and girls in particular, is a crucial time for learning about trust, loyalty, honesty, and boundaries. During this time, friendships often become intense and emotionally charged. Young people are testing the waters of emotional intimacy, authority, and social belonging outside of their families for the first time.

He said, ‘12 year old girls are the meanest people on the planet’, we all giggled because we could all relate at some level. This is not because they are inherently cruel, but because they are instinctively testing how far loyalty stretches, what betrayal feels like, and where their own boundaries begin and end.

These early friendship betrayals — being excluded, gossiped about, shamed, or losing a "best friend", can leave scars just as deep as familial betrayals. You may be thinking is there any way we can prevent this? Developmentally, these early close friendships give tweens practice for navigating their first intimate relationships in their teenage years. What is important as parents, is that we offer containment for our teenagers during these years so they are able to process these emotional experiences in a healthy way and they do this through our co-regulation. When you parent teenagers, you will find that what they need is a lot of containment to help them feel all the big feelings they are having which are often overwhelming because of their hormonal surges.

When they don’t receive that co-regulation and containment, they are left out on a limb to navigate this on their own and their nervous system will most likely be quite overwhelmed by this. They may develop unhealthy adaptive strategies to cope and what they will learn is that trust can be dangerous, speaking the truth gets you abandoned and ignored, and your vulnerability can be used against you.

For many women especially, these early relational wounds create an energetic template that later influences teenage romances, adult friendships, and even professional relationships.

Unless tended to, these imprints can quietly guide our choices, our trust levels, and our capacity for authentic connection, long into adulthood.

What happens when betrayal wounds show up at work?

Betrayal doesn’t just haunt our intimate relationships — it shows up everyday in our professional lives too. Most organisations lack any psychological safety and one of the reasons for this (there are many more) is that many people carry an unconscious expectation that colleagues, bosses, or teams will betray them.

As a result, they hold back: not speaking up in meetings, withholding ideas, disengaging from group dynamics, or interpreting neutral interactions through a lens of mistrust. Some may skip meetings or avoid collaborative projects altogether — not out of laziness, but because their nervous system is protecting them from what it perceives as a relational threat. The workplace becomes a battleground of unhealed childhood and teenage wounds, silently shaping how we show up or don’t.

What is the impact of our younger parts taking the lead in our adult relationships?

When betrayal wounds go unhealed, younger parts of ourselves — child parts, teenage parts — often step in to lead adult relationships.

These parts don’t have the skills for mature communication. They know how to survive, but not how to thrive. They know how to protect, but not how to open.

So we might find ourselves communicating indirectly, lashing out, withdrawing without explanation, testing others unconsciously, or assuming we’ll be misunderstood before we’ve even spoken. Our inner child has no place running our adult relationships and when it dominates our behaviour and decisions it often leads to poor choices and outcomes.

Poor communication is not just a skill gap; it's often a symptom of an unhealed betrayal wound.

How betrayal wounds shape who we draw in

One of the most painful patterns is that unhealed betrayal often pulls us toward people who cannot meet us, as friends, lovers or partners, unless they’ve done their own deep healing work.

Without realising it, we may magnetise:

• People who are unavailable, distracted, or unreliable.

• People who cannot understand or hold our unspoken pain.

• People who, energetically, mirror the early betrayals we experienced.

It's as if the energetic wound keeps echoing outward, unconsciously seeking resolution, while simultaneously protecting itself from getting too close. This will keep happening until we do our own healing, the pattern tends to repeat.

What most people find when they do the healing work on these relational wounds, is that they charge they felt when connecting with people who couldn’t meet their needs goes away. They start being attracted to a different type of person.

Image- Kellie Stirling

Healing the energetics of betrayal

Healing betrayal isn’t about telling yourself to "just trust people" again. It's about repairing the energetic fractures in your system, slowly, gently, consistently.

Here’s how it often begins:

1. Rebuilding Trust with Yourself

Betrayal healing involves learning to stay with yourself rather than abandoning your truth to stay safe. Tiny, consistent acts of self-loyalty rebuild trust from the inside out. Keeping promises to yourself. Honouring your needs. Setting boundaries by learning what a Yes, No and Maybe feels like in your body and then learning to listen to that in your body will help to build this skills. Each act sends a signal to your system: I am safe with myself now.

2. Listening to the Younger Parts

Instead of shaming the child or teenage parts for their survival strategies, we acknowledge them and we listen to them. We learn how to reparent them. We show up as the adult they needed but didn't have.

3. Creating Repair Experiences

In safe, steady relationships — whether with a friend, therapist, coach, or partner — you practice staying present through small ruptures and repairs. Many of us haven’t learn how to have a repair conversation when we have a relational rupture. This is an incredibly important relating skill to learn and it is something our children learn through our role modelling of it. Each moment of being seen, heard, and stayed-with, rewires the nervous system’s expectation that betrayal is inevitable.

4. Tending the Nervous System

Betrayal activates primal states of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Through somatic practices — grounding, orienting, gentle self-touch, breathwork — we teach the body that it is no longer trapped in the past.

Healing betrayal is like tending a storm-battered tree. We don't expect it to "get over" the damage overnight. This is slow, long and steady work. We nurture its roots, protect its tender branches, and trust that over time, it will grow stronger — not despite the scars, but through them.

Building a new kind of loyalty to yourself

When we heal the energetic imprints of betrayal — whether they originated from family or early friendships — we become fiercely loyal to ourselves. Not in a hardened, guarded, self-centred way, but in a rooted, emotionally mature, self-authoring way.

From there, we begin to choose relationships differently. We communicate more cleanly. We are able to ask for our desires and we learn to recognise when someone cannot meet us — and we no longer abandon ourselves trying to make them.

And most importantly, we remember: Betrayal does not define us.

The way we choose to heal, love, and live — that’s what shapes who we become.

If you need some support with betrayal wounds so that you can thrive in your relationships, come talk to me about relationship coaching or somatic experiencing.