The Father Wound

A core wound I see often in my work is that of the Father Wound.  This is the experience of growing up with a father who was absent, emotionally stunted or simply unable to offer interest in you or care for you.  It is a profound experience that heavily shapes the way people move through the world.  What I often see are the compensating strategies that have kept us safe throughout the years.  Over achievement, hyper independence, hyper vigilance and over functioning.  Often on the outside people look like they are crushing it, but on the inside they feel hollow or totally discombobulated.

Most of the people I have worked with who have this deep wound are usually incredibly high functioning and they have built their survival around a strategy of brilliance of some description.  Often they were a parentified child and had to provide that masculine ‘container’ in the family system.  Almost like a partner to their mother.  This feels really weird for most people now as adults, as it should, it is not in ‘right relationship’ systemically.

When I talk about the father wound we aren’t just talking about a particular event or specific memories of childhood; but rather an internal structure that drives adult behaviour.

Often the core wound is deep existential shame that is felt in a deep sense of unworthiness that gnaws at our bones.  It is the legacy of a child who learned to be loved they had to perform and to be safe they had to shrink themselves or hide.  They became a ‘junior detective’ always assessing the mood of the room to predict the environment.   If a child’s survival skill is to please the father, then their No becomes a weapon that threatens their survival.  We stop having a No to keep the peace, to be the calm waters in the family system.  Often this calm is the only thing that stands between a child and an overwhelming sense of shame. 

Digital Art, Kellie Stirling

The father wound shows up in adult life as: 

Over achievement - Effort = survival so rest often feels dangerous.  Behind this is the belief system you are only as worthy as your last big accomplishment.  Many people switch between extreme productivity and then collapse that requires deep rest.  They often find themselves recruited into organisations that feed off their prodigious creativity and output and have very few boundaries themselves culturally.  So they get into a continuous ‘give more’ and ‘stretch yourself more’ loop, that burns most people out or leaves them bitterly resentful at best.

Poor boundaries - They often don’t feel safe to say no.  Actually often I find they are incredibly compassionate to people they work with and their friends but they don’t demonstrate the same care for themselves.  Because they did not receive attuned care from their father, they grow up fawning and managing others emotions at their own expense. This is because their nervous system perceives boundaries as a threat to primary attachment. The caring gaze was never demonstrated to them and the nervous system doesn’t learn to turn this caring gaze inward.  The treat themselves like the people they are trying to save or impress, rather than the person that they actually are.

Attraction to unavailability - in relationships these people are often attracted to people who are emotionally unavailable.  People who ‘give them crumbs’ of themselves in the relationship.  What is familiar feels safe.  It is what they received off their fathers, it is what feels normal.  It is not normal.  When we unconsciously seek out partners who cannot meet us emotionally, we are recreating a childhood struggle to earn the love that was never fully given to us.

We often minimise or maximise our experience.  This shows up as black and white thinking about our parenting experiences that we received.  We minimise it by saying it was not that bad and we forgive our parents and pretend it didn’t happen or we go the other way and over inflate it.  We minimise our sadness.  The reality is our inner child, maybe our 6 year old self, doesn’t care about a father’s reasons for not showing up.  But as adults, we can acknowledge the underlying drivers.  We can have both, two things can be true at the same time. We can learn to hold the tension of my father was wounded and he didn’t show up for me as a child in the way a parent needs to.

We can tell the truth of our experience to our coach, therapist or friends and acknowledge our experience and grieve the loss of the childhood that we never had.  And, we can acknowledge that often our fathers were like this for a reason.  They are often repeating a pattern that they experienced (ancestral trauma); the cultural context, many fathered in times where fathers weren’t expected to be emotionally present or to be able to be with their own emotions.  Then there are some fathers that due to their own traumatic experiences got completely cut off from their emotional lives.

One cultural meme that I find quite disheartening is when we talk about ‘Daddy daycare’ like it's some hugely wondrous thing that a father is looking after their kids.  You aren’t a babysitter, you are the parent. Lets call it what it is - parenting.

How do we work with all of this?

This is not just a mind thing, it is body too.  The father wound lives in the nervous system, we have to work somatically with it.  We have to start to learn to feel safe in our body.  Notice where we feel collapsed, where we feel tense.  In fact what I notice when people start to feel safe is that they often realise they are carrying a wound that is not theirs at all.  When we work through all these sensory experiences, we start to uncouple what is tangled up together that is not ours to carry.

We work with our inner child parts.  The wound lives in our inner child and we have to find what that part of us needs.  Our adult self learns how to support our inner child parts.  We are reparenting ourselves.  We move from reacting to our environment to being able to witness ourselves when our childhood wounding is touched and we then can become more intentional and choiceful in how we show up in life.

We move really slowly and titrate these experiences because they are deep, old and big.  We move slowly and in small pieces, building capacity in the nervous system to be with emotions so we don’t get flooded by them.

Often to stop the fawning - the people pleasing and appeasing - we have to do some good boundary work and build capacity for healthy aggression in the body.  Learn what a Yes and a No feels like in our body.  The more we build up our No, the better we also get at taking care of ourselves.  But most importantly we don’t become the dumping ground for everyone else's emotions because we build up compassionate boundaries to keep them out.

Remember you are not a fawner and people pleaser because you are weak; this is actually an incredibly sophisticated survival strategy.  The goal isn't just to get better at boundaries, it is also to decouple your worth from your performance.

If this resonates with you, ask yourself this question.  What would happen to you internally if you said No to something today.  Is there a fear that if you don’t perform you will be judged as not being worthless?

What would happen if you scheduled some time for yourself?  How would your body feel to be still for 30 minutes?

What happens when the 'I'm fine' scaffolding collapses

Discover why midlife reckonings and relationship explosions aren't sudden, they're the collapse of somatic holding patterns when "I'm Fine" runs out of road.

I think most of us know when someone says ‘I’m fine’, they usually aren’t.  Certainly I can think of a few scenarios where I have said it and I have been majorly pissed off or so sick of a situation I am actually out the door completely disengaged and never coming back.  I wonder if in myself it is a fawning response sometimes or an extreme case of apathy.  Sometimes it's also when I am super tired and have no energy reserves to take an issue somewhere.

The ‘mechanics’ of the ‘I’m fine’ scaffolding are often built on fawning, over functioning and emotional suppression and it leaves a huge debt.  Every time someone swallows a boundary, silences a desire to keep the peace or ignores a trauma response, they are taking out a high interest loan against their own nervous system.

This debt can hold for years and in some cases decades until a capacity threshold is reached and the body falls apart.  This shows up in many different ways.  There are event based triggers and hormonally driven triggers.

Digital image, Kellie Stirling, Woman externalising her psychic scaffolding as it breaks apart.

When you look outside the midlife and matrescence events, the scaffolding breaks down whenever the nervous system’s capacity is reduced or or the loan is suddenly multiplied.  Some events I have observed over the years with clients include:

Illness or injury.  Physical vulnerability strips away the energy required to ‘over function’. When you cannot take care of everyone else, the suppressed rage of having taken care of everyone else's needs but your own, for years, can explode.

Grief and loss. The death of a parent or loved one can destroy our illusion of control.  Grief demands so much nervous system bandwidth, there is literally zero energy left to over perform accommodation or fake harmony.

Burnout and professional rupture. Sometimes people reach the top of their career ladder only to realise the ladder has been leaning against the wrong wall.  The body collapses, ‘the workaholic’ management strategy scaffolding is revealed because achievement stops numbing the internal emptiness that exists.

The Parental Mirror.  This can happen at any age. Watching a child hit a particular developmental milestone or experience something you never received from your caregivers can trigger a big collapse because our inner child’s unhealed grief is exposed.  I have seen this happen with 28 year olds and 50 years olds.  There is no specific point of trigger here, it seems to be the experience.

What happens when it is a hormonal trigger?

When we go through big hormonal changes, such as those experienced in child birth and menopause, the nervous system can receive a big shake and all the stuff we pushed down into the basement of our psyche comes popping up.  It definitely happens to many women during menopause and I always think that in many ways we are lucky to go through this transition because it forces us to face reality and do some deep inner exploration.  I know some of you reading this won’t agree but what I have come to learn through my professional training and my work is that the body is very wise and at some point it will bring it all up.  The developmental challenge of midlife is ‘come back to the truth of who you really are’.  There is wisdom in this, don't you think?

It is true that in the midlife season of life in particular, old stuff usually comes up to be resolved, more than other life seasons.  Simply because the body has been squashing it down for years.  Smoothed over with the ‘I’m fine’ response and it hits a limit and up it comes.  It is a capacity issue and it can happen to all of us because the cost of pretending outweighs the body’s capacity to hold everything in.  The armor cracks, whether through illness, grief, childbirth, or simply the unbearable weight of one too many swallowed boundaries.

For those of us around someone going through this it can be overwhelming and scary when we don’t understand what is happening.  I think what is helpful to know is that often it is not ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’, but often, the 40 tonnes of hay that were loaded onto the truck that we didn’t have the capacity to hold in the first place.

If you need some support, come talk to me.  I specialise in working with people navigating life transitions, and I am deeply invested in helping you understand the body’s somatic truth, emotional capacity and the physics of human suppression.

Demystifying Menopause

It is menopause awareness month and actually on October 18th, World Menopause day.  This is an area I do a lot of work in - supporting women in their midlife transition.  To be honest I am sick of the messaging around HRT being the silver bullet.  It is not, not even close.  It is helpful for some people, medical care matters and symptoms deserve attention.  You don’t have to suffer.  If you need it and it helps, go for it.  But it will not fix everything, only a couple of things.  So today I wanted to demystify the broader transition to help you make sense of what you might be seeing, hearing, thinking or feeling. Because there is a whole lot of conversation around the enormity of this transition that is not being spoken about and it is making people’s lives harder than they should be.

Menopause is a reckoning with how we have been living.

We are going through a re-wiring of our brain and nervous system.  All our body systems are interconnected so when our hormone levels start to change, all hormones are impacted, not just your sex hormones.  Your stomach hormones leptin and ghrelin, insulin, all of them.  Of course our hormones interact with our nervous system all the time so it will be impacted to.  Our brain is rewiring for this new hormonal cocktail just like it did when we were in adolescence and after giving birth.  We will be tired and have brain fog, just like we did in earlier transitions. Our body needs time out and support.

For many of us the body changes alone don’t cause the exhaustion, over functioning and disconnection or loss of self.  It can make the strategies we have relied upon for decades much harder to sustain.  The scaffolding of our coping strategies becomes highly visible and the body has much less tolerance for the old deal most of us made with ourselves that sounds something like this.  “I will keep giving, pushing, over-achieving, caring, anticipating, juggling all the balls, holding everything together and then eventually I will get to myself”.

Suddenly our body says, No, I am not doing that anymore.

Fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, hot flushes and the loss of resilience can become not simply problems to get rid of but information.  Not information to not treat but information that invites you to ask yourself, How am I actually living?  What is my body carrying?  What am I no longer willing to carry?

Your body is asking you for a different economy, a different way of using your energy.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Menopause is known as the second spring.  Our first spring in the five elements model is adolescence.  TCM works with women’s bodies in a seven year cycle.  It is around the age of 42 years that our perimenopause often starts in TCM terms, the next seven year cycle starts at 49.  Most women in the western world go through menopause at the average age of 51.  It differs across cultures.  In the Indian subcontinent, the average age is 49.

TCM sees menopause as a life preserving action.  Every month when we bleed we use up a lot of energy, both in creating the lining of the womb and then in shedding it.  Once we enter second spring all that energy moves from the womb to the heart.  It nourishes the heart as we age. I really like this explanation.

When we are depleting our reserves all the time, our yin starts to diminish.  We start to really feel it in this 42-49 year cycle.  The old ways of endlessly drawing on our reserves, without attending to ourselves become increasingly untenable.

In this time period our body starts to insist on reciprocity.  That is, not so much How much more can I give?  The questions become what nourishes me?  What replenishes me? What is enough?

It really is a reckoning for us to look at our own limits and boundaries - or lack thereof.

There is a lot of messaging out there that says, your body is changing, here are all the things that can go wrong, here is how we can keep your functioning.

I feel this misses the point.  What if you actually are not meant to return to who you were?  Menopause can mark a threshold between one way of being a woman and another way that might be possible for you.

It is not a decline or an oestrogen deficiency. It is the Autumn season of our life where we get to review and decide what we don’t need anymore in our life and what we need to keep and what we need to birth.  It is an initiation into the next phase of our life - to our wise woman power.

When the cloud of estrogen lifts I find many people remembering all their aspirations and goals they had when they were a young girl.  They might find their inner activist who somewhere along the way got lost.  Many women find that they care less what other people think.  I think this is a good thing because what they are coming back to is their own internal compass and what they care about passionately, what lights them up and gives them meaning and purpose.  Living life on their own terms, rather than looking after everyone else and sinking in the process.

The young girl isn’t necessarily the person you want to become again, but rather she may carry qualities that the adult woman within you finally feels free to claim.  Curiosity, creativity, sensuality, adventure, fierceness, imagination.  A particular fascination with something?

Digital Image, Kellie Stirling - A woman connecting with her Maga archetype.

Menopause connects us with our desire.  It can be a profound connection for many women with what they really want.  Like really actually want.  Not what they should want, what their husband wants, what their family needs.  Not what would make them a good partner, wife, employee or mother. But what does my body want now?

That can be very confronting.  If you have spent thirty to forty years being highly functional, connecting with your desire can feel very strange and unfamiliar.  I believe this is one of most powerful aspects of menopause.  The possibility that you are connecting with your own inner compass and becoming more internally referenced.  It is not becoming self-centred, it is having a centre within yourself from which to meet the world.  When you connect with that, that is why you start to care less.  That is why you find yourself speaking out more

Menopause is not asking you to become the woman you were again. It is asking you to become more fully the woman you actually are.

We are living longer these days and Archetypically this has brought a new archetype to our understanding of women’s transitions and modern feminist spirituality. We now have Maiden, Mother, Maga and Crone.

So who is the Maga? In the TCM model she is late summer and early autumn. The word Maga is Portuguese for magician, sorceress or wise woman, she is an enchantress and wild woman. In this transition time we are moving from being outward focused coming back to inner sovereignty. The Maga represents the reclamation of personal power, clear boundaries and creative alchemy. Our sexual and spiritual potency is no longer tied to our fertility. As I say to many clients we are becoming the sorceress and it is time to put our magic out into the world.

So you can see the conversation is much bigger than HRT.  It is a conversation about how we have lived, about depletion, about what our bodies are trying to tell us.  It is a conversation about our boundaries and limits, desire, identity, sexuality, ageing and about our power.  It is a conversation about the parts of ourselves we have put aside or banished into the basement of our psyche and they are now screaming hard to come back.  It is a conversation about what we are no longer willing to do and ultimately, it is a conversation about who we are becoming.

This is a profound initiation and a threshold, and thresholds always ask something of us.

Resentment, Desire and Somatic Healing

How unexpressed anger and fear mute our authentic desire.

We often talk about lack of desire like it is a mental problem. We say get a vision board, list your goals, find your voice. Well, it is to a small degree, but it’s more complex than that. 

For most people this is not the problem, they can do all of these.  The issue is their body doesn’t feel safe to ask for what they want.  This is a somatic issue.

For decades many people suffer their boundaries being trod on, told that to want is selfish, keep people happy, ‘keep the peace’.  We swallow our anger and become afraid to speak out loud what we are afraid of.  For some of us our brain develops a crazy logic that if we speak our fears, they will come true.  Over time the body adapts and it physically creates an armour so we cannot get hurt.  It creates an armour around the heart to protect it.

If you feel resentful of others for what they want and receive or achieve or if you feel completely disconnected from your own desire, the last thing you actually need is another strategy session.  You need to understand what your body has been holding onto to keep you safe.

Digital art Kellie Stirling - Woman wistfully looking out the window, her armour is protecting her heart and it is also keeping her from reaching out for exactly what she wants.

Why does the heart armour up?

Well it does this to protect our heart physically but also it does it to protect us emotionally, from our heart being broken.

When you were younger asking for what you want may have brought with it rejection, conflict or shame.  Saying ‘no’ might have come with anger, withdrawal or punishment.  Armouring of the heart may feel like a tight chest, clenched jaw, tight throat, tense shoulders and shallow breathing.  Sometimes people feel it as anxiety because there is so much repressed resentment, fear and anger.

One of my old teachers used to say resentment is unexpressed desire.  When your heart is armoured up because you have stopped expressing your desires they don’t go away.  The bury themselves deep in your unconscious.  When that buried desire meets someone who lives freely and is doing what we want, it ferments and bubbles up as resentment.  Clients often tell me with resentment they feel both frustrated and angry. 

It is easy to label resentment in people as bitter, selfish and bad, but actually it is a beacon of light.  Because what it is telling you about are the hidden wishes and desires that you buried a long time ago that someone else is now receiving.

• When you feel resentment for a friend who is taking time out for themselves, your body is saying to you I want a rest too.

• When  you resent a colleague who asked for a pay raise and they receive it, your body is saying to you, I want my worth to be seen also.

• When you experience a flash of bitterness for someone who is simply enjoying themselves your body is saying, why do I have to keep holding it all together.

Resentment and jealousy give you a very clear map of what it is you desire.

To open your heart and find your own voice you cannot skip over anger.  Many women especially were taught that anger is dangerous, destructive and unrefined.  They smother it over with guilt, anxiety and passive accommodation of others needs.

Anger, somatically, is very important for us body, mind and soul because it expresses our boundaries and it is the energy of self-advocacy.  It is the very clean intelligence spoken from the body that say ‘this is where I end and you begin” and  “This is what is okay and not okay for me’.

When you cannot express a clear no your body doesn’t know how to say a clear yes.  If your body doesn’t trust you to express your boundary, to speak the no, it will never feel safe enough to give you the green light to step into the open hearted, vulnerable expression of what you desire.

Often we are also working with shame.  Most people feel immense shame when they experience envy toward a friend, their own children or a colleague. Like I said at the start, this is complex.

The work to do is being able to feel the sensations in your body of the things mentioned here.  The tight jaw and shoulders, acknowledge the protection, say to your body ‘thankyou for keeping me safe’.  When I work with clients I always work on boundaries and desire at the same time through different exercises.  They are the opposite sides of a coin.  Then we start to develop greater capacity in your body for anger and fear, so you have more space to feel these very normal humour emotions.

We begin to slowly de-armour our heart, working somatically with all the points of tension in the body.  When we do this we open the door to deep, vulnerable connections with each other.  It is the pathway to greater intimacy with others and a deeper knowing connection with ourselves.

Limits and Boundaries

I have been thinking a lot about limits and boundaries recently.  All the times we don’t listen to our body and push on through.  Knowing what a Yes, No and Maybe feels like in our body.  In truth I feel like speaking about this now because I see it as an issue in almost everyone I work with and recently I have had a lot on my plate and my body has told me it has hit a limit and I had to listen to it.  If you read my blog regularly you might have noticed I haven't written in almost a month.  My body said no to writing.

I let my creative juices boil and brew in my time off until they could no longer be contained.  So here we are.

Many of us have been taught to ignore the feelings and sensations inside.  We override to keep on going. Some of us have been taught to do this in our families or in the cultures we grew up in, the cultures we work in.  We often value people who persist and grind.

Modern society treats boundaries as an inconvenience and limits as a weakness to overcome.  We glorify the grind of the worker who pulled an ‘all-nighter’, or the caregiver who selflessly gives until their last drop of energy.  The athlete who plays through an injury.  But both biologically and emotionally our body is constantly signalling to us where our limits lie.  Learning to notice those sensation based cues can be one of the most empowering things we can do for ourselves.

So how do we know what a limit feels like?  Well our body has a surveillance and alarm system in our autonomic nervous system.  Before we consciously know that a boundary has been crossed in our thinking brain, our body already knows.  It picks it up first.  It shows up as a tight jaw, shallow breathing, a heavy chest or that feeling we all know in the pit of our stomach.  There is an experience of friction when we override these cues and it can look like, pushing through physical exhaustion, swallowing resentment that gives us a tight jaw or sore throat, or maybe you have experienced freezing up when you want to say no.

The water doesn’t need a wall to know where it meets the land. The edge is constantly moving but it is still an edge. They have permeability, movement and relationship without losing distinction. The boundary is fluid.

We learn to override either in the family or cultural systems.  Workplace cultures are notoriously bad for this - stretch goals anyone?  Popular culture celebrates and hero worships high performers who override their human limits all the time.  We frame exhaustion as dedication and self-abandonment as loyalty.  Our economy and workplaces value what we produce over how we feel, and that conditions us to treat our bodies as machines rather than a living system that has hard thresholds.  On that note, I find in workplaces when I am doing work around systemic change, many people have a mental model of the organisation as being a machine and they struggle to comprehend complex change.  Well maybe if we started treating our bodies as the fluid, dynamic, organic, living systems that they are, the mental model would change?

What is the difference between limits and boundaries?  Well this is how I see it.

A limit is internal, what your bodymind can handle and a boundary is external.  It is our behaviour demonstrating how we protect that limit in our interactions with the world.  To be able to set a boundary you first have to be able to tolerate feeling your own emotions and sensations in your body, including anger, guilt and anxiety.  Because anger tells us when a boundary has been crossed, it is our body saying No.   For many of us when we start to set boundaries we may feel guilt and anxiety, particularly around people who have taken advantage of us pushing ourselves in the past.

When we learn to tune into our emotions and sensations we begin to hear what the Yes, No and Maybe feel like inside of us.  It becomes very clear.  Also I find a maybe is just a No that takes a bit of time to be spoken by our body.  That deep sense of inner knowing that you are developing and refining by doing this work, it knows that a maybe is a no.

Healthy boundaries are never rigid. They are fluid, always in relationship and can always be renegotiated. If they are too rigid we cannot let people in, we say no to opportunities that come our way that might benefit us.

One thing I notice in myself and also with clients, when we start setting boundaries with the people who have been on the receiving end of our over giving and over working they might not like it.  You might lose a few friends in the process but you will gain so much for yourself in the long run.

We gain time for ourselves.  It also often brings with it more energy, more creativity, more time to invest in the relationships that are important to us.   Most importantly, it strengthens our connection with our deep inner knowing so we can become ourselves.

 Boundaries aren’t just about saying no, they are about becoming more available to an authentic yes.  Boundaries are not a luxury, they are an essential ingredient for a healthy bodymind and happy life.

The Gates of Grief

Last week a friend of mine passed away. I got the news early in the morning when I was at the gym.  This is unusual because I never take my phone with me when I am working out but for some reason this particular morning, I slid it unconsciously into the side pocket of my tights, put my headphones on and off I went.  I love listening to music when I exercise, I find it motivating and uplifting.  Normally I turn on my playlist on my phone and leave the phone in the locker; the bluetooth in my headphones is great and picks up the signal from quite a distance.  On this day I did not, I put my phone in my pocket.  

I have known this friend for twenty five years, I met him through my husband.  He was 90 years old, there is no tragedy in the death of a ninety year old but it is sad. He was our friend, we met him in Italy and got married in his town, which is a very beautiful place.  We were looking forward to seeing him next year.  Just a week ago, whilst out for a walk we were talking about him and we admitted to each other that there was a chance he might not be there next year and we talked about our feelings about that, should it eventuate.  Needless to say both of us were very sad when we found out.  I had a few tears at the gym, when I read it, walked home and hugged my husband for an hour.  He was very upset.

It got me thinking about the gates of grief that I learned off Francis Weller who is a psychotherapist who does a lot of work in the grief space.  If you google him you will find many conversations and interviews with him.  I did 12 months of training with him about 5 years ago, more for myself, when I noticed about 6 months out of chemotherapy treatment, I had a lot of grief about my medical experience.

Weller completely reframed the meaning of grief for me in this program.  What he has done is  create a profound contribution to soul-centered psychotherapy because he helps us shift the Western cultural narrative of grief, which often treats grief as private, pathological, and linear, toward one that is relational, ancestral, and integrated.  His map of the five gates of grief help us understand that we can experience grief for many different reasons in our life, beyond the experience of losing someone we love.

So I thought I would take you through them and add my thoughts on it.  I have found in my own experience and in working with clients that there are often many other emotions that get wrapped up with grief, and how it shows up in our lives changes all the time.  There is no unique experience of grief, it changes every time within us and it is different for every individual.

I often talk about grief as a crucible.  A container that can withstand great heat and stress to create something new.  We could see that Weller’s gates create that container by naming different types of loss, we allow others to stop bottling up their grief and sorrow and allow it to flow.  This is what helps us process transitions.

The first gate is, Everything we love we will lose.  Grief is an essential part of being a human.  Weller says one of grief’s most important teachings is everything is a gift, nothing lasts.  To accept this is to live on life’s terms.  This is what the Buddhists called impermanence.  There are no exceptions.  When we acknowledge grief we acknowledge that everything we love we will lose.

I notice lots of people are sad about things that did not happen in their lives or if they didn’t get what they think they deserve.  I think there is a difference here, this is more disappointment and it is totally ok to be disappointed with what has or has not happened in your life and you might experience great sadness with this.  There is a distinction for me between the two, it is nuanced for sure.

People do experience grief in big life transitions like parenthood and menopause and events like a chronic or acute illness like cancer.  These are all very big initiations and initiations take us into places that are unknown.  We wonder will we ever be the same again, who will we be on the other side?  We are not meant to be the same person on the other side, these are times of sheddings and endings and often we are brought face to face with our own mortality.  Often these experiences strip away all our defence strategies we created to adapt as children and we are forced to face our adult world that is much sweeter, riper and vivid.  Many people discover they can actually be with all the emotions we experience as humans and we will not only be okay, we can thrive.

The second gate is; The places that have not known love. This gate is about the parts of ourselves that we have separated from that are untouched by love.  These are the parts of ourselves that have been banished to the basement of our psyche because they are surrounded in shame.  They haven’t experienced kindness, compassion, warmth or a welcoming smile.  What we think or experience as a part of ourselves being defective or wrong is often what we experience grief for.  Weller explains that it is hard to grieve for parts of ourselves that we have banished because we feel they are unworthy of our grief.  Some of you might be familiar with IFS as a therapeutic modality.  It is very helpful to many people to help them bring these banished parts back on line.  When we bring them back it makes sense that we would experience grief having disconnected from them.  Shame separates us from our soul. It is an insidious emotion and I understand why academics like Brene Brown have spent their professional lives trying to understand it.

The third gate is, The sorrows of the world.  We experience this most days just looking at the TV and watching the news.  The grief we experience at lives lost to war, around climate change and natural life being destroyed, cultures being destroyed, people living without a home.  It takes everything that we have within us to walk down a street and not be affected by the sorrows of our world.  This is where being in community, ritual and grieving together is a very powerful process for people to process grief.  Often we do this through art, music, and dance.  Ancient cultures have been doing this for years.  We live in relational fields, in fields of consciousness, indigenous cultures have known this for years.  

The fourth gate is, What we expected we did not receive. This one is a little trickier to explain but I believe it links to belonging.  We are born into families, into communities.  There are certain things we are born to expect.  Weller says we are designed to hear (as babies) soothing sounds, to be comforted, and hear soothing sounds and noises to soothe and comfort us.  Yet some of us don’t experience that.  We are wired to want to belong, it is a very primal need of humans, we are not wired to do life on our own.  Our nervous systems are wired for connection.  Our feelings of not being enough, of feeling like we are lacking are most often not a sign of personal failure but of a community or a society that has failed to offer us what we are designed to expect.  I believe this is where marginalisation and discrimination deeply wounds us.  One of the rituals of Italian life I love is the passigiata.  This is where Italians go out at night before dinner and take a walk with family and friends. There is both communion and spectacle in this event, often dressed in their very best, the passigiata gives rise to a bit of theatre as well as connection with others. As the Italians meet in the community and talk about their day, maybe have a cafe or gelato or aperitivo.  It is a beautiful ritual where people come together at the end of our day.  

The fifth gate is Ancestral Grief.  This is the grief that we carry in our bodies that is handed down by our ancestors.  This can be held for generations and often creates secondary coping strategies of addiction, rage or silence in families.  Things that are never spoken of for generations until they turn up generations later in unexplained maladies like illness or chronic health conditions repeated throughout families. Or ways of being and showing up in the world that we think is personality but actually trauma.  People who lost touch with their cultural  rituals of dance, art, song and moved into survival strategy which is often silence.  I have a few Mexican friends and they all say borrow our Day of the Dead.  This is the 1st of November and it’s the day they all honour and remember their deceased ancestors.  I have started doing this, it's so lovely.

To help grief flow it must be witnessed by another.  Like trauma, grief requires a witness who can acknowledge and witness our experience.  That is why ritual and grieving in community are so important.  This allows us to live more fully as we are opening our heart to our emotions and not repressing them.  We learn to hold what is both bitter and sweet at the same time, what is painful and pleasurable.

I could write pages about grief. I feel like I have barely touched the surface here.  It is such an essential human experience that helps us let go, to keep growing as humans.  I often say to clients, the tears of our grief are like windscreen wipers for our heart.  They help us process our experience of being a human.  

I will finish with a quote from Martin Prechtel, a Mayan Shaman who is also a grief specialist.  “Grieving should never be avoided or postponed; griefing is absolutely necessary.  Without grief the world would never renew itself; the world would cease to exist”.

If you want to read more I highly recommend Francis Weller’s, The Wild Edge of Sorrow and Martin Prechtel’s, The Smell of Rain on Dust.

Building Circles of support

When I was about nine years old, the grandchildren of some elderly neighbours died.  My neighbours who were probably in their 60s at the time, although they looked really old to my nine year old self, were devastated.  What was more devastating was that during an acute experience of severe post-partum depression or psychosis, their daughter in law took the lives of the two young children.  The children were very young, I can remember the eldest being about three years old and the other child a baby.  I can still see the little boy running around on his grandparents front lawn.  The front lawn was the best lawn in our street; it was like a bowling green, so smooth and even, we all loved to walk over it in our bare feet.   The case went to court and she was found not guilty, thank goodness, it was clear that this lady had been suffering terribly.  Devastating for everyone.  This was 45 years ago, did we even know that post-partum psychosis was a thing back then? I don’t know the answer to that. So lately the case involving Lindsay Clancy in the USA, which is currently underway, has brought this memory back for me.  We also had another case happen only a month ago close to where I live in Australia.

This is troubling to me because what is very clear is that we are failing mothers.  I feel terrible for these mothers who have not received adequate care and support from the health system that is supporting them.  I know post-partum psychosis is rare but what I also know is that many women have a pretty tricky time during this life transition. Becoming a mother is called Matrescence; did you know of this word? Many people don’t and I think that in itself is cause for us to think more compassionately about our rites of passage and becoming a parent in particular.   Many of us who have had children find there is a big hole in the mental health care and adjacent services that new mums receive.  I also see this mirrored in the midlife time when women go through menopause.  

I also think to myself, what is going on with us as a community, as employers, who have people who are very vulnerable working for them during these transitions?  I question whether we are looking out for people enough and where and with whom is the line for responsibility and care?  These are tricky questions and issues of change often fall apart in the space between.

This is one of the big reasons why I choose to work with Life Transitions because I have seen over the years both in my corporate life, and now private practice, that people are grossly under-supported in these huge changes.  But more than that, they are expected to come back to work and be the same old person they have always been.  Not only is it delusional and dismissive, it is extremely toxic for families.  This socially constructed myth of life being a solitary journey and having to manage, medicate or white knuckle major life transitions of parenthood, midlife, menopause and ageing is toxic. The felt sense of navigating a massive life transition in isolation sees the body automatically go into hyper-vigilance, bracing, and feelings of overwhelm, before we even start.  I have been at times furious with the fear mongering I have seen propagated by medical doctors on social media regarding menopause, who are telling women if they don’t take HRT they will get very sick.  

Our human bodies are wired for connection; we are not meant to do life on our own.  There is a reason people used to live in tribes.  The female nervous system in particular is predisposed to a fawning response, or a tend and befriend response, over fight or flight because oxytocin is a neuromodulator of the female nervous system.  This was brought by Shelly Taylor's research in 2000 that showed that female nervous systems heavily utilise oestrogen and oxytocin pathways under stress to ‘tend and befriend’ the threat in order to protect themselves and their children.  Her work brought this tend and befriend response to our attention.  There is a little nuance to this though. Her research found that oxytocin requires a safe and supportive container to be produced and absorbed. When the female nervous system faces these big life transitions without that safe and supportive circle, the oxytocin pathways get blocked and what is left is a body stuck in a high cortisol state.

These big rites of passage are when our body needs a circle of support the most.  Historically our ancestors held these rites of passage as collective experiences and we were held in the transition space by our community.  I will say in Australia we have this thing called the Mothers Group, where new mothers are randomly assigned to a group of new mothers soon after birth.  They are gatherings initially facilitated by the community health nurse organiser and then we branch off on our own to self-organise.  Some people have very strong life long friendships that come out of these groups.  We need these groups because the raw un-armoured nervous system of a new mother needs community support for co-regulation so her body can drop out of threat detection when it needs to.  Women navigating Menopause need support because it is not just a hormonal shift; their brain is re-wiring as is their nervous system. Hello Brain Fog.   The reduction in estrogen that happens in menopause tends to drop away any fawning, people pleasing tendencies we have, creating a fierce need for a supportive, authentic, non-judgemental community.  We have all heard midlife women say one of their greatest joys is they don’t care anymore!! In our elderhood transition, stepping into wisdom means we need to be held by a community that can receive, hold and honour that wisdom; otherwise ageing feels like we are disappearing.

Why is it so hard to build these supportive circles?  Well the individualist culture is one reason, but I also believe sisterhood wounding is a very big issue for many women.  Women can be very mean to other women when they are competing for limited resources, approval or safety.  Then there is the whole mean-girl dynamics many experience in early teen years, which is both developmental and somatic.  These wounds often happen in early teens and they can leave big imprints on our nervous system.  They make us compete with each other and frankly it's not very nice and it causes relational trauma that makes women shy away from female only spaces.  When women experience betrayal, micro-aggressions, exclusion and conditional warmth in these spaces, their nervous systems maps other women as a threat rather than a resource.  The irony is most women crave a circle of support during these life transitions but their nervous system and adaptive armour fears it.  That creates self-dialogue of an inner critic whispering, Do I belong here?  Am I enough?  Are they judging me?

What is the answer?  Micro-dosing relational safety.

You don’t have to jump into a twenty person retreat.  Start with health practitioners like a coach or therapist, or body workers who you can work on your transition with.  Put yourself in the centre of your own circle.  If you can work with practitioners who you feel safe with, who can hold space for you without judgement, help you complete adaptive stress responses that are still operating underneath, and learn to feel safe being held and witnessed by others (other women in particular), you will slowly start to build the capacity to sit in these held spaces.  You want someone who can work slowly with you, pace yourself.  The nervous system likes slow.

If you are forming a circle container I want to caution you that it is not just a social event.  There is anatomy to a circle space, it needs supportive connection.  I am not talking about having lots of people who agree with you; I am talking about creating an ecosystem of people with different relational capacities.  Often these groups need people who can naturally take up “implicit roles” like the person who is a grounding presence, whose steady nervous system can help you settle when you are activated.  Or the mirror/truth teller, the person who can gently call you out when you are using your adaptive strategies without shaming you.  Or maybe you need a strong co-regulator who can witness your grief, rage and joy without having to fix, dismiss or intellectualise what is going on.  We need people with these skills and capacities in our lives.

Circles of support are not just a social calendar event when they are well held.  When they are well held by skilled facilitators they become a nervous system container, a co-regulation resource and an antidote to isolation and self abandonment.

And for the men reading this, yes, you need circles of support during your life transitions. Men also move through profound rites of passage too and we were never meant to navigate life on our own.

Autumn doesn't ask the leaves to stay

Autumn is my favourite season by far. Where I live, the days are warm and the nights start to become cooler. Coming off the back of summer holidays, most people have a lot of energy and life is busy but there is an invitation somewhere in the air to start to slow down. I find myself being very reflective. The earth starts to have that pungent earthy smell and there is a feeling of letting go. Often there is a bit of sadness in the air; grief for the ending of what has happened and also what didn’t come to fruition.

Midlife is the autumn season of our life and I find that all these feelings are mirrored in people’s experience at this time. Yet many of us struggle to deal with the Autumn season of our life.

Nature does not cling to what has completed its season. Yet humans often do. We hold onto identities, roles, relationships, beliefs, coping strategies, and versions of ourselves long after they have fulfilled their purpose. Much of the suffering of midlife comes not from change itself, but from our resistance to the natural ending of things.

One thing that strikes me is how many humans see decay and loss as personal failure rather than a natural cycle of life. Autumn's leaves falling isn't a failure of the leaf or a punishment for anything, it's the design working correctly. Often I find with clients in midlife transitions, whether they are dealing with divorce, career endings or kids leaving home; they often carry a private sense that the loss means they did something wrong, or that they should have been able to prevent it. There is a natural intelligence in our body, we have these things called emotions that are superb at helping us process life and our experience of being human. It is just that modern culture doesn’t really like them, so many of us repress them so we can keep functioning. You know the leaves fall so the tree can bud again. Grief and sadness are regenerative, they help us let go of what we have loved that we have lost. Sometimes what we are losing is that is part of ourselves that we can let go of because it was an adaptive survival strategy that we created as a child and we don’t need it any more. It is not serving us in our adult relationships.

Digital Art- Kellie Stirling

“If I was tucked inside a clock, then Autumn would be the magic hour.”

— Victoria Erikson

Autumn doesn't ask, bargain, or explain itself to the leaves, it simply arrives, and the season changes regardless of whether the leaves are ready. There's no negotiation, no guilt, no over-explaining. One thing I find about the midlife season of life is that for many people it highlights where they have been abandoning themselves and their own needs. This often shows up as Anger. Anger tells us where our body is saying No. It helps us set up our boundaries. No doesn’t have to be coming from a fight or flight response. A clean no doesn’t need force behind it for it to be true. This is one of the gifts of midlife, when we pay attention to the anger we find places where we have really porous boundaries and our body is exhausted and finally had enough. When we explore our inner world and find where our Yes and No live inside of us, we get clearer on our desires, what we really want in life. A no that comes when we feel safe, comes from a place of internal certainty that is so settled it doesn’t need defending. That is a no coming from someone who has arrived in a place in their life, where they know down to their bones, who they are.

Many people talk about letting go as a mindset shift, a decision to stop holding on. I don’t agree with this, it is physiological first and the mind follows. Autumn doesn’t decide anything. The leaves release when the tree stops sending resources to it. There is that wisdom again; its time. This reminds me of the somatic process in the body. When the body starts to feel safe, the body starts to let go of old trauma and stress it has been holding onto for a long time. There is a loosening or a letting go that happens before the story and belief systems catch up. There is a natural wisdom and intelligence in our body that moves with our life transitions. Insight alone doesn't create change, for someone to truly let go of an identity, relationship, or role, the body has to be able to feel safe enough to let go of the protective strategy it has been holding onto. In midlife, many clients experience emotional distress or pain and it is the bodies way of saying, it is time. We are in the autumn season of life, come home to the truth of who you really are.

Autumn doesn't ask the leaves to stay. It doesn't judge them for changing colour or rush their falling. Nature trusts the wisdom of the cycle. Perhaps there are parts of us that are ready to be released too; not because they were wrong, but because their season is complete. Perhaps what feels like an ending is also making space for something deeper to emerge. Not a new self, but a truer one.

When our children trigger us

Children invite us into rooms within ourselves that we spend a lifetime avoiding

Nothing will expose your early wounds quite like trying to get children out the door before school.  In our house, mornings were often the hardest part of the day. One child moved slowly, just as I do. The other was quick and efficient. I hated the rush because slowness is my natural rhythm, and every morning felt like a collision between who I was and what the day demanded.

These days I meet many parents who are psychologically literate.  They have read a lot but they haven’t necessarily done their inner work.  So, even if you understand your inner child, can name your attachment style, have listened to the podcasts and read the parenting books; your child will meet the unconscious parts of you that haven't yet been integrated. Because it's when you're stressed and exhausted that those parts show up.

So when a little person cries, do you rush to fix them? Or do you shut down, explode, withdraw, go numb, feel guilty? Do you physically or psychologically leave the room?  With your teenagers do you find them too much and hard to handle so you leave them alone?  None of that makes you a bad parent. It makes you human with coping strategies you use to manage your internal experience.  We all have them.  Some of us experience these triggers a lot when our kids are little, some of us later when they are teenagers or young adults.   They are a signpost to where you need to explore your unconscious patterns.

Children have a way of touching our greatest wounds.  The places where our younger parts learned: I'm too much. I'm alone. Love has to be earned. There's no room for my needs.

Those beliefs don't live in your mind. They live in your body. That's why a toddler's tantrum, a refusal to put shoes on, a teenager's stonewalling, can awaken old grief, anger or fear inside of us because our nervous system doesn't know the difference between then and now.

The child isn't creating your triggers. Your triggers belong to you.  They're revealing the places where your younger self is still waiting for someone to choose them, for someone to stay and listen.  For someone to be interested in your emotional world.

That's why parenthood can feel so overwhelming. Children invite us into rooms within ourselves that we locked long ago and forgot existed.  Most of these rooms live in the basement of the psyche. We buried them there because what we were feeling at the time was simply too much. We dissociated, adapted, fragmented and survived. The problem is that the parts we left behind don't disappear. They wait.

Our child doesn't need us to be perfect. They need us to be conscious.  To be able to notice, to stop and pause, to repair when we have a rupture, to stay contained within ourselves whilst allowing them to have their emotional experience.  They need us to soothe them when they are young to help their nervous system learn how to soothe.  Our teenagers need some stabilisation and containment when their emotional swings are really big, so they feel safe and that there is room for them to explore who they are in the supporting container of our love.  That means when they are overwhelmed we can stay in our body, in our internal experience, soothe ourselves and stay connected to them.

Our children call us to choose differently, to make a choice that isn't reactive.  This is how we end generational patterns. Ancestral trauma gets passed down from one generation to the next until someone does the work on themselves.  When you choose to explore your inner world, to understand your coping strategies and pull them out of the basement and into the present, you are choosing to love parts of yourself that have been desperate for connection for many years.  

We can reclaim our inner child. We can reconcile with the parents who passed these patterns to us. But the greatest legacy we leave is to do our inner work, we do this for our children, they call us to be better people.

We don't need to keep carrying everything that came before us.

When we do our own healing, our children benefit. Our partners benefit. Our friendships deepen. Every relationship in our life becomes more honest, more connected and more alive.

Relationships are where we are wounded, but they are also where we heal. This is perhaps one of the greatest gifts our children offer us.

When a Child's Survival Strategy Becomes a Culture's Dysfunction

One of the things I love about the nervous system is how plastic it is.  We adapt for survival and our autonomic nervous system which drives our behaviour, adapts to keep us safe.  It is clever, so masterful in how it drives us to adapt so that we stay safe, feel a sense of belonging and receive the love we need to grow and flourish as humans.

That same survival system is also what drives maladaptive behaviour.  When we look at toxic cultures, we have to look systemically at what is driving the threat.  Often it is a leader with maladaptive traits that were developed as a child to survive.  But it can be other things too. It may also be remuneration and compensation structures that aim to foster never ending financial growth, which we know is completely unsustainable.  Maybe it is further out than that.  Maybe it is laws that are overly rigid and drive dysfunctional behaviour, it happens, and there is irony in that because in theory laws are put in place to promote safety, prosperity and harmony in society.  The point is all of this ripples out. We all know that cultural and geopolitical hegemony exists and have to look broadly at what might be going on. Most often in culture it is all these happening together.

Back to the individual though.  Our adaptive strategies start forming sometimes whilst in the womb.  Babies cannot regulate their own nervous system, they need co-regulation of parents and caregivers to learn how to soothe themselves.  We do that by attending to their cries for help, through touch, a soothing voice and meeting their needs to feed or change or soothed back to sleep.  Babies can’t survive without a parent/caregiver, they need to be fed and cared for.  When those needs aren’t met or parents are miss-attuning to them, they start to develop little strategies to receive the love, feel safe and feel like they belong to the family.  You see for a small baby or small child to not receive this attuned care, it feels like death to them.

These are adaptive strategies and as Gabor Mate says, children will choose adaptive over being their authentic selves every time.

It is here our adaptive strategies begin.  Now this is okay in childhood but as we grow and age they get in the way of our adult relationships and often lead to conflict in our intimate and platonic relationships.

I want to add that its not always about our parents.  Some of us were bullied at school, some of us had lots of sports accidents when we were teenagers that really impacted our proprioception which is our bodies’ sense of where it is in space and time.  This can cause some of these strategies to develop also.

Digital image - Kellie Stirling. An adult soothing their inner child who is metaphorically holding the ‘armour’ of their adaptive strategies.

Let's talk about some of the common strategies that I see.  Some of these are mine too!

Hyper-vigilance — We flinch at footsteps, scan every room we walk into. There's nothing wrong with us; we were just watching for the next threat so we’'d never be caught off guard.

Control — We white-knuckled every plan, every outcome, every unknown. When our past was unpredictable and unsafe, we learned that controlling the details was the only way we could sleep at night.

Overthinking — We stay awake at night, ruminating, replaying conversations from years ago, when one wrong word used to cost us everything. We thought that if we studied every angle, next time we'd see it coming.

Overexplaining — We write an essay to prove that we aren't the problem. When words were twisted or used against us, we thought if we gave enough context, we'd finally be believed.

People pleasing — We agree to things we don't really want because saying no cost us our safety when we were younger. We learned to keep everyone happy; that was the only way we stayed alive.

Perfectionism — Making a mistake felt like a death threat to us. Perfectionism shields us from the pain of losing love, avoiding criticism, and preventing abandonment by being completely flawless.

Self-abandonment — We make ourselves the last person on our list of who we look out for. When choosing ourselves meant punishment, self-abandonment taught us that disappearing, or receiving the crumbs of what was left in the love and attention department was the safest thing we could do.

Shame — Shame made us feel like we were the problem for things that were done to us. We were made to feel like we weren’t deserving of receiving love and attention.  We carried the blame because the person who hurt us didn't have the capacity to take responsibility and we have to hold it for a really long time.  

Freeze — We go deathly quiet, mid-sentence, vacant behind the eyes. When fight and flight aren't options, we froze in place so danger would pass over us. This is such a natural biological response when we are experiencing extreme threat, animals do it too.  It is just that animal’s bodies know how to shake it off and somewhere along the way our bodies stop remembering how to do that.

Dissociation — It makes us disappear when things get too loud, too close, too much. When our body couldn’t run or fight, dissociation came in and it took us somewhere we couldn't be reached.

Isolating — It made us cancel our plans, dodge the calls, and stay behind the locked door. After the people who were supposed to love us hurt us, being alone was the only place we knew to feel safe.

Growing into adulthood isn’t about eliminating these strategies, it is about becoming aware of them and not letting them run your life.  When we work with them somatically, we become so aware of them and we learn to expand our capacity to feel them so we have the choice to pause and slow them down in the moment.  To be actually present to what is happening right now and not disappear into our survival response.

I want to add that many of these strategies can give us superpowers. Here are a couple of examples. In clients that are hypervigilant, I notice they don’t miss anything going on in the meeting at the office.  Super attentive people.  The over-thinkers and over-explainers are great at managing risk in my experience.  The people pleasers, natural carers and they are always very attentive to people’s moods.  The perfectionists, whilst they can be hard to work with, their attention to detail is always exceptional in my experience, and they are generally pretty good at finishing and completion of tasks.  

It’s just that when one of these strategies (or maybe a few together) is the dominant operating strategy, it gets in the way of honesty, deep intimacy and being able to listen to and be okay with different perspectives on life and how we live it.  That is what causes friction at home and in the office.  It is what causes greed and manipulation.  It causes wars and conflict.

In my opinion, healthy adult relationships are the bedrock of a happy life. Loosening these strategies makes room for deeper intimacy, happier lives and healthier cultures.

Will I Still Belong If I Become Who I Am Becoming?

There is a question that sits quietly beneath many of life's biggest transitions.  Most of us never say it out loud.  Instead, we ask questions about careers, relationships, ageing, health, identity, purpose, or the future.  But underneath those questions is often another one:  Will I still belong if I become who I am becoming? With that there is often fear and also a quiet awareness that life as we know it cannot continue in the same way.  Sometimes it is a whisper and sometimes it is a crisis.  Either way we become aware that change is asking something of us.

That question lives somewhere below the throat. You might not have words for it yet. You might not even know you're asking it. But if you're in the middle of a significant life transition, becoming a new parent, a relationship ending, a career dissolving, a sudden life threatening illness, a version of yourself becoming suddenly ill-fitting, your nervous system is asking it on your behalf, constantly, in the background of everything.

It's not really a question about the future. It's a question about whether you are fundamentally safe to change.

What I have discovered is that thinking your way to the answer doesn't work. Not because you're not intelligent enough, but because the question isn't being asked by your intellect. It's being asked by something much older and much more fundamental, the part of you that is wired, before anything else, for connection and survival.

Last Saturday I sat in a room with a group of somatic experiencing and TCM practitioners and learned something that my body already knew.

We were working with the Five Elements of Chinese Medicine, an ancient framework that maps all of life onto a seasonal cycle. Being taught by the incredible Alaine Duncan (TaoTrauma). Metal, Water, Wood, Fire, Earth. Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, Late Summer. Each element with its own quality, its own organ system, its own emotional signature, its own role in the great turning of things.

What stopped me, what caused a kind of internal earthquake I'm not sure anyone else in the room noticed, was the moment I understood that these five elements describe not just the seasons of the natural world, but the seasons of every significant transition a human being moves through. More than that actually.  Each element carries precisely the quality of support a nervous system needs at that particular moment in the cycle.

I've been working with people in life transitions for nearly ten years. I thought I was learning something new about somatic touch work and I want to reaffirm to you that I absolutely did.  But I was also actually finding the map for territory I'd been navigating and creating by felt sense all along.  Every transition we go through has a cycle within a cycle.  These big transitions are not linear, they are fractals within a fractal.  Spirals that move in, out and around.

Digital Art, Kellie Stirling

Here's what I mean.

Every transition begins in Metal that sits with the season of Autumn. Something ends. Something is released, or taken, or outgrown. The Metal element governs our capacity for sensate awareness, the skin that registers the first chill, the gut that knows before the mind does that something has shifted, that sense we have when we experience slight arousal because our gut knows something is not quite right. The resource energy of Metal is respect. Respect for what is ending. Respect for the fragility of the threshold. Precision in how we hold what is being lost.  How might perimenopause be experienced if culturally we had more respect for what women experience at this time.  If we could offer that in a large container for them.  If getting older was not denigrated but rather respected.

In transition, Metal asks: can you let this be what it actually is?

Then comes Water, the element associated with Winter. The not-knowing. The fallow. The period that our culture is most brutal about rushing, most intolerant of sitting inside. Water is where fear lives, but also where wisdom gestates. You cannot see the shape of what's coming yet. The resource energy here is protection,  to anchor, to contain, to hold someone steady while they cannot yet hold themselves.  This is often where we reach out to others for help, trying to regulate through connection.  Our tribal need to connect to help us regulate ourselves through the fear that is rising up.  This is where providing a container of support is really useful.  In Australia, new mothers are connected with other new mothers in a mothers groups so they can have connection during this time.

Water asks: can you bear not knowing what comes next?

Wood is Spring.  Spring cannot be manufactured. But when the conditions are right, when there has been enough winter, something moves. Wood governs the mobilisation of life force, the capacity for healthy anger and also hope.  It is directed forward movement.  Life wants you to move, something new is trying to emerge. A dream that was never pursued, or a  truth that was never acknowledged. A boundary that was never spoken. The resource required here is encouragement. Encouragement is not pushing, it is standing alongside someone and quietly saying: "I think you can trust this next step."

 In our training room last Saturday, a colleague placed her supportive hands under my ankles. The intention with the somatic touch was encouragement and support in the spirit of a coach. As I was lying there I felt a moving forward energy in my body. Then an image arrived in my mind, unbidden, I was running through a field of flowers in pure delight. That's Wood. That's what an unimpeded mobilisation response actually feels like in a body that has been through enough winter. Whilst the resource energy for wood is encouragement, the felt sense is of something or someone believing in your capacity to move, even when you cannot yet believe it yourself.

Wood asks: what wants to emerge through you now?

Fire is Summer, coherence restored. This is the moment in a transition when you suddenly start to know yourself again, when the scattered pieces find their arrangement and come together in a new constellation, when connection becomes possible again. Fire governs the heart, and the heart's capacity to communicate both danger and equanimity to the whole system. The resource energy is love, not sentiment, but the agape quality of full, unconditional presence. Being truly met.

Fire asks: can you let yourself be known again?

Finally Earth, the arrival of late summer, the harvest. This is where the gristle gets digested. Where the lessons move from being things that happened to you into being part of who you are. Where the gut microbiome, the immune system, the capacity for giving and receiving, all of it comes back online. This is the time in a life transition where we have enough distance from the challenge that we can harvest the lessons we have learned along the way.  In menopause in TCM this time is known as the second spring.  The resource energy is support  coming from underneath, nurturing, a trust and knowing that the ground is holding you rather than you holding yourself up.

Earth asks: what has this made you?

Then we move back to Metal again.  Metal is both the beginning and ending of a cycle.  Life is nothing but a series of transitions, beginnings, middles and endings that keep on happening.

Respect. Protection. Encouragement. Love. Support.

Five different answers to the same question. Will I still belong if I become who I am becoming?

Yes. When we are in transition we feel like we have lost our inner compass because our nervous system is often rewiring and this affects other systems in our body.  When we experience all of this it offers a sense of what it feels like to belong within a transition.  Within each season of our life.

The reason transitions are so hard in our culture is not that we lack resilience. It's that we treat them as problems to be solved rather than seasons to be moved through. We try to think our way to summer while our bodies are standing in the frost. We pathologise winter and try to get out of it as soon as we can, often without support. We rush spring. We skip the harvest because we're already anxious about the next thing ending.

But the body knows. The body has always known. What it needs, what it has always needed is not a solution. It is the right quality of presence for the season it is actually in.

When you help someone belong to themselves through a winter they didn't choose, you are doing something that ripples far beyond the room. A nervous system that has been met in its fear, encouraged in its spring, and supported in its harvest doesn't mobilise that unresolved energy outward. It completes the cycle. It becomes available for connection, for contribution, for the next season, whatever it brings.

You don't learn this with your mind first. You learn it the way I did last Saturday through highly attuned presence of another person, sitting with you and holding space for you through it.  With that your  body suddenly remembers what moving forward safely feels like.

That's where we start. Not with the answer to the belonging question. With the conditions that make the question safe enough to ask.

Here are some reflection questions for you if this resonates with you.

Can I respect what is ending in my life? How can I protect myself in uncertainty? What do I need to be able to encourage what is emerging? Can I meet myself with love? What support do I need to foster time and space for the integration of my experience?

Leaning into longing: the distance between being heard and held.

There's something quietly poignant happening right now. People are turning to AI for something that feels like companionship.   A place to be heard. A presence that's available, patient, non-reactive. I don't say that dismissively, because I understand the impulse completely. We are living through an epidemic of loneliness so profound that we will reach toward almost anything that approximates the feeling of being held. The feeling of being connected with another, with each other.

What I keep coming back to is this, what people are actually reaching for isn't information or even reflection. It's the experience of mattering to another nervous system. That mattering to another nervous system, as much as we might wish otherwise, cannot be replicated by a machine.

That is because the nervous system is fundamentally a relational ‘organ’.  It likes to be with others to co-regulate.  It likes connection, choice and agency. What people are reaching for is not information but relationship. The nervous system develops in relationship, heals in relationship and, throughout our lives, continues to seek the regulating presence of other humans.

I must admit, I work on my own a little and I find myself craving the connection of other humans in person. When I have days when I am writing I will often go and plonk myself in a cafe just to be around other people. It might be surprising to you that these days are often my most creative.

We tend to think of connection as a social skill. Something we learn, practice, get better at. But underneath the social layer, connection is a somatic experience. It happens in the body before it happens anywhere else.

When you feel truly met by another person, that feeling of really being seen and being with a person who can hold your experience in their body and stay in connection with you, well something in your physiology shifts. Your breathing changes. Your muscles soften. The part of your brain scanning for threat quiets down just enough to let something else come forward. This is not a metaphor. It is the nervous system doing what it evolved to do: co-regulate with another.

This is why genuine connection is so hard to fake, and so hard to find. It requires two people who each have enough internal settledness to stay present, not just cognitively, but somatically, when things get uncomfortable. When the conversation touches something real. When the other person's activation starts to move through the room.

Most of us never learned how to do this. Not because we're broken, but because most of us grew up in environments where the adults around us hadn't learned either. Neither did their parents or grandparents.  The lack of capacity, inability to attune, it gets passed down through the generations.

Many people talk about the concept of moving our orientation from me to we.  This is not a new phrase, it has been around for quite a few years but what does it actually mean from an embodiment perspective?

Here's the paradox at the heart of relational work: you can't genuinely be with another person until you've developed enough capacity to be with yourself. This isn't about self-sufficiency or emotional independence. It's about having enough internal space to notice what's happening inside you without being completely run by it. To feel your irritation, your fear, your contraction and still stay in the room. Still stay in the relationship, still stay in your body and not dissociate or project it onto another person.

Without that internal witnessing capacity, connection collapses into reaction. We move fast. We get irritated, or angry and we defend. We assert. We project what we can't metabolise internally onto the people around us and then wonder why we feel so alone even in company.

The ‘me’ work isn't selfish. It's the foundation that makes ‘we’ possible.  To receive, we have to learn how to listen with our body, with all our five senses.  In a world where striving, action and constant motion is celebrated and rewarded, where people are expected to ignore their own basic bodily functions and boundaries all the time and keep on doing, this can be hard and slow work. It often feels unsafe for a body that is constantly in motion to slow down. It's also hard when your value is attached to productivity, the state becomes a trait. But it's not who you are. What if you could titrate your experience of slowing down a little bit at a time so that you could feel safe to just be. To receive the presence of another, to really listen and not have to fix anything or be fixed.

One of the things I notice consistently in my work, with individuals navigating midlife transitions, with leaders in organisations, with people doing the slow, courageous work of trauma integration, is how hard it is to receive.

Not just to receive care or support, though that's part of it. But to receive the experience of being held by another person and let it actually land. To feel it in the body rather than process it in the head. To let it matter.

For many people, especially those whose early experiences taught them that support wasn't reliable or safe, this is genuinely threatening. The nervous system that learned to survive on self-sufficiency doesn't easily soften into ‘we’. Even when ‘we’ is right there, available and real.

I've sat with individuals and groups in sessions where something quite profound has happened, a moment of genuine attunement, a shift in the room and watched them move past it almost immediately, back into their head, back into their story, because the body didn't yet have a map for what just occurred.

Building that map is slow work. It happens through repeated experience, not insight. Through the body, not the mind.

Back to AI.  Let's talk about what it can and cannot offer. I want to be honest here, because I think the nuance matters.  I think there is real value in AI as a reflection tool.

There is something useful in having a space to think out loud. A patient, available presence that reflects without reacting. I use AI in my own work to test ideas, to do business analyst work that I don’t have time to do.  That's real.

But nothing in an AI interaction is changed by contact with you. It isn't moved by your story. It doesn't carry you between sessions. It can't offer you the experience of mattering to another nervous system because it doesn't have one.  You can reflect to AI over a tricky experience you had with others and whilst it reflects back to you, nothing in it is changed by the experience that it is witnessing.  It doesn’t actually sense the relational field like our nervous systems do. It can recognise the significance of it but it doesn’t feel anything.  The mutuality of relationships is that our nervous system is changed by the interactions we have with others.  That fact is exactly what makes human relationships irreplaceable.

That mutuality, that being-changed-by-each-other, is precisely what makes human relationships the irreplaceable thing they are. Real connection leaves marks on both people. That's not a bug. That's the whole point.

There is a longing for ‘we’ that we are all desperately hungry for, that feeling of connection we receive from the nervous system of another human who is able to be with our experience and let it be.

What I believe people are reaching for in therapy, in AI, in every form of connection they can find, is the experience of not being alone with their inner life. Of having it witnessed, held, accompanied by another.

That experience is available. But it lives on the other side of the ‘me’ work. It requires a nervous system that has enough capacity to stay slow when things move fast. To receive when receiving feels vulnerable. To be genuinely present to another person without losing yourself in the process.

That's not a social skill. It's a somatic one that is learnable slowly, in the body, in relationship with others, over time. Which is, perhaps, the most human thing there is.

Permission to be slow

There is a rhythm in the body that most of us have never been taught to feel.  It is actually really hard to feel or listen to.

It is not the rhythm of the heart, though that too. Nor is it the rhythm of the breath, though that is closer. It is actually deeper than both of those and also slower than both.  It is a deep rhythm that feels a bit like it is a tidal movement in the body that pulses beneath everything else. It is two deep rhythms, like a deep tide and a middle tide. Or as my teacher described it is like the ocean, which holds both a surface current and a deep undercurrent. The body carries its own layered rhythms. Both are real. Both carry information.They are deep and they require something most of us have forgotten how to do.

It requires us to slow down enough to feel it.

This year I have been completing training in biodynamic craniosacral therapy, a modality that works with exactly this. What struck me most, is how radically unhurried it is. The touch is extraordinarily light, almost weightless actually. The practitioner's hands don't press or manipulate or fix. They listen. They receive. They create enough stillness that the body's own intelligence can begin to express itself.

Art, Vanessa Palmer, Beneath the Lillies 2019

This is a different kind of healing to the one most of us have been taught to expect.

We come to healing whether it be to therapy, to coaching, to body work, often looking for something to happen. We want the insight, the release, the shift we can point to. We have been trained, particularly those of us who live from our minds, to measure progress by what we can articulate and what we can feel ourselves changing. We are used to effort. We are used to working hard, even at our healing.  I would say that many of my clients work incredibly hard.  They show up, they invest in themselves.  I do this too.  I always have, even with my own healing work.

Craniosacral therapy quietly dismantles all of that. Before the body can heal, it needs to feel safe enough to be itself.

This is not a metaphor. It is a biological reality. The nervous system, particularly one shaped by years of high-functioning stress or early relational difficulty, is not simply waiting to be fixed. It is waiting to be met. It is scanning, constantly, for whether the environment, including the practitioner, is trustworthy enough to soften into.  I talked about this last week in my blog when I was discussing how the nervous system is always scanning for safety in belonging and trying to work out what role it can take up in the social system.  It's the same theme.

Attunement is what creates that safety. Not technique. Not expertise, though expertise matters. But the quality of presence that says, “I am not here to rush you. I am not here to interpret or analyse or pull anything from you. I am here to be with what is”.

There are things the body carries that have no words.

Not because they are mysterious or unknowable but because they arrived before language did, or at a moment when language shut down. Shock held in the diaphragm. Grief folded into the chest. A startle response stuck in the body. The memory of a moment when the body braced and never quite let go.

Talk therapy doesn’t reach this because it deals with what is in the rational and logical part of the brain, not the limbic system and primal brain, where the nervous system lives, that holds all the patterns of bracing, tension or stress we may not be fully aware of. The body stores experience in tissue, in posture, in the patterned way the breath moves or doesn't move. Sometimes what a body most needs is not to be spoken to, but to be touched, with such fine attunement, such precision of presence, that the tissue begins to trust it is safe to release what it has been holding.

This is what the lightness of biodynamic craniosacral touch makes possible. It is not passive. It is listening at a cellular level. It is a hand that says, ‘I can feel you. I am not frightened of what I find. You don't have to do anything’.

That kind of touch is a language. One the body recognises before the mind has time to evaluate it. The body is the most incredible self healer.

What continues to move me, both as a practitioner and as a person who has spent years working with what the body holds. It is not the practitioner doing the healing, it is the person on the table receiving the gentle touch.

The body already knows. It has always known. The intelligence that knows how to close a wound, regulate temperature, move food through the gut without a single conscious instruction from us; that same intelligence knows how to process and integrate experience, when it is given enough safety and enough time.

My job as a somatic practitioner is not to fix. It is to create conditions. To hold space that is regulated, attuned, and unhurried enough that the body's own healing capacity can come online.

Slow is not passive. Slow is the speed at which the nervous system's deepest layers operate. Slow is the speed at which the tidal rhythms of the body move, carrying their information. Slow, it turns out, is where the most profound healing lives.  I have constantly been surprised by how much depth and nuance can be achieved when we slow things down. It allows stress cycles that have been stuck for years to be completed.  It creates a level of unwinding in the body that can only happen when the body is not rushed.  Slow is more. 

If you are someone who has worked hard at your healing; and I suspect many of you reading this are, I want to offer you this.

You are allowed to receive.

Not just information. Not just insight. Not just techniques to practise between sessions. But the quiet, almost-nothing of being held in a regulated, attuned presence and allowed to simply be. The body does not need to be pushed into healing. It needs to be trusted to know the way.

Permission to be slow is not a luxury. For a nervous system that has been organised around effort and vigilance and productivity, it may be the most therapeutic thing on offer.

The tide is always moving. We simply need to learn to feel it.

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.

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.

The wisdom women carry

Reflections on International Women’s Day.

I am a bit late to international women’s day this year. It happened on the weekend, we had a long weekend where I live and my week last week was really hectic. It arrived before I realised what date it actually was. Sometimes I get a bit ‘meh..’ about it too.

International Women’s Day often celebrates women for their achievements. The roles we hold, the barriers we break, the leadership we demonstrate. All of these things are very important. But I wanted to bring to your attention the deeper truth I witness in my work with women is something quieter, older, and far more powerful. It is the wisdom women carry in their bodies.

The wisdom forged through cycles of life. Through life’s transitions, challenges and the roles we take up in our lives. This wisdom that is forged through birth and loss, relationships that begin and end, careers that are built then changed, and identities that reshaped. All of this through the long and often invisible work of healing.

Women’s bodies are cyclical by nature. We are designed for seasons; for expansion, contraction, renewal and rest. Yet many of us have spent decades living inside systems that expect us to operate like machines: linear, productive, always moving forward.

Digital Art, Kellie Stirling

However, a woman’s body never forgets its inherent nature. Eventually it calls us back and there are many different ways it speaks to us to do that. Often this call becomes louder during or after the big life transitions of becoming a mother and in our midlife when perimenopause arrives.

In midlife in particular, things really start to get shaken up. The old identities that once held us together begin to loosen. The roles that defined us, mother, partner, professional, caretaker often no longer fit in the same way they once did. What can start to feel like we have lost our inner compass a little at this point. What can feel like disorientation is actually something else entirely.

A threshold.

In my work as a somatic experiencing practitioner and somatic coach, I often see women arrive at this threshold carrying years of invisible labour, emotional labour, relational labour and generational patterns they have carried quietly for their families and communities.

When we slow down enough to listen to the body, something remarkable happens. The nervous system begins to soften and the old protective patterns that once helped us survive can gently loosen their grip.

Beneath those protective patterns something else emerges. It is not weakness or fragility. It is profound strength and a deep sense of knowing. This sense of knowing, this strength, comes from women who have lived.

What does it mean to have lived? It comes from our lived experience where we have have felt deeply, lost deeply, loved deeply. It looks like women who have learned that true power does not come from pushing harder, but from becoming more deeply connected to themselves, to their bodies, and to the web of life around them.

International Women’s Day, for me, is not only about celebrating what women achieve in the world. It is about honouring the depth of women’s inner worlds. Women who try so very hard to keep healing and growing as human beings. It comes from honouring the quiet courage it takes to heal and the wisdom that emerges when we listen to the body.

I notice the profound capacity women have to transform pain into compassion, for themselves, for others, and for future generations. When a woman heals, the ripple effect of it travels far beyond her. There is a saying that the mother is the anchor in the family system and constellation; when mum is okay, the family is okay. So when a woman works on her own healing the ripple effect is to all the social system she exists within. To her family, her intimate and platonic relationships and to her leadership.

The impact is far reaching.

So today I honour the women who are doing the deep work, the women who are reclaiming their bodies. The women questioning the systems they were taught to live inside and learning to reconnect with their deep knowing and learning to trust it again.

This kind of change rarely makes headlines but it is the kind of change that has a huge impact, one tiny step at a time.

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?

Functional Freeze: When you are coping but not living

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

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

This is what we call, functional freeze.

What is functional freeze?

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

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

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

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

Digital Art, Kellie Stirling

How does functional freeze develop?

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

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

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

Until it doesn’t.

Why functional freeze often shows up in midlife?

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

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

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

This isn’t failure.

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

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

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

What helps functional freeze begin to thaw?

Functional freeze doesn’t resolve through insight alone.

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

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

The invitation of functional freeze

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

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