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.

Belonging everywhere, nowhere and to ourselves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things I have learned about meeting my edges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ancestral Trauma and the Midlife Body

How midlife awakens the ancestral stories we carry in our bodies

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

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

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

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

What is Ancestral Trauma?

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

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

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

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

Why does this show up in midlife?

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

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

Our body is a storyteller.

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

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

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

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

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

The ripple of healing.

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

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

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

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

Menopause, coming home to the body's wisdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But menopause calls all of that into question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The power of midlife initiation

Our culture, driven by the cosmetics industry, has created a very distorted, narrow narrative around women, ageing and menopause. One the one hand we are subjected to endless anti-ageing advertising that equates youth with worth, desirability and visibility. On the other side there is a one size fits all mainstream solution, given to women when they reach perimenopause or menopause that HRT will solve all their problems and you can carry on as if nothing has changed.

All of this ignore a deeper truth; menopause is not a problem to fix. It is a profound transition physiologically, psychological and spiritually. In many cultures, it has been seen as an initiation into wisdom and power. Our western productivity focused culture, dismisses that and is focused on keeping women youthful and functional rather than moving through this transition with dignity, agency and choice.

What is frustrating for me about this is it creates many big losses and maladaptive issues. The two biggest I see are:

• They don’t get the holistic support they need to actually learn to listen to their body, honour its new rhythms and integrate changes and,

• For society in general, we miss out on the leadership, wisdom and creativity once women aren’t hormonally geared toward reproduction and are able and free to channel that energy somewhere else.

When women step into this new season of life, they expand into their social and relational power. This is the stage of eldership, where wisdom, creativity, and leadership can flourish.

I am not saying HRT is wrong, it can be super supportive when you are going through this transition which takes years, but it shouldn’t be the only story. Midlife offers an invitation to step into a new way of being with our body and with life itself, rather than staying locked in the old story.

Menopause, when not pathologised, is often a time when childhood and ancestral trauma comes to the surface, because the body is less able and willing to keep these patterns locked down. Hormonal changes will drive changes in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) so layers of freeze stuck in the ANS can come up strongly. It is your body telling you it cannot carry this anymore.

I do a lot of work helping women reclaim healthy aggression and what I find is that we are so culturally conditioned to suppress our anger, which is suppressing our life force energy, our boundaries and our right to take up space. So doing this work to reclaim our aggression is deeply countercultural. Because what the cultural script tells women is quiet down, look young, stay useful in ways we deem okay (appearance, productivity and caretaking). The deep truth about menopause is it asks us to reclaim all of this. It is inviting us to reclaim our vitality in a different form, one that is fierce, wise, protective and deeply relational.

In modern society we see a loss of interdependence in modern family systems. In many cultures, grandmothers were never ‘done’ after menopause. They became pivotal in holding the community web, through storytelling, wisdom keeping, guiding younger adults, offering support to children without being a primary caregiver. Our isolated nuclear family model is what contributes heavily to burning women out, not the fact that they are ageing.

So the cultural story becomes ‘you are no longer fertile you are less valuable’. When actually the truth is the opposite. This is the time in life when women expand their social and relational roles, if the culture allows it. Throughout my career I have seen many women thrive once they entered midlife, either in new business ventures, in community work, in advocacy work. They really are in their prime.

So this life stage is not just about personal healing, it is about cultural repair.

Midlife is this pivot point: either a woman breaks free from the old narratives and survival patterns, or she risks staying trapped in victimhood, silence, or suppression. When a whole generation of women stays trapped, society loses out on the wisdom, leadership, and fierce love that could be shaping our communities, workplaces, and systems.

At a peace summit in Vancouver in 2009 the Dalai Lama said ‘the world will be saved by the western women’. Well I think its women globally actually. If women embrace this midlife initiation, they don’t just heal themselves, they begin to model a different way of being in power. A power that is relational, embodied, self-authored, and deeply interconnected into the web of life around them.

When a woman can step through her midlife transition with the right support, they don’t just attend to their own healing and personal growth, they become catalysts for cultural change. Connecting to their voice, their presence, expanding their capacity to step into and become their personal power, ripples out into families, workplaces and communities.

This is the work of midlife: not just healing ourselves, but reshaping the world through connection with the deep essence of who we really are and the authority of who we are becoming.

The soul of sensuality - awakening the beauty within through pleasure and presence

Most of us do not enjoy sitting with uncomfortable feelings, we tend to try and escape them. At midlife, many of us experience a lot of discomfort because a lot of our old patterns and habits that no longer serve us, come into the forefront to be dealt with and healed. The body has such a unique capacity for healing and as we age and grow through our life stages, it gives us many opportunities to heal our childhood adaptive strategies to come home to our core self.

Midlife is huge transition for most people. As our bodies start to age and we enter perimenopause, things start to shift and what once worked for us no longer works. Whether it is the way we exercise, what we eat, our arousal patterns, our behavioural coping strategies, everything seems to be thrown up in the air. What most people report is a sense of confusion and betrayal by their body.

More than ever, as you enter this stage, you need to learn how to meet and be present with the feelings and emotions you are experiencing and give space for them to be expressed. This can be challenging, particularly when many people grew up in environments where they were not able to express their emotions, so their management strategies are all about repressing and squashing down said emotions.

Our sensuality, can be a beautiful bridge of support for you to connect with your pleasure, and that pleasure can be wonderfully supportive in regulating your nervous system (which drives you behavioural responses), restoring trust in your body and repairing any past wounding around sexuality.

Artist unknown

In fact, reclaiming your sensuality can be one of the most supportive practices you can use to reconnect your body and restore a sense of awe, reverence and wonder for it. Sensuality is about being alive and present to your senses - taste, smell, touch/feeling, sight and hearing. This makes it a safe and accessible starting point for women feeling disconnected from their body. And yes, it is also a doorway to your sexuality because sensual practices are like portals to embodiment and presence, which naturally open the door to pleasure and the body feeling safe again.

When we are able to connect with pleasure and what feels safe inside our body, we lay the foundations for deeper sexual awakening and expression, because sensuality practices can be a rehearsal space for women to explore their bodies and remember and/or learn what feel good without any pressure.

For many people sexuality can be extremely complicated. It carries the weight of cultural conditioning, expectation and often pain. Before we dive deep into exploring our sexuality, which can feel like an enormous burden, sensuality offers us a gentler path.

Sensuality is the art and practice of being alive to our senses. Its the visual feast of the mountains, streams and lakes, the taste of ripe fruit of your tongue, the feeling of the sun on your face, the texture of silk against your skin and the smell of your favourite meal. Unlike sexuality, their is no overhanging expectation of performance, outcomes or anyone else’s involvement. It is quite simply, you and your body in deep connection.

Through our sensual practices we return to our body as home. We learn to connect with our body again and trust it one small breath at a time, one sensation at a time. When we learn and connect with what feels safe and pleasurable within us, the doorway to our sexuality can open naturally without any force or agendas. Sensuality becomes the practice to connect with ourselves and experience intimacy; with ourselves, with life and when we are ready, with another.

A huge part of trauma healing work I do through somatic experiencing is about connecting people with their sensuality through the use of the language of the Felt Sense. Sensuality practices are not just physical practices they open, through the ability to focus on our internal experience, our felt sense which is the language of our nervous system.

When we use this approach, we bypass the logical mind which often drives many women to approach pleasure practices with an underpinning drive of shame (I should be able to do this). The nervous system doesn’t shift through thinking so we can’t think ourselves to safety. When we use the language of the felt sense we drop into sensation; the warmth of my belly, the softening of my jaw. We bypass corticol control and connect with the truth of the body.

Each time we feel, notice and observe or savour we are witnessing our bodies story instead of ignoring it or overriding it. This transforms sensuality into not just a pleasure practice but also to deep belonging, to oneself and to life.

How do we practice the felt sense of sensuality?

Notice one sensation - maybe the warmth of your hands, or tingles in your feet. Stay with it, without judgement. Notice what happens in your body.

What are some simple sensual practices you can try?

• Applying oil or moisturiser to your skin, slowly and intentionally,

• Pausing to smell flowers in a garden and noticing when you smell that flower, how you feel,

• Moving your body to music in a free flowing way - not following a dance routine or sequence,

• Savouring the smells and tastes of healthy food,

• Laying still and gently placing one hand on your womb and one on your heart, noticing your breath and feeling warmth expand in your body.

Sensuality is not an indulgence, it is a remembering. Pleasure is our birthright, our bodies are designed brilliantly to feel, to savour, to awaken. Our sensuality is a pathway to our personal agency and power, not through striving and pushing ourselves but through softening and slowing down, to being present to each day of our life, moment by moment.

If you would like to practice some feminine embodiment practice, I have a complimentary mini course on my website that may be supportive of your sensual learning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perimenopause as Turning point.

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

Art - Visions in Blue

Oxytocin, pleasure and women’s nervous systems

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

Vagal Tone and Menopause

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

The bigger question: Lifestyle and systemic change

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

Post Menopause brings Sovereignty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can experience shame and confusion around this.

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

What are some practices that can support you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling

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

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

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

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

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

And it doesn’t always knock gently.

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

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

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

And with that call comes a kind of heartbreak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grief is your friend.

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

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

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

The freedom to be your true self.

Healing through relationships

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

But they’re also something deeper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We find home.

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.

The Siren, the Queen Bee and the Journey back to Self

It was my birthday last week, I had a really great week. As I move further into my fifties I have to say I love this time in life so much. I remember one of my coach colleagues, who is ten years older than me, saying to me about 5 years ago, “Oh the fifties are the best”. I have to say that so far, I whole heartedly agree. There is something really great about not having your life run by estrogen and knowing yourself so well - and being more than happy to explore the deep and dark places when they come up. It is liberating. This is the thing about midlife, we talk about it being empowering and it definitely is. But it is more than that. It is liberation. It is not reinvention but remembering.

Midlife is the moment we stop performing. We descent, we grieve. And, we rise knowing who we are.

Over the weekend, I watched the Netflix series Sirens. I went in expecting dark comedy and fantasy. It was all that but there was also a lot of the cultural underbelly on display. And yes, there were nods to the mythical Sirens—those seductive, powerful figures feared for luring men to their doom—and to Persephone, who descends to the underworld and rises as Queen.

But what stayed with me was something more subtle. More familiar.

The story centred around women who contort themselves—twist their truth, their instincts, their bodies, their very being—to belong. And what shook me was how often I see this in the real world, especially in the women I work with. I see it on social media all the the time. I find it bizarre that there is a whole fashion trend of people dressing in a way that makes them look wealthy. The whole anti-ageing story crafted by the skincare industry; it is really insane. Why does a 65 year old woman have to have skin the looks like a 25 year old’s?

After watching, I turned to my husband and said something about how heartbreaking it was, but also how powerful it is to have a television show that cleverly shows us the mirror on the collective unconscious. He looked at me and said, “This is your work. You help people come back to their authentic selves, their essence.”

He was right.

So many of the people I work with—especially women in midlife—come to me having spent years (even decades) twisting themselves into shapes they were told would bring them love, safety, or acceptance. They’ve played the roles: the good daughter, the accommodating partner, the high-achieving professional, the one who keeps the peace. But beneath all that performance is often a profound grief: the grief of self-abandonment.

That shows up in many different ways, it can be anger, deep sadness and grief, and also a deep searching for something different or more.

Mythology offers us maps for these kinds of journeys. The Siren is often seen as dangerous, but perhaps she’s just a woman who refused to stay quiet. And Persephone? She was taken underground, but she didn’t just return—she rose transformed, a ruler in her own right. Stripped of her ego and connected to her core self.

There’s another layer to the story that cut even deeper. One of the central characters—the so-called “queen bee”—is replaced. (sorry for the spoiler if you haven’t watched it yet) She’s ousted by a younger, much less confident version of herself. At first, we’re led to believe, the Queen Bee is the villain; she was behaving pretty badly. Then we think the younger replacement maybe is, but we soon see the truth. It was her billionaire ex-husband, who represents the culture of patriarchy, who had the real power all along. A cultural narrative, that builds women up, shapes them to a particular taste, then discards them when it gets bored or their behaviour no longer suits.

And what struck me most is this:
She had contorted herself to make him/them happy.
She had shaped her power around what he wanted, not what was true for her.

I see this in so many women in midlife. They realise, often with some pain, that the power they thought was theirs… wasn’t. It was bestowed—by a relationship, a career, a title, a system. It could be taken away. And often, it is. They don’t know who they are without it.

That’s the heartbreak. But it’s also the turning point.

Because when a woman realises she’s been performing power rather than embodying it, she can begin a different journey. One that doesn’t require contortion. One that descends into grief, yes—but also into truth. Into agency. Into the kind of power that can’t be stripped away. She becomes authoring and starts to write her own story.

These stories speak to the deeper truth: that reclaiming your voice, your instincts, your knowing, often requires going into the underworld of your own psyche. It means feeling the grief of the parts you've left behind. It means listening to the song of the Siren—not the one the world fears, but the one that sings from within your own bones.

This is the kind of healing work I guide people through. It’s somatic. It’s slow. It’s deep. We listen to the body, not just the mind. We notice the nervous system patterns shaped by a lifetime of contorting. And over time, a different kind of belonging emerges—one that doesn’t require performance, one that comes from being rooted in your own truth.

The journey isn't linear. Like Persephone, we may descend many times in our lives. But each time, we bring back more of ourselves. And eventually, we stop contorting to fit the world—and start shaping a world that fits us.

It’s not about becoming someone new. It’s about remembering who you are when you stop performing. When you stop shaping yourself around what others want and start listening to your own body, your own knowing, your own nervous system.

If you're in that moment of reckoning…
If you're realising the version of power you held was conditional…
If you’re longing to come back to the essence of who you are—
I’d love to walk with you.

If this resonates with you—if you feel like you’ve been contorting for too long, or if you’re longing to find your way back to your own voice and centre—I’d love to support you. I offer one-on-one coaching and somatic work for women navigating life transitions, grief, and the reclamation of self. You can learn more about working with me or reach out to talk about coaching.

Your real power is not out there.
It’s in you.
And it’s waiting to be reclaimed.

Your journey home to yourself is sacred. You don’t have to do it alone.

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

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

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

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

They are using silence as a tool to resource themselves.

The Nervous System and Relational Avoidance

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

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

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

Image - Stockcake

Deep Intimacy Requires Capacity

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

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

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

Reframing Ghosting, Silent Treatment and Miscommunication

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

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

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

Moving Toward Conscious Communication

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

This means:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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