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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens when it is a hormonal trigger?

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

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

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

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

Demystifying Menopause

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

Menopause is a reckoning with how we have been living.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resentment, Desire and Somatic Healing

How unexpressed anger and fear mute our authentic desire.

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

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

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

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

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

Why does the heart armour up?

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

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

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

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

When you feel resentment for a friend who is taking time out for themselves, your body is saying to you I want a rest too.
When you resent a colleague who asked for a pay raise and they receive it, your body is saying to you, I want my worth to be seen also.
When you experience a flash of bitterness for someone who is simply enjoying themselves your body is saying, why do I have to keep holding it all together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Autumn doesn't ask the leaves to stay

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

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

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

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

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

— Victoria Erikson

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

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

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

The midlife reckoning and initiation

For women, the midlife journey is a time of reckoning and it is our menopausal journey that is often the catalyst for this for many women. It is not to say that midlife is not a time of reckoning for males but I think menopause really puts the jet thrusters on it for women in a way that men don’t experience. Sorry to talk in the binary, whatever you identify as on the gender spectrum, I think if you have ovaries and will go through menopause it puts the jet thrusters on it. Notwithstanding, I have had many male clients over the years go through their midlife reckoning in their own way.

I often talk about this process as being the Autumn season of our lives. A time where we review what works for us, work out what we need to let go of in our life and work through the process of doing that so that you can birth new parts of yourself. The rebirth is your initiation into your wise woman power that is your authentic self. This stage is called Maga which is the stage before Crone. We are the first generation of women going through this because we are living longer than the other women in our female lineage.

When we move through this process of letting go, we are going through a process of figuratively dying. All the ideas you had about yourself, who you are, who you thought you were becoming, where you thought your life would take you. So of course there will be grief that comes with that. You will find that what used to motivate you no longer does. You will start to pull back into yourself in a way, rather than giving your energy away.

This is because you are leaving the mother phase of your life. So whether you have been the mother of children or the mother of a business, or the creator and mother of something else in your life, all that energy you put into mothering is not going to be there anymore. This is what happens when our estrogen starts to decline. When I noticed it within myself I noticed I was really tired and I just couldn’t over-function in all the ways I used to and I was not really interested in lots of things I really used to get passionate about.

I have found this to be a hard habit to break but a necessary one. I noticed one day about two years ago, how liberated I felt and not being full of estrogen and what it used to drive within me. The overarching need to connect and make sure everyone is ok. One day I was I sitting at my desk and I felt down to my bones this freedom at not caring so much anymore. Not is a sociopathic way, but in a light and carefree way, I didn’t care what other people thought of me at all. I didn’t care if I put in a boundary and others didn’t like it, I needed to put me own needs first for my own wellbeing.

The reckoning and initiation hits us all in different ways. For some of us it is our physical health, some of this may be perimenopause symptoms but it can also be in poor health. This was me. Cancer came a knocking in a small way about 8 years ago, I got better and went on with my workaholic ways and then five years ago it was back in a big way and I had no choice but to stop. It was bad, stage 3 colon cancer, a big surgery that really knocked me around and lots of chemotherapy that went on for months. I barely functioned during that time and I could not work. “I am listening” I finally said and learned to feel safe to do nothing and sit with my own misery and distressing emotions. I didn’t do it on my own. I created a circle of support around me with different health practitioners and friends. This is often what we need in midlife, to be midwifed through the reckoning process and we can do this by creating a circle of support for ourselves to get us through. Whether it is a psychologist , a coach, your chiropractor, a nutritionist, friends you meet to talk with this about, you can create this circle of support to midwife you through this change.

My healing that I needed to do was nervous system related and deep inner child work to stop the over functioning. It was somatic work that supported me through this so I could find in my body where that small child part of me that had to solve all the problems and find all the answers lived. My excess of will power has served me well in my lifetime, it has got me through some really tough times and kept me going in jobs, relationships and challenging circumstances far longer than I needed to be. It stopped me from getting stuck and left behind often. But I could not will my way through my midlife transition I had to learn to face my shadow head on and be on the proverbial meat hook that Inanna went through in her heroines journey and have faith that I would come off it when it was time.

I think that we often think that menopause will bring us some hot flashes and night sweats and maybe other symptoms but it is so much more than that. You are faced with your own emotional reactivity, your stress levels bouncing around and it is like an out of control roller coaster. What you do not face in this transition will hang around in your life until you do face it. It is a humbling experience.

It can also be very humbling when you have already done a lot of work on yourself. I have been in a constant learning process full of self reflection for the last 20 years. I thought surely I had explored most of my inner territory. No there is always more to be explored. What I can tell you is that for me is that all the tools and knowledge I had, the ones that I work with my clients on, I used them every day and they got me through the really tough times.

What this journey takes us to is our authentic self. It strips away all the strategies our ego created when we are young to stay safe, you don’t need them and they won’t work for you going forward. To step into your wise woman power you need to address all the aspects of yourself that you have repressed. The emotional reactivity you might be experiencing? That is your body telling you to pay attention and connect with what is coming up. It is our menopausal muse showing herself. I love the saying ‘when the muse arrives let them in or they will burn the house down’. If we ignore what is coming up, if we persist in ignoring it, life gets harder.

Who is the muse?

“Your muse is the part of your that you have kept hidden away to belong or fit in. The Muse is the original essence of who we are. They reveals fears, taboos and expectations that need to be explored as this powerful transition unfolds. All those emotions repressed, feelings we have smoothed over, they want them released. As estrogen declines, a veil is lifted from our eyes. All the things we kept silent about we can longer ignore. We must speak up”.
*Midlife and Menopause ebook, Kellie Stirling*

Everyone goes through this journey in their own unique way. We often parse out challenging life experiences at this stage as something else, something tough that is unrelated and just bad luck. it is all part of the journey. it may not be your health that suffers. You may experience a relationship falling apart, or having to stop everything to take care of an ailing parent, maybe it is a teenager going off the rails or suffering and you need to stop everything to focus on them. Maybe you have a big career change and you know that you need something different and you don’t know where to start. Something will initiate you into this journey. It will mean you cannot go on the way you have been and you have to actually stop and learn to do life differently.

There is something for all of us in this transformation and it offers us an extraordinary opportunity to do it consciously. When you choose to pay attention to your experience and consciously focus on it, you are not only doing your own healing work, you are healing ancestral trauma, the trauma that has been carried down through family lines.

This is the time to learn to choose what you want in life. To move away from your reactive patterns, to learn to sit back, metaphorically and physically and observe. To be able to sit in your chair, in your back body, in a neutral position, back into the chair, feet on the ground, feeling the stability in your body and not lean forward and react. To learn to observe and watch as a wise elder would and then choose which course to take. You don’t have the high energy lots of of estrogen brings anymore, so taking care of your energy is so important. You don’t have to go in and react and clean up every mess. The lesson here is learning to put your needs first which means sitting back and watching. The thing is when we sit back and watch, we often have a clearer view of what is actually going on and we make better choices every time.

Once you move through this, you are naturally drawn to pursue more meaning and purpose in your life in everything that you do. Whether it is your work, your hobbies, the relationships in your life. This is because our purpose is to be our most authentic selves, lead from the our soul, and every aspect of our life wants to align with that. Because after going through the reckoning and initiation we can be nothing else but ourselves.