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.

Some reflections on Nostalgia and Collective Grief

There’s a trend circulating at the moment on social media. “Mum and Dad… what were you like in the 90s?” People are posting old photos, grainy images, oversized denim, sun-faded afternoons. There’s something almost tender about it. A collective wistfulness and I’ve noticed it in myself too.

Recently, I’ve been watching Ryan Murphy’s series on John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. There’s something about it, the aesthetic, the pace, the feeling that evokes a different era. A quieter one. It stirs something. Not just memory but something deeper. The visuals evoke memories of my twenties living in London in the UK and times I visited New York in that time period.

Nostalgia is a slow form of grief where time shifts without our awareness. Chapters of our life end really quietly without much self awareness whilst we are living them. There are people, places and versions of ourselves that we never really got to say goodbye to, because we didn’t realise that we were at the end of something, until it was over.

We don’t really think of nostalgia as grief. Many of us learned that nostalgia was fondness or sentimentality. The yearning for the good old days. It is a felt sense, it’s very somatic; our senses are the gateway to our memories. A song comes on and reminds you of a time and place. You smell something and a whole era of your life comes flooding back. You might come across an old photo and as you look at it you remember the version of yourself that you see in your hand. How it felt to be that version of you. Sometimes you miss that version of yourself and sometimes you smile and think I am glad I am past all of that.

A few mornings ago, I was walking with my 17-year-old son. He’s been feeling the weight of the world lately like many young people are. The complexity of it. The uncertainty. The constant stream of information that never really lets the nervous system settle.

And he asked me: “What was life like when you were 17, Mum?” So I told him about 1989. There were no mobile phones or internet. You rang your friends on the house phone and hoped they were home. People turned up when they said they would and most of the time you waited. We used to spend a lot of time waiting around for each other. Shops were closed on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Nights were quieter. Life moved more slowly. As I spoke, I could feel something in my body soften. What was strengthened in our nervous system when we waited around was a greater capacity for uncertainty and a quiet trust that connection would come.

Digital image, Kellie Stirling. Waiting for our friends by the clocks.

Not because everything was better, it wasn’t. But because something about the pace of life was different. It was a little more contained, less exposed and relentless. I think that’s part of what we’re feeling when we experience nostalgia at the moment.

It’s often described as longing for the past but I don’t think we’re really longing for a decade. I think we’re longing for that felt sense. A way of being in ourselves when the world moved differently.

Later that day, I was in the car with my sons. My eldest, who’s nearly 20 and an engineering student at University, was driving. We were talking about fuel shortages and what might change in the future, electric cars, shifting systems, renewable energy options, the way the world is having to adapt.

I found myself asking: “What do you think we’ll learn from this?” He said, quite simply: “I think people have to realise that the only way we’re going to get through this is together. We have to collaborate. We have to support each other. We’ve got to change.”

I felt it land in my body as he spoke because in that moment, something shifted. Nostalgia looks back. But what he named looks forward. We can’t recreate the conditions of the 90s. The world is more interconnected now. It is more complex and demanding on our attention, our nervous systems, our capacity to process.

The slower pace we remember wasn’t just a lifestyle it was an environment that offered a kind of built-in regulation. There was less information, stimulation. and there were more natural boundaries between “on” and “off.”

That world doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. So the question isn’t, how do we go back? It’s: ‘How do we live well here? Perhaps this is where nostalgia becomes something more than wistfulness. Maybe it becomes a kind of remembering. Remembering not of a time but of what mattered and what was valued.

There was connection, presence and rhythm. It felt a little more spacious for our nervous systems and there was more connection and time spent in different types of community.

We are being asked to express those things differently now, not through simplicity, fewer inputs or retreating from the world, but through conscious collaboration with greater discernment. By learning how to stay connected within it.

What my son named, in that simple sentence, is something I see in my work every day. Whether I’m working with leaders, couples, or individuals navigating change the same truth emerges: we regulate in relationship and we find our way through complexity together.

So maybe the nostalgia many of us experiencing at the moment isn’t asking us to return to the past.

Maybe it’s helping us feel what we’re missing, so we can choose how to bring it forward. We may not get the slower world back, but we can create moments of slowness. We may not escape the complexity but we can learn to meet it with others, rather than alone.

I think perhaps that is the quiet invitation underneath all of this; not to go back but to become more intentional about how we live now.

Together.

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.

When the Roots are revealed

A nervous system reflection on collective disgust, power, and disillusionment

There are moments when the collective emotional field shifts.  You can feel it, not just in headlines or conversations, but in the body. A heaviness. A tightening. A quiet sense of repulsion that sits somewhere in the triad of disgust, anger and grief.  Lately there has been a lot of upheaval in our lives and lots of information revealed that has frankly, shocked many of us to our core.

It is not just the big stuff.  I feel like every day I read the newspaper or look online and something about the abuse of power is there.

So it is not surprising that many people have been describing feelings of disgust, disbelief, and despair as more information circulates about powerful people, networks, and systems that appear far more complex and paradoxically far more human than we once imagined.

The reactions are strong and they make sense because this isn’t just an intellectual response.

It is a nervous system response and we notice that the body knows before the mind can explain.

When people feel disgust, the body is doing something very specific.

Disgust is a boundary emotion.  It is the nervous system saying, this is not safe, it has crossed a line and I need distance.  Disgust is an interesting emotion because it doesn’t say fight, it says move away.  Our visceral reactions with disgust are often really strong; recoiling, nausea, tightening in the throat and gut, facial expressions that close down intake.  It is like our body is saying, ‘do not ingest this’.  Which makes sense when you think that disgust evolved evolutionarily to protect us from contamination, like rotten food or toxins.  When you explore it psychologically that same neural circuitry extends to moral violations, ethical breaches, abuses of power and relational betrayal.  So when people feel disgust at certain events or revelations, the nervous system is experiencing something more than ‘this is wrong’.  It is experiencing a very different message.  The message is more ‘this feels contaminating to my sense of safety or moral order’.

It is a little bit different to anger.  Which we then might experience closely after it.  Anger is a mobilising energy that wants to restore integrity or fairness.  After that, for many if anger offers us no respite, then comes something heavier.  A flattening, fatigue and often a sense of despair. The moment when the body recognises that the systems involved feel too large to influence.

Now lets think about disillusionment for a minute. At a nervous system level, disillusionment isn’t just disappointment. It’s the moment when something we were orienting toward; a person, system, belief, or story, no longer provides stability. The illusion wasn’t just an idea, It was an organising principle that helped shape our mental models of how things are, how we perceive everything works together.

So when it falls away, the body momentarily loses its map. You might feel a drop in energy, a slowing or flattening, maybe heaviness in the chest or a kind of internal ‘oh…’ that comes with a sinking feeling in your belly. It is almost like our body is saying ‘I don’t know where to place my trust now’. With disillusionment, it is like relational disappointment and so we might be feeling something like a micro grief because we are carrying sadness rather than outrage (or maybe outrage too!). It might feel like we are grieving the certainty, innocence and simplicity we once knew.

In the context of what we are experiencing with information revealing abuse of power, these responses are not signs that something is wrong with us. They are signs that our bodies are orienting to what feels morally and relationally unsafe.

When trust and power collide

Human beings are wired to seek safety through connection.  Connection with trusted structures like families, communities, organisations, leaders, institutions.  When those structures feel compromised, the impact is deeper than opinion or politics.

It can feel like an attachment rupture at a collective level.

Deep inside of us we ask, Who can we trust now?  What is actually true?  How do we orient in the world?

In my work with teams and leadership systems, I often see a similar dynamic. When trust breaks in a leadership group, the entire nervous system of the team shifts. People become hypervigilant, cynical, or withdrawn. Energy that once went toward creativity or collaboration turns toward self-protection.

In society, the collective field behaves much the same way.

Digital art, Kellie Stirling

Another way we can look at it is by using a metaphor; The forest and the storm.

Sometimes a forest looks healthy from a distance.  The canopy is full and the trees stand tall. When we zoom up above and look down, everything appears stable.

But a storm arrives, and suddenly weak branches fall. Rot hidden deep within the roots is exposed. What seemed solid reveals its fragility.  The storm did not create the decay, it simply revealed what was already there.

This is often how systemic realities come into awareness not all at once, but through moments that expose the invisible networks of power, proximity, and influence that shape human systems.  The discomfort people feel is partly the shock of seeing complexity where we once wanted simplicity.

Living with complexity without collapsing

Our nervous systems like clear categories: good or bad, safe or unsafe, hero or villain.

Complexity asks more of us.  It asks us to hold multiple truths at once that people can be influential and flawed, connected and compromised, admired and deeply human.  It is asking us to hold the tension of polarity, of competing priorities.

When this ambiguity becomes too much, we tend to move toward extremes.  It can look like outrage that burns hot and fast or sometimes numbness that shuts us down.  Often we protect ourselves by demonstrating cynicism that protects us from disappointment.

But there is another possibility, a slower and more embodied stance.  That is Witnessing.

Not bypassing what we feel. Not rushing to certainty. Simply allowing the body to register what is present while staying connected to our capacity for discernment.

Staying human in a dysregulated world

When collective stories stir strong emotional responses, it helps to come back to what our nervous systems can actually hold. To orient to the present moment and to notice where we still have agency.  Can we find where we have choice in how we speak, how we relate, how we show up in our own circles of influence?

Systems change slowly and nervous systems change slowly too.  Often the most grounded response is not to harden, but to stay soft enough to feel, while strong enough to hold boundaries.

How can we rejuvenate and grow in the face of decay, how can we hold space for it?

In nature, decay is not the end of the story.  When something breaks down, it creates space for renewal. Nutrients return to the soil. New growth becomes possible.  Perhaps this is also true in human systems.  Moments that expose cracks in our collective structures can feel deeply uncomfortable, even destabilising, but they also invite reflection.

We can ask ourselves what kind of leadership we want to grow now within ourselves and what values we choose to root into, even when trust feels fragile.  The work is not only to witness what has been revealed.  It is to stay human, grounded, discerning, and connected as the system reorganises around us. The more we can stay in peace and calm and maintain a clear focus, the more easily we can navigate this time.  Can we stay connected to a vision of a much more compassionate and loving world for all of us as familiar systems shift and reshape around us?

If you are struggling at the moment with the chaos of the world, here are some reflection questions for you.

What sensations arise in your body when something feels morally confronting?

What helps you stay grounded and discerning when trust feels fragile?

What kind of leadership are you choosing to embody in your own sphere right now?

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.

Belonging everywhere, nowhere and to ourselves

If you have ever wondered ‘where do I belong?’, you are not alone. I see it come up in coaching work all the time. Every big transition in life stirs that questions within us. It is our body and our psyches way of recalibrating. Making space for the next version of you to emerge.

The tender questioning of where we belong isn’t a flaw, it is part of being a human. Each transition asks us to find a new version of ourselves. It is a basic survival needs of humans to feel that we belong. We humans are mammals and we are wired for connection.

We spend so much of our lives searching for belonging; in relationships in communities and at work. Sometimes we find it. There are moments when belonging wraps itself around us so softly we barely notice it. Sometimes it slips through our fingers. The truest home we will ever know is the one we carry with us: our body. My body is the house that I live in. The place I return to when everything else feels uncertain, the memory and echo of every place I have ever been and seen, live within it.

Every version of me that once searched for home lives in my body.

There are moments when the world opens to us, when we feel connected to a person, a landscape, a shared purpose. These moments are luminous. We feel the pulse of life running through us, the sense that we’re part of something greater.

It’s easy to think, this is belonging. It is, for a time. But belonging to the world is fluid, it changes, shifts, and evolves as we do.

Then there are the seasons when we don’t fit anywhere. We grow and we change constantly. The old roles don’t suit us, the conversations feel thin, the places that once felt like home start to feel foreign.

That ache of displacement can stir a deep questioning, Who am I now? Where do I belong?
It is here that imposter syndrome often arises, whispering, I’m not enough. I don’t belong here.
But imposter syndrome isn’t proof of inadequacy. It’s a symptom of disconnection from self-belonging, a signal that we’ve drifted from our inner home and started measuring our worth through someone else’s eyes. It is not surprising to me that many people experience this at work, particularly when they are promoted to a new role, because we are constantly judged by external frameworks in organisations. Like show dogs who constantly have to jump through hoops to please. Few people feel like they can be themselves at work. If you do feel that, you are one of the lucky people.

When we come home to ourselves, the landscape changes. We remember that we belong, first and foremost, to ourselves, to the body we inhabit. We reconnect with our own heartbeat, our breath, our quiet sense of deep inner knowing.

Belonging to yourself is not about isolation; it’s about full bodied integrity. It’s the grounded sense that, no matter where you are, you can meet life from a place of wholeness. It is the warmth in your chest when you tell your truth, the grounded spine when you say no, the quiet smile when you know that you don’t need to prove a thing. You no longer need to perform or prove. The voice of imposter syndrome softens because you no longer outsource your worth.

Somatically, this is felt. A softening in the shoulders. A deepening of breath. A quiet, anchored presence that says: I am here. I am enough. I am mine.

In midlife something shifts for most of us. A new north star begins to emerge.

Midlife often unravels the old anchors. The identities that once defined us, parent, partner, professional, caretaker, begin to dissolve or shift. Our compass spins. The ground beneath us feels less certain. It is less about fitting in and more about who you are becoming.

But this loss is not emptiness; it is space. It’s the fertile ground where the new north star begins to form; one that reflects not who we were told to be, but who we truly are.

To find that star, we have to do the healing work: to meet the parts of ourselves were left behind, to grieve what’s ending, to feel the sensations of transformation moving through our body. This is where somatic work becomes essential.

Through the interoceptive lens, through noticing what’s happening inside, we begin to meet our emerging self not as an idea, but as a lived experience. We reconnect with our wholeness, with all the parts of us that are ready to come home.

We belong everywhere and nowhere and ultimately, within. Belonging is not something we earn or find; it’s something we remember.

The work of midlife, and really of a lifetime, is to come home, to feel safe inside your own skin, to live from the quiet strength of belonging to yourself. From that place, connection flows naturally. You can meet life, love, and change with openness, because your roots are within you.

So pause.
Breathe.
Feel the house you live in.
Let your body remind you. You already belong.

Things I have learned about meeting my edges

Edges we all have them. Some whisper slowly and some flatten us in a moment. A few years ago, a friend said to me, you meet your edges with grace. At the time I must admit I was perplexed by the comment. Mainly because like many people, when I hit my limits and edges I struggle. Edges arrive in many forms, a conversation that stirs something deeply uncomfortable, a season of uncertainty, a devastating illness or a body that whispers enough. So I have been reflecting on this comment this year and I thought I would write about it.

I used to think edges were something to overcome. Now I see them as initiations, thresholds where life invites me to grow a new layer of being. I view them as portals not problems. I have come to understand that every edge , whether burnout, grief, conflict, or uncertainty, is a threshold moment. I don’t try to cross it quickly. I tend the threshold until my whole being is ready to step through. I take my time (where I can), and on the other side, I always emerge with a new layer of wisdom that I quietly weave back into my life, my relationships and my work.

I have always viewed my edges and limits from a perspective of curiousity not control. When something feels uncomfortable, in my body, a relationship, or a system, my first instinct isn’t to fix it. I listen to it with my five senses. I try and get close enough to sense what wisdom it’s carrying. Through years of embodiment and somatic practice, I have trained my nervous system to stay present with discomfort until it reveals the deeper pattern beneath it. This has not been easy, it is very hard work.

Connecting with my body has taught me when to rest, when to deepen and when to let go and shed. There is regenerative intelligence in going slower, what looks like retreat can often be fertile integration. My Winter season has taught me to trust the stillness. Spring, to let new growth emerge without forcing it. The tides, always the tides, to remind me that contraction and expansion belong to the same dance.

I’ve discovered that when I meet an edge, the first thing that matters is slowing down. My mind wants to sprint ahead, but my body asks for stillness. If I can pause long enough to feel what’s happening underneath the surface, the contraction, the ache, the flicker of fear, something shifts. The edge becomes less like a wall, and more like a doorway.

Meeting my edges has taught me that they reveal what’s ready to be integrated. They show me the places I’ve outgrown my old ways of being. They ask for tenderness, not toughness. Sometimes the most courageous act is to soften, to stay present, to breathe until my system remembers that it’s safe to expand again. I don’t do this on my own, I ask for help to hold the container so my body can do what it needs to do.

I have come to understand that meeting your edges in relationship is so much easier than doing it on your own. Healing and growth happen in relationship. I don’t isolate when I reach a threshold, I lean into a trusted circle, my friends, my health providers, my husband, or nature itself as co-regulators. I have learned that building a circle of support around you is one of the most constructive things you can do to live well. I allow others to witness me in the process, those people I have secure connection with are the most supportive to my nervous system. There is something about being seen that can turn fear into belonging.

I definitely meet my edges somatically, not conceptually. Well to be fair, I might start reading about something that is coming up just to get more context and understanding, but I know that path through, is through the body. I’ve come to learn how to locate tension, grief, or fear in my body and to feel it as sensation rather than make it a story. Because our body records every experience of our lives and that tension or emotion is my body’s story. I let my body lead the dialogue: sometimes through stillness, sometimes through tears, sometimes through movement or sometimes just be being in nature. Those edges of mine then becomes a living conversation between my nervous system and my consciousness.

I try to meet my edges in rhythm with nature. There is something incredibly healing about learning about our inner seasons, that brings us back into right relationship with our internal rhythms. I don’t push for transformation, I let it compost. I have noticed both within myself and with my clients, that going slow is more effective, nuanced and has more depth than pushing fast.

Connecting with my body has taught me when to rest, when to deepen and when to let go and shed. There is regenerative intelligence in going slower, what looks like retreat can often be fertile integration. My Winter season has taught me to trust the stillness. Spring, to let new growth emerge without forcing it. The tides, always the tides, to remind me that contraction and expansion belong to the same dance.

Perhaps most of all, I’ve learned that every edge is a form of love, life calling me deeper into myself,
asking if I’m willing to be even more fully alive.

What edge is alive for you right now? Take a moment to feel it in your body.
What might it be inviting you to see, soften, or grow into?

Edges are not walls, they are doorways. Today, notice one edge you’re facing.
Slow down, breathe, and feel what wisdom it might hold if you pause long enough to meet it.

Ancestral Trauma and the Midlife Body

How midlife awakens the ancestral stories we carry in our bodies

Midlife has a way of loosening what’s been tightly held. As our hormonal landscape shifts, things that once stayed neatly tucked away, old grief, inherited fear, unspoken stories, they begin to rise. This isn’t failure or falling apart. It’s the body’s way of inviting us to heal what has been carried for generations.

Our body is the keeper of our stories, and sometimes it holds the stories of our ancestors that came before us. We know through research on epigenetics that this is true.

Sometimes the ache we feel didn’t start with us. Sometimes the heaviness in our chest, the tightness in our belly, or the deep tiredness that no amount of rest can soothe, belongs to a story that was never ours to carry. We are born into other people’s stories.

We inherit much more than eye colour and bone structure from our ancestors. We also inherit their nervous systems. This is shaped by the environments, events, and relationships that came before us. The body remembers what the mind forgets.

What is Ancestral Trauma?

Ancestral trauma refers to the transmission of unprocessed emotional pain, fear, or survival patterns from one generation to the next. These are not always passed down as explicit stories. More often, they live in silences, in the shape of a family’s nervous system, or in the ways we unconsciously learn to stay safe. Ancestral Trauma lives in the body’s tissues, rhythms and reflexes.

It can show up in many different ways. Chronic tension that never seems to release, or maybe a tendency to over-function, taking responsibility for everyone else’s wellbeing. Or for some it is deep fatigue or burnout that isn’t fixed by rest.

“When you heal the wound in yourself, you heal the wound of generations before you and generations after you.”
— Michael Meade

A grandmother who survived war may never speak of what she endured, but her vigilance might live on in a granddaughter who finds it hard to relax. I have worked with many women who come to me and say they literally cannot stop working and rest, even though their body is screaming out for it and they don’t understand why. The pattern often lies in what has been inherited in their autonomic nervous system.
A father who grew up in scarcity may raise children who, even in abundance, feel guilty resting or taking up space. These imprints are adaptive, they helped someone survive once. But what was once protection can become limitation when it’s no longer needed.

Why does this show up in midlife?

To be fair it can show up earlier. It is just that in midlife, part of our developmental challenge is to come back to the truth of who we really are. This impulse can show up in a myriad of ways. Many people ignore it, so it will hang around until they pay attention. In my experience with my clients, there is a deep discomfort with life and a strong impulse or urge to seek more meaning, purpose, or something different. They find they cannot continue on the way they have been travelling so far.

As our hormonal landscape changes, our emotional landscape does too. The hormones that once buffered and balanced our stress responses shift, and the body’s elegant system of containment begins to loosen. Things that once slipped neatly under the surface start to rise. Old grief, ancestral sorrow, unprocessed experiences; they all start knocking on the door of awareness. So it is not that life suddenly gets harder it is that what has been kept buried in the dark, suddenly starts knocking on the door asking to be seen. While this can initially feel unsettling, it’s also profoundly healing. The body, in its own divine timing, invites us to metabolise what we’ve inherited, so we can step into the next chapter lighter and more integrated.

Our body is a storyteller.

In my work, I see how ancestral stories express themselves somatically. The body carries what hasn’t yet been felt or integrated. Chronic tension, gut and reproductive issues, or a sense of deep fatigue, often emerge as the body’s way of trying to resolve inherited stress.

I’ve worked with many women who, even after hysterectomy or menopause, still hold a palpable energetic imprint in the womb space. These might be a story of loss, silencing, or generational grief that predates their own experiences. When the body is met with compassion and attunement, those old imprints can begin to release. What was frozen starts to move.

Healing doesn’t always mean understanding the exact story, it means restoring a sense of safety so the body no longer has to carry it alone and the pattern that has been long held, can be expressed and completed because there is enough of a felt sense of safety in the body for it to let what has been stuck, be released.

Recognising that an inherited pattern lives within us is not about blame or burden, it’s about freedom. When we see that our over-responsibility, perfectionism, or shutdown might have roots in someone else’s survival, we can meet it with compassion rather than self-judgment. In that awareness, something softens.
We begin to relate to our own patterns differently, not as flaws to fix, but as messages from the body inviting us to complete what was once incomplete.

It is important to remember that these patterns and imprints you inherit, they come from survival and they also come from love. A mother’s hypervigilance was once love and protection of herself and her family. A grandfather’s stoicism was a protective response, grounded in love to protect himself and his family system. They did the best with what they had to keep surviving.

The ripple of healing.

The beauty of this work is: when we heal, we don’t just heal for ourselves. The nervous system reorganises and recalibrates. We slowly and gently start to change how we show up in relationships, in our families, and in our communities. That healing ripples backward and forward . It honours those who came before, and is freeing to those who will come after us.

Ancestral healing is not a thinking activity it is a somatic and relational one. The best therapeutic modalities to heal it are somatic experiencing, internal family systems, somatic attachment work like NARM, family constellations work and ritual, ceremony and nature based practices. Rarely is it one modality. It is often a few woven together to integrate, depending on what is showing up for an individual.

Ultimately the goal is about restoring flow and connection, within the body, within the family system and within the wider relational field of our lives.

As you read this, gently place a hand on your heart or your belly.
Feel your breath, and remember; you are part of a long line of survivors and lovers and dreamers.
What might shift if you allowed your body to trust that it no longer has to hold it all alone?

Burnout, chronic stress and boundaries

Every week, I meet people who are utterly exhausted, not because they or aren’t capable, but because they’re working inside systems with no boundaries left. Restructures, shifting roles, endless “transformations”, it’s like the organisation itself is in permanent fight-or-flight, constantly reacting to the next thing.

Many people finding it almost impossible to get into the ‘meaty’ parts of their role, they are simply skirting along the top, doing the things they have to do to keep functioning. Inside that chaos, people are expected to just keep pushing and pushing until their bodies finally say, no more.

They lose touch with the ability to listen to their body’s boundaries or they notice them and ignore them. When you are bored, exhausted, shutdown or unmotivated, that is a boundary. The body is saying no, not for me.

Chronic stress traps the body in survival states, fight, flight, freeze or eventually collapse. Over time, we lose connection with our most basic autonomic cues, those subtle sensations that tell us when to rest, pause, or say no.

We override those messages so often that “pushing through” becomes who we are. The nervous system becomes so used to being “on” that stillness feels unsafe.

Many of my clients tell me they don’t even know what rested feels like anymore, they only know the space between deadlines. When they start slowing down in our sessions, they’re often deeply moved by the experience. It’s as if their body finally exhales. They realise they haven’t felt that kind of slowness, safety, and presence for years.

The Myth of Resilience

In my experience, most organisations completely misunderstand resilience. They talk about “building resilience” as if it’s about pushing through, grinding harder, or coping better with dysfunction.

But nervous system resilience isn’t about endurance, it’s about return. It’s the capacity to come back into your window of tolerance, that place where you feel calm, connected, and curious, after you experienced hyper or hypoarousal in your autonomic nervous system. That’s where perspective returns, creativity awakens, and we can actually relate to others instead of reacting from stress.

Pushing through isn’t resilience. It’s disconnection disguised as dedication.

Systemic Boundaries and the Body

When an organisation has poor systemic boundaries, no clear priorities, constant change, or unrealistic expectations, people end up carrying the system’s chaos in their own bodies. The organisation offloads its dysregulation onto its people.

A nervous system can’t heal without stabilisation, neither can a culture. We need workplaces that honour pause, stabilisation, containment, and rhythm, the same sequence that helps a nervous system recover from chronic stress. Stabilisation creates the ground. Containment provides safety. Rhythm restores flow.
Without that, burnout isn’t a personal failure, it’s a systemic inevitability.

When Agility becomes agitation

Many workplaces today pride themselves on being “agile”; always pivoting, always moving. But without true systems thinking capability, agility easily turns into agitation. Instead of responding intelligently to what’s happening, organisations start grinding, pushing, and reacting. People carry the cost, through exhaustion, disconnection, and burnout.

So instead of becoming more fluid and responsive, organisations become hyper-reactive. They confuse activity with progress, speed with strategy, and flexibility with chaos. When leaders can’t see the system as a living organism, with cycles, rhythms, and interdependencies, they unconsciously perpetuate stress throughout the whole structure.

Without true systems thinking capability, “agility” gets flattened into constant motion, change for change’s sake, rather than mindful adaptation. When we don’t understand the organisational system as a living system, we keep driving it past its own capacity. The solution isn’t to become more efficient; it’s to become more attuned.

Healing from burnout and chronic stress isn’t about bouncing back; it’s about coming home. It is remembering what it feels like to inhabit your own body again, to breathe, to rest, to notice. It is about understanding what a Yes and a No feels like in your body. It is feeling safe to be slow.

True resilience begins when we stop pushing through and start listening, to ourselves, to each other, and to the quiet wisdom of our own biology.

If you are feeling overworked, overwhelmed or burned out, it is a reminder to take time out for yourself. Take a mini break. Notice your breath. Notice when your body tightens, braces, speeds up, or checks out. That’s your nervous system whispering that you’re at the edge of your window of tolerance.

For leaders and organisations, it’s time to redefine resilience, not as pushing through, but as coming back home to ourselves. Back to stabilisation. Back to rhythm. Back to the wisdom of the body, individual and collective.

Because when the system learns to breathe again, everyone within it can too.

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.

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.

Why the feminine is the change maker - part 2

Last week I started this conversation about why the feminine energy in our culture tends to be the instigator of change. I know this is not always true but I do find that many women whether by choice or force of life events, tend to explore themselves deeply and the fact that we have this deep inner knowing which I talked about in last week’s blog which means we tend to read the ‘tea leaves’ and know when it’s time for change.

Anecdotally, when I think about all the training and professional development I have done over the years, there has always been a much higher percentage of female participants than male participants and so we notice this and we talk about it. You could complain about it and say men don’t do the hard work, but I don’t think this is entirely true because I have lots of male clients and friends who have committed to exploring themselves, but to be honest it is usually after something going really wrong in their lives. Maybe it is that it is women who are the instigators of change in relationships, in families, in cultures. Many studies of couples on relationships and marriages consistently show that around 70% of divorces are instigated by women.

There are many ways we can explore why this happens and I always love taking a Jungian lens on what is actually happening because it always explores the shadow side of everything which I find super interesting. If we look through a Jungian lens, It is always the masculine within the feminine that changes first. In Jungian parlance, the animus (the inner masculine in a woman) seeks direction, clarity, and forward motion. When a woman begins her transformation (say, through grief, menopause, creativity, or awakening), it’s often her inner masculine that reorients first, perhaps by finding new values, boundaries, or purpose. Once that internal alignment shifts, her outer relationships must also adjust. How I notice this in clients is they cannot pretend to be anything other than their authentic selves anymore and this often causes friction in different relationships in their lives as this authentic self in them is emerging. Things can be a bit wobbly for a while as she finds comfort with meeting these new parts of self.

And yes, often this catalyses change in the masculine partner or in the wider system. But not always right away. Sometimes the feminine awakens and moves first, and the masculine (whether internal or external) resists or lags—until it feels safe or necessary to catch up. That friction can either break the container or refine it.

Digital image - Womb in the Sky, Kellie Stirling

Why does the feminine change first?

In the simplest form, we are the ones who can create life and give birth to that. Even beyond biological birth, the feminine is the archetypal womb—the container that holds, gestates, dissolves, and re-emerges. This role isn’t limited to women, but in most systems, it is the feminine energy that initiates the deep work: the descent, the death, the regeneration. Women, especially at midlife, often step into this initiatory role on behalf of their families, partnerships, and communities.

It’s like we become the crucible in which the old dies and the new is born. Let’s look at it from a few different perspectives:

• Biologically: Our hormonal cycles force us into regular encounters with change. Life transitions like menstruation, pregnancy, birth, perimenopause, and menopause demand transformation. For example, every month when we have menstrual cycles, we are moving through a cycle of change, a cycle of birth, death, rebirth metaphorically speaking that is experienced in an embodied way with our menstrual cycles.

• Emotionally: The feminine is finely attuned to relational field dynamics because we have lots of estrogen which helps creates oxytocin. Our nervous system is regulated by oxytocin which acts as a neuro-modulator. Neuro-modulators fine tune and shape how our nervous system reacts to stimuli over time. So we become more relationally attuned and attuned to social safety. We feel what’s missing, what’s breaking down, or what wants to emerge sooner. So oxytocin plays an enormous role in regulating arousal, stress responses and healing.

• Spiritual/Archetypal: The feminine holds the wisdom of the underworld. We know how to descend and return with insight. That’s where true alchemy happens.

So when it comes to relationships, often, when a woman begins to change, it upsets the systemic homeostasis of the relationship. If she holds the relational field (as is often the case), any shift she makes is deeply felt by the other. This can either provoke resistance or invite the partner to evolve too. Sometimes both. In this sense, women often become the alchemical fire that either transforms or reveals what’s no longer sustainable.

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 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.

Ghosting and silent treatment; miscommunication and the avoidance of deep intimacy

Ghosting and ‘the silent treatment’ are often framed as problems of miscommunication, or, poor communication skills. We often tell ourselves that the person simply didn’t know what to say, or how to say it, or that life got in the way. But at there core, ghosting and silent treatment are not just about a lack of words. They are about a deep avoidance of intimacy. This occurs in both intimate and platonic relationships.

For many, the ability to engage in honest, clear communication is not just a matter of willpower; it is a reflection of their nervous system’s capacity to hold emotional intensity. When someone disappears—leaves a conversation dangling, ignores a message, or cuts off connection without explanation—it’s rarely about us. It’s about their own inner world and the deep-seated discomfort they have with relational transparency. It is about not having the spaciousness inside of them, to express exactly how they are feeling.

The more we understand this, the more we can make empowered choices about who we invite into our most intimate spaces—and the more clearly we can recognise when someone’s silence is not just avoidance, but a form of emotional withdrawal known as the silent treatment. Like ghosting, the silent treatment is not a neutral act. It can activate deep wounding and confusion in the person on the receiving end, while giving the illusion of control to the one withdrawing. The truth is, the person is not doing this to get control of the situation, they are doing it to try and get some regulation back into their nervous system. They are overwhelmed by the emotions they are feeling and terrified of deep relational intimacy because they did not have the experiencing growing up where they could talk about their feelings openly and honestly.

They are using silence as a tool to resource themselves.

The Nervous System and Relational Avoidance

Our ability to communicate with honesty and clarity is deeply tied to our nervous system’s regulation. If someone has never developed the capacity to stay present with the discomfort that arises in difficult conversations, their body perceives deep intimacy as a threat. Their system does not register open-hearted honesty as safe.

For people who ghost, or struggle with direct communication, disappearing may feel like the only way to avoid overwhelm. It is not a conscious, malicious act—it is a survival response. Their nervous system is simply not equipped to navigate the vulnerability required for clear, honest communication.

It can hard to be the receiver of this. Silent treatment in a relationship can be very hard to receive, and many people who are on the end of it often feel very lonely in their relationship. They feel very misattuned to and very misunderstood because they are not receiving the mirroring or reflection of their experience back from the other person.

Image - Stockcake

Deep Intimacy Requires Capacity

Clear, open communication is not just a skill—it is an embodied experience. It requires us to feel the full range of emotions that arise when we are seen, when we express our truth, and when we hold space for another person’s truth in return. It means being with the discomfort of hurting someone’s feelings, of disappointing someone, of witnessing another’s emotional response without shutting down or fleeing.

But not everyone has built the capacity to stay present in these moments. Many have never been taught how to regulate their nervous system in the face of emotional intensity. They may have grown up in environments where difficult conversations led to conflict, abandonment, or emotional withdrawal. In these cases, avoidance becomes the learned response. Or maybe they grew up with parents who struggled to acknowledge their own emotions and learned that to express them was messy and unruly, so they would never have been able to be with their kids emotional expression. So the kids learn, we are safe and will receive love if we are very good children who do what we are told and do not complain. Over time, big emotions start to feel unsafe, so we push them away.

Some of us become masters of this and use our enormous willpower to push them down. Others soothe with food, alcohol and maybe drugs just to stay regulated. At some point, typically big life transitions, our body starts to push what has been repressed and ignored back up. This often shows up as conflict in relationships, physical health issues or the person feeling very lost and discombobulated and not knowing what is going on within themselves.

Reframing Ghosting, Silent Treatment and Miscommunication

When we experience ghosting, silent treatment or confusing miscommunication, it’s easy to take it personally. We might feel rejected, unworthy, or left in a state of anxious uncertainty. But understanding ghosting as a nervous system response can shift the way we hold these experiences. It allows us to see that this behaviour is not about us, but about another person’s limitations in holding intimacy.

This does not mean we excuse the behaviour. We can hold compassion for someone’s struggles while also recognising that a healthy, reciprocal relationship requires both people to be capable of presence, honesty, and emotional responsibility.

These behaviours are often rooted in avoidant attachment. When closeness feels threatening, the nervous system chooses distance over connection. Avoidant attachment creates a belief system (often unconscious) that says “If I get too close, I will lose myself’ or, ‘If I express my truth, it won’t be safe’ or maybe ‘If you need too much, I will disappoint you'“.

Moving Toward Conscious Communication

If we want to cultivate relationships rooted in trust and depth, we need to surround ourselves with people who have the capacity to hold both their own emotions and ours. We also need to deepen our own ability to stay present in the face of discomfort.

This means:

• Strengthening our own nervous system regulation so that we can engage in honest conversations without collapse or reactivity.

• Choosing relationships where both people are committed to staying in connection, even when it’s hard.

• Recognising when someone’s avoidance is a sign that they simply do not have the capacity for the depth we seek.

• Honouring our own worth, by not chasing people who are not available for honest, clear communication.

Ultimately, ghosting and silent treatment are not about miscommunication or poor communication —they are about an inability to stay in connection when things get emotionally complex. That inability is rooted in the nervous system’s struggle to feel emotions and feelings that allow us to hold and be present to deep intimacy that we can experience with another person when we have the capacity to be with their feelings. To listen to them, to see them and be able to stay with what they are feeling.

The more we understand this, the more we can make empowered choices about who we invite into our most intimate spaces.

If you would like to expand your capacity for deep intimacy in your relationships come talk to me about relationship coaching.

The fear response, a double edged sword

Fear is a master of disguise. It doesn’t always show up as a racing heart or sweaty palms; sometimes, it speaks in the language of logic, whispering that we’re “not ready yet.” It convinces us to set arbitrary deadlines, create endless prerequisites, or delay action under the guise of preparation. But if we look deeper, we often find that fear is at the root of our hesitation, quietly orchestrating our self-sabotage.

At its core, fear is a survival mechanism, designed to keep us safe from danger. But in modern life, fear doesn’t just react to physical threats—it responds to uncertainty, failure, judgment, and change. Our nervous system doesn’t distinguish between the fear of a tiger and the fear of speaking our truth, starting a business, or pursuing an intimate relationship. It just registers the discomfort and sounds the alarm.

This alarm triggers one of four responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Each of these can subtly shape our choices in ways we don’t always recognise and we create adaptive strategies to push through and avoid our feelings. Here are some examples:

• Fight: We overcompensate, push too hard, and exhaust ourselves with perfectionism.

• Flight: We distract ourselves with busyness, convincing ourselves we’re productive while avoiding the real work.

• Freeze: We get stuck in analysis paralysis, endlessly researching or seeking validation.

• Fawn: We over-prioritize others’ needs and expectations, losing sight of our own desires.

Fear as self sabotage

One of fear’s trickiest tactics is its ability to masquerade as prudence. We tell ourselves we’ll launch the business once we get one more certification, we’ll write the book when life is less hectic, or we’ll pursue love when we feel more secure in ourselves. These milestones often feel responsible and logical, but in reality, they are fear-driven delays.

Self-sabotage isn’t always about overt destruction; sometimes, it’s simply about waiting too long. The longer we delay, the more distant our desires feel. And the more distant they feel, the easier it becomes to believe they weren’t meant for us in the first place.

Ignoring our fears

Sometimes we develop adaptive strategies to ignore our fears and push through. This becomes problematic when we learn to ignore the limits of our own bodies and keep on pushing through. Some of us, to have more courage, learn to ignore our fears and push through (I used to do this a lot). The problem with this is that we are ignoring our bodies risk assessment system, our autonomic nervous system, and that ultimately can cause us to get run down, ill or so stressed that our focuses narrows so much we find it hard to function with the complexity of life. So I am not saying learn to push through your fears, I have saying learn to understand them and listen to them, what they feel like in your body. Learn to discern between levels of fear.

Making decisions from a survival state versus coherence and feeling safe

The state we are in when we make decisions matters. When we make choices from a place of survival mode—driven by fear, anxiety, or urgency—our nervous system is dysregulated. In this state, we tend to react rather than respond. Our thinking becomes narrow, focused on short-term relief rather than long-term impact. This can lead to reactive decision-making, avoidance of necessary risks, and choices that feel safe in the moment but create more complexity down the line.

On the other hand, when we make decisions from a state of coherence—where our nervous system is regulated, and we feel safe—our thinking is more expansive. We can be truly strategic, discerning, and appropriately prudent. We’re able to see the bigger picture, weigh options without urgency clouding our judgment, and engage with complexity without feeling overwhelmed.

This is why when we cultivate nervous system regulation—through practices like breathwork, grounding, or simply slowing down—we tend to make more sustainable, wise decisions. The more we develop the ability to recognise when we’re making decisions from fear in survival mode versus from a regulated state, the better we can lead ourselves and others.

“Courage does not always roar, sometimes it’s the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, I will try again tomorrow”

Mary Ann Radmacher

So how do we break free from fear’s grip and step toward what we truly want?

1. Recognise Fear’s Voice – Become aware of when fear is masquerading as logic, caution, or endless preparation. Notice when you’re setting unnecessary milestones that delay action.

2. Slow Down and Regulate – Instead of reacting from fear, pause. Use breathwork, grounding techniques, or somatic practices to settle your nervous system so you can make choices from a place of clarity rather than reactivity.

3. Make Micro-Moves – Fear thrives in the enormity of big leaps, but it loses power when we take small, consistent actions. Instead of waiting for the perfect moment, take one small step today. This goes for those of you having to make harder choices at work in your leadership role. Small iterative changes help people to adjust and accept change rather than big sweeping changes that often put people into their survival response and usually result in them trying to avoid the changes.

4. Reframe Fear as a Companion – Fear will never fully disappear, but it doesn’t have to lead. Instead of resisting it, acknowledge it: “Hello fear I see you, and I know you’re trying to protect me. But I choose to move forward anyway.”

5. Commit to Your Desire – If something truly calls to you, trust that desire. Your nervous system might resist, but deep down, your body knows what it longs for. Trust that wisdom.

In our big life transitions we often go through periods of review and reflection. The biggest regrets aren’t usually failures—they are the things we never tried, the dreams we postponed, and the desires we denied. They are often the relationships we didn’t foster or pay attention to. Fear will always try to keep us safe, but safety isn’t the same as fulfilment. The good news? We can choose differently.

What have you been delaying that your heart is calling you toward? What if you took one small step today? Because the truth is, you’re already ready.