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.

When our inner child is leading the fight

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

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

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

Artist unknown, From Burning Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In adult relationships, this can look like:

• Over-functioning

• Carrying the emotional load for both partners

• Resentment building beneath “being fine”

• Struggling to ask for help or show vulnerability

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

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

In adult relationships, this can show up as:

• Anger that feels bigger and disproportionate to the moment

• Defensiveness or blaming

• A sense of being misunderstood or unfairly criticised

• Feeling chronically “wrong” or rejected

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

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

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

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

In adult relationships, this often looks like:

• Withdrawal or emotional shutdown

• Avoidance of conflict

• Difficulty expressing wants or desires

• A partner feeling shut out or alone

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

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

Why do fights often escalate so fast?

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

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

• Can stay present

• Can hold complexity

• Can self-soothe

• Can take responsibility without collapsing or attacking

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

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

From Fighting to Repair

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

• Recognise when your adaptive child is running the interaction

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

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

• Speak from the present rather than the past

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

The Quiet Shift That Changes Everything

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

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

Here are some reflection questions for you to sit with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lying in the Dark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belonging everywhere, nowhere and to ourselves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Menopause, coming home to the body's wisdom

It is world menopause awareness month, and like I do every year, I am going to write about it and focus on it for a few weeks. I coach clients through many different life transitions, and menopause wrapped into our broader midlife transition, is the most challenging many people experience. That is because for many of us, our body is going through such a profound shift and biological rewiring, that most of us cannot push through it.

Which is annoying for many because if you are a Gen Xer, you learned to be the Queen of the push through.

Much of the conversation around menopause today is about managing symptoms; balancing hormones, finding the right supplement, or seeking a medical fix for what feels uncomfortable. While these supports can be helpful, they only touch the surface of what this transition is truly inviting us into.

Menopause is not a medical condition to be managed. It’s a profound biological and emotional reorientation; a call to come home to the body’s wisdom after decades of living in our heads, pushing through, and taking care of everyone else.

For many of the women I work with, mostly Gen X women, this transition feels like hitting a wall. For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 70s, a time when emotional awareness simply wasn’t part of family life, we are suddenly faced with a bucket load of previously ignored feelings and we cannot seem to stop them anymore. We never learned how to safely experience them in the first place. Major things happened in our families and in our communities when we were growing up, and often, no one talked about them. We spent our teenage years roaming the streets after school, hanging out with friends, figuring life out on our own. There was freedom in that, but also a quiet loneliness. We learned early on that to cope, we had to hold it together and we had to do that on our own or learn from each other.

I don’t know about you but I have never met a teenager with a regulated nervous system; its more about co-dysregulation that co-regulation. Which is not surprising given the hormonal shifts and brain rewiring going on in their bodies. Guess what? Our bodies are doing the same thing but in the opposite direction, preparing us for the next stage of life.

As a result, many of us became women who are both hyper-independent and who have incredibly high standards. We are for the most part, competent, capable, and relentlessly self-sufficient. We learned to fix things, to keep going, to never need too much. Somewhere along the way, we equated worthiness with being in control.

But menopause calls all of that into question.

The body begins to speak in new ways through heat, sleeplessness, tears, irritability, or sudden waves of emotion that can feel both foreign and inconvenient. These aren’t problems to be solved; they are signals from the body, asking for attention, softness, and presence.

In my work, I see how powerful it is when women learn to be with what’s happening rather than fight against it. When we slow down and notice the sensations moving through us, the tightness, the bracing, the pulsing, the warmth, the ache, we start to rebuild a relationship of trust with our own body. Over time, this presence helps us gently accept what arises and to fully inhabit our experience.

Many people find at this time in life they have to go back and educated themselves on many things about their body, particularly the impact of changes to our sex hormones, on the hormonal cocktail within our body. It is not just about estrogen and progesterone, there is also insulin, ghrelin, leptin and cortisol levels that are impact by these shifts. They impact both our metabolic health and also our emotional health because our endocrine system is the deepest system in our body and all our body systems work together.

As women learn about their changing body they become more comfortable in their it; they often notice that their relationships shift too. When we’re no longer fighting or fleeing from our own discomfort, we stop projecting it outward. There’s less reactivity with our partners, our kids, our colleagues. There’s more space for connection, empathy, and repair.

There is often a bit of work to do here because most of us did not have our emotional lives fostered as children and teenagers. Combine that with a good whack of cultural shame about having feelings, about women’s menstruality, about being a good girl and not rocking the boat, there is a lot of unpack.

Menopause will show you where you need to focus your attention because it will bring it up front and centre for you to pay attention to. If you don’t attend to it, it will just hang around until you do. So that anger and resentment that has reared its head. That is your body’s wisdom asking you to learn to hold healthy aggression in your body. We need to have anger, it protects our boundaries, it keeps us safe and it fuels our passions.

This is one of the quiet gifts of menopause: it brings us back into relationship, first with ourselves, and then with others.

But this process isn’t easy for our generation. We were raised to keep moving, to stay strong, to fix. Softening, resting, and receiving can feel unnatural, even wrong. Yet that’s precisely what this life stage is asking of us. It’s a somatic initiation, a shift from doing to being, from control to surrender, from self-criticism to self-compassion.

When we begin to trust the body’s wisdom, menopause becomes less about loss and more about liberation. It’s an opportunity to unlearn the old patterns that kept us safe but small, and to step into a more grounded, embodied form of power. One that no longer relies on effort, but on presence.

Menopause isn’t the end of vitality. It’s the beginning of living from a deeper, wiser rhythm, one that the body has known all along. It is a gentle reminder to pause, breathe and notice what your body is telling you.

Healing through relationships

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

But they’re also something deeper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We find home.

Healing our abandonment wounds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art - Giulia Rosa

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

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

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

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

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