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?

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.

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.

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.

Emotions are not thoughts they are physiology

One of the things I often see and hear, especially during perimenopause is, “I am feeling emotionally out of control” or “I am feeling things that I have never felt before there must be something wrong with me”.  Whilst I have compassion for people feeling that they are on an emotional rollercoaster my first thought is often, what is wrong with feeling emotions?  What did this person learn about emotions when they were growing up and were they allowed to have big emotions when they were a kid.

A lot of clients I have had what I call emotionally neglectful childhoods.  Their parents did not foster their emotional life.  They did not let them have big emotions when they were young.  They were either punished physically or through isolation.  So they learned that expressing emotion was not safe.  

This is more common than you think.

I have sat across from people, brilliant people, some of the most self-aware clients I've worked with, who could narrate their own psychology like a well-rehearsed lecture. They have done the work.  They knew exactly where the pattern came from. They could name the childhood dynamic, trace the attachment wound, explain the trigger with clinical precision. However, when the moment came, maybe being on the receiving end of criticism, silence, or a raised voice,  their body did the same thing it had always done. The same collapse. The same flood of heat. The same bracing.

Understanding hadn't touched it. Not because they weren't insightful enough. Because insight was never going to be the thing that touched it.  Emotions are not a thinking thing, they are physiological.

This is the quiet, exhausting secret of so much personal growth work: you can know everything about why you feel the way you do, and still feel it. You can try and push it away with your mind but it still lives there silently in the background running everything.  Willpower doesn't reach it. Positive thinking doesn't reach it. Even deep, accurate self-understanding doesn't reach it; because none of these operate in the place where the emotion actually lives.

Here's why. The nervous system responds to threat and safety faster than the thinking mind can form a sentence about it. By the time you've had the thought, I'm getting defensive right now, your body has already braced, already flooded, already moved. The mind narrates. The body decides. There is no amount of narrating after the fact that reaches back in time to change the decision.

This is why you can understand everything and still feel exactly the same. The gap isn't a failure of insight. It's a category error, trying to think your way out of something that was never a thinking problem to begin with.

Which is why the work that actually shifts things doesn't start with a better story. It starts in the body itself.  Experiencing slowing down enough to notice the bracing before it completes, building enough capacity in the nervous system that it doesn't have to slam the same door every time. In practice this can look undramatic: a hand noticing it's clenched, a breath that's allowed to finish, a session where nothing is explained but something, quietly, unclenches.  When we slow down and let stuck stress responses be completed, when we touch into the physiological expression of an emotion we let it move and we build capacity to feel it.  The defensive or protective action of the autonomic nervous system doesn’t shut it down or bypass it.

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling

What is the natural physiology of emotions?  Here are some examples.

Grief isn't just sadness. It's the weight in your chest that cognitive understanding never lifts.  It is the body wanting to lie down to let that grief be expressed and that fear we all have that if we lie down we may never get back up again.

Anger isn't a mood. It's heat rising through your body, a tightening in the jaw, before your mind has even found the reason. The body moving into a protective posture.  It is a boundary that has been violated and the body wanting to say no. It is the body preparing to push away danger.

Shame isn't a feeling. It's your body collapsing inward, your chest curling, your eyes dropping downward before you're even aware that it's happening.

Anxiety isn't just a worry. It's your nervous system rehearsing every possible ending, over and over, trying to manage risk and the potential scenarios that might happen, faster than thought can keep up.

None of these are thoughts. They are physiology, that distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.  

The state of our nervous system drives our behaviour and that physiology that I mentioned is our bodies natural response that goes with it and helps it move through.  So when you learn all your life to dampen it down or pack it away, when it randomly starts to come up because your body is exhausted and can't keep the lid on it anymore no wonder you feel overwhelmed.  No wonder you feel exhausted with it.  Imagine the amount of energy it takes to repress all that emotion and you have been doing it for 40 or 50 years.  

Learning to self-attune, to sense and interpret our internal experience, what's sometimes called interoception, is an important skill. Our emotions carry information: what matters to us, what hurts, what we need and what we want to change. When we can hear that information clearly, we can make choices that actually serve us. When we can't, when we override or ignore it, we self-abandon. We stop listening to ourselves, which means we stop knowing what we actually need.

Your body wants you to listen.

It has been trying to tell you this for a long time, it is ready for a change and to do life differently.  So instead of medication what if you learned to feel more safety in your body so that you could own and express your emotions in a way that didn’t feel too much. Like you were too much.

Finding our inner fire

How do we hold our power in service of what matters most?

A woman sits across from me and tells me she never gets angry and she thinks she might have a problem with boundaries. She says it like a diagnosis, almost like an apology. She wants to learn how to say no. She wants scripts, maybe. A formula. But what she's actually telling me, underneath the words, is that she has lost access to a part of herself.

I see this constantly in my practice. Women, often deeply competent, articulate, successful women, who can navigate almost anything except the felt sense of their own no. When we start to work somatically rather than cognitively, something interesting happens: the no doesn't arrive alone. It brings the yes with it.

This is not a skills problem, it is a capacity problem.

We tend to talk about boundaries as if they're a technique. Say this sentence. Hold this line. Don't over-explain. But boundaries aren't really built from the outside in. They're an expression of something underneath  your capacity to feel your own healthy aggression.

I don't mean aggression as violence or hostility. I mean it in the older, more honest sense: the felt charge of “I exist, I take up space, I will push back if I need to”. It's the energetic foundation beneath every no that actually lands not from anxiety, not from over-explanation, but from a settled, embodied place.

Most of the women I work with didn't lose this capacity through some dramatic event. They lost it gradually, often in childhood, sometimes through culture more than through any single relationship.  They learned early in their life that their fire made other people uncomfortable, so it got smaller, quieter, eventually unconscious.

What is surprising to most people is that they find that when we rebuild that capacity, what comes back isn't just the ability to say no. It's the ability to feel everything more fully, including joy and pleasure.  They start to get better at expressing what they desire because with the feeling of safety and what a NO feels like, also comes the kind of full-bodied yes that doesn't come with a flicker of guilt attached to it. The same nervous system gate that was clamped down on anger was clamped down on delight. You can't selectively numb. When you reclaim capacity for one exalted state, you tend to reclaim it for all of them.

So I know you are probably thinking right now, what does healthy aggression actually look like?

This is the part people misunderstand most. They hear "healthy aggression" and picture confrontation; raised voices, conflict, some kind of fire-breathing transformation.

Often it looks like almost nothing at all.

A woman with real capacity for her No can say "no thanks" and feel completely unbothered by it. No story. No spiral. No rehearsing the conversation for three days afterward. The protective response did its job, quietly, and then it was finished. That ease, that lack of charge, is the proof of capacity, not the absence of it.

Drama only enters when the no didn't get to happen early enough, or often enough, for the system to trust that it would be heard. The fire isn't supposed to need to roar. It only roars when it's been ignored.

Culturally we view anger in women as shameful. Why?

I find myth genuinely useful here, not as decoration but as a way of making meaning out of something the body already knows. Lilith is one of the oldest stories we have of a woman exiled not for wrongdoing, but for refusal.  Lilith was the woman who refuses to extinguish her fire to make others comfortable.  She said I will not shrink myself to belong.

If you haven’t heard of Lillith, she was an interesting  woman.  According to early creation myths, Lilith was the first woman created from the exact same soil as Adam. She refused to be subordinate or lie beneath him because she knew they were spiritual equals. As an archetype she asks you to examine where in your life you are settling for less than true equality.

That's the pattern so many women carry quietly: the sense that their fire, their refusal, their full-throated aggression was never met with curiosity. It was met with the message that maybe we are too much. So our nervous system does what any intelligent nervous system does under threat it adapts. We got smaller and found ways to be palatable instead of present.

Reclaiming Lilith isn't about becoming dangerous. It's about no longer mistaking your own aliveness for a threat. It's recognising that the parts of you that got exiled your appetite, your refusal, your fire were never the problem. They were simply too much for the room you were in at the time.  Lilith represents the wild, untamed truth of your soul that refuses to be tamed, managed, or approved of by others

Many women find that Lillith arrives for them in perimenopause.  I want to talk about this because I think it explains so much of what shows up in midlife that gets pathologised instead of understood.

In perimenopause and menopause, something arrives that I think of as the muse, the essential self, the part that was exiled long ago and has been waiting, patiently, for the conditions to change. In perimenopause, the hormonal conditions do change. Hormonally, developmentally, something shifts and the lid that's been sitting on decades of suppressed fire starts to lift, often whether a woman is ready for it or not.

If there's no capacity built underneath that shift, it doesn't arrive as clarity. It arrives as leakage. Rage that seems disproportionate to its trigger. Reactivity that surprises even the woman feeling it. This isn't pathology, and it isn't really about whoever happens to be standing nearby when it surfaces. It's decades of unspoken no finally getting loud enough to be heard, because the quiet no, when we felt safe, was never honoured in the first place.

This is the real difference between healthy aggression and what we usually call rage. Healthy aggression is directed, contained, proportionate, it knows what it's responding to. Rage without capacity is undirected. It escapes containment because the container was never built. The fire was always there. It just never had enough space on the inside of us to hold it.

Women who've done some of this capacity work on connecting with healthy aggression before the hormonal shift tend to meet their muse as something like a homecoming. Women who haven't can get ambushed by her, by themselves, in a way that can feel disorienting and even frightening.

I want to come back to where this started, because I think it's the part that matters most. The more capacity I've built for my own deep no, the more grounded I feel. Not more guarded. Not more isolated. More grounded, more able to actually be present for my life, because I'm not spending energy holding a lid on something that wants to move.

This is the real promise of healthy aggression. It isn't about becoming harder, or more combative, or less relational. It's about widening your capacity for the whole range of being alive, your no, your yes, your fire, your joy. Capacity for life, really, in the broadest sense.

The fire was never meant to burn anything down. It was only ever meant to keep you warm enough to stay present to your own life, all of it, not just the parts that were easy to feel.  I think this is the bigger change we learn to work with in midlife. How do we tend to our inner fire and keep the embers burning.  This makes me think of Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth, whose sole role was to keep the hearth burning.  

What I love about Hestia is that she wasn't the goddess of achievement, seduction, battle, or even transformation, she was the keeper of the sacred flame.  The fire that allowed everything else to happen.  In Greek mythology, she stayed at the centre. While the other gods and goddesses were caught up in dramas, quests, rivalries, romances, and wars, Hestia tended the hearth.  There is something profoundly midlife about that.  It is not about withdrawal from life but a movement toward our essence.  The developmental challenge of midlife is coming back to the truth of who we are.

We start to ask ourselves what truly matters now? What is worth investing my energy in?  What keeps my inner flame alive?  From a nervous system perspective, this is such a different way from how our culture frames and portrays vitality.  In popular culture, it is portrayed as worship of the bonfire.  Constant activity, productivity and performance, the endless quest for wellness and self improvement.  Hestia reminds us that endurance comes from a different kind of fire.  The hearth fire is steady, reliable, warm and sustainable.

So Lillith energy invites us to find our fire and build capacity for it and Hestia energy invites us to know how to hold is wisely. To ask ourselves, how do I become a trustworthy keeper of my own inner fire?

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.

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.

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?

The kings and queens of the push through

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

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

It is a body in freeze.

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

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

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling, People thawing their freeze

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

So how does this overachieving freeze pattern start?

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

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

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

Productivity culture is built on functional freeze.

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

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

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

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

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

This is why burnout in midlife spikes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your needs matter.

Fawning: why we mirror, merge and self-abandon

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

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

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

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

Digital Art, Kellie Stirling. Woman merged with nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do we stop Fawning?

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

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

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

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

Lying in the Dark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burnout, chronic stress and boundaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Myth of Resilience

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

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

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

Systemic Boundaries and the Body

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

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

When Agility becomes agitation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it doesn’t always knock gently.

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

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

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

And with that call comes a kind of heartbreak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grief is your friend.

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

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

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

The freedom to be your true self.

Healing our abandonment wounds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art - Giulia Rosa

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

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

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

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

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

Why the feminine is the change maker - part 2

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

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

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

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

Digital image - Womb in the Sky, Kellie Stirling

Why does the feminine change first?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the feminine are the change makers - part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women’s bodies are literally designed to attune:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The big challenge.

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

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

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

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

Midlife, when the cost and payment becomes due.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We were never meant to carry it all.

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

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

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

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

Part 2, coming next week…..

Breaking the cycles of ancestral trauma, a pathway to freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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