How Stress experienced as a child can impact our midlife journey

Stress is not our friend in our midlife journey.

Did you know that the stress you experienced in utero can impact on your perimenopause transition?

When we experience stress hormones from our mothers, our little body gets the message that when we arrive earthside, we need to have a pretty quick off the mark stress response because the world is not safe. Fast forward to the baby becoming a woman and what this means is that her body will go into a stress response more easily.

Amazing thought. The science of epigenetics is showing us that our cells actually store memory in their DNA and that it is possible for non genetic information to be passed down mother to baby. So it's possible for your mother's trauma as well as your own affecting your body.

When our adrenal glands (which make stress hormones) are tired, our body will literally steal the sex hormones we have and turn them into stress hormones. Guess what we will become deficient in? You guessed it sex hormones. This can translate into PMS in our menstruating years, and more physical symptoms of perimenopause, like hot flashes, anxiety, depression, in our menopause transition.

We are made to survive. Our body will prioritise our safety first every time. Let's think of all the ways this impacts on our relationships in our life.

A woman who is sensitised to high stress (which given they way we work now is most women) as a developing baby or young child, will tend to perceive her environment as unsafe or stressful where others may not. This pattern continues throughout life and by the time we arrive at perimenopause we are burned out and might have adrenal fatigue.

In our second half of life, our adrenal glands and fat cells take over our sex hormone production from our ovaries when they wind down at menopause. If the adrenals are tired when we start this journey and our body is giving them another new job, to produce not only stress hormones but also now sex hormones, they are not going to cope too well are they.

Remember it is all connected.

Learning to work with our emotions and feel safe to experience the emotions we have been told are 'bad' all our lives is so critical at this time in our lives. When we have been repressing an emotion for years and then all of a sudden we start experience it at midlife because our body can't keep the lid on the repression anymore, it is going to make us feel unsafe. Most of us will shut it down, this takes up even more energy or it will come in an outburst. This has a negative impact on our relationships also.

What is the best way to deal with this?

It is not a thinking exercise, you can't think your way out of trauma. It is learning to feel sensation and create safety in your body that that feeling is OK and may be even pleasurable. So we call that feeling approach a somatic approach.

Learning to feel the sensations in your body somatically and connect with them will bring you into a deeper level of emotional intimacy with yourself. It will create more capacity in your nervous system to feel. When you start to learn and practice this skill, you get more comfortable with the sensations and feelings and you get better at talking about it to others.

In my experience coaching women to do this, it has an unbelievably positive experience on all their relationships but most often it is their primary intimate relationship that benefits the most. This is because they are able to have a deeper level of communication with their partner about what is going on in their inner world. This deepens intimacy in the relationship; the crux of intimacy is communication. When we can talk about our inner world with honesty, it is appreciated so much by our partners, they learn from it too and can mirror us, and in my observation this is what leads to better sex.

As I say to everyone I coach, intimacy means 'into me you see'.

So when you are looking at your physical symptoms in your midlife journey remember everything is connected. It is not just about physical changes alone or dietary changes. Learning to actually be in your body and feel the sensations, to make your emotions your allies, is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.

I currently have space to coach two new people. So whether you would like to reclaim your emotions, enhance your leadership skills, create more ease in your life with a big transition, you can contact me to book a clarity call to see if we are a good fit to work together.

Midlife Crisis

What is a Midlife Crisis all about and why is it so destructive in so many people’s lives?

The Middle passage is a time of transition in adulthood that can happen anytime from 30s through to our 70s. Most of us are familiar with it happening in our 40s and it is commonly known by the term ‘Midlife Crisis’. It is a time of internal upheaval that some handle well by going inside to explore their inner world. Others not so well when they project it outside. Outside projection shows up as trying to fight ageing, affairs, the new sports car, working out vigorously at the gym, recurrent changing of jobs, the list is long. Without a doubt there is an increased awareness of our mortality as our bodies start to show signs of age, not quite doing what they used to. For many women Peri Menopause is whacked on top of this and it can prove to be a really challenging time in life for them. It is also a time in life where health issues start to show up for many people. It is a time of absolutely huge transition and upheaval in our life that our society as a whole does very little to support.

James Hollis, the Jungian analyst, describes it as the time where we transition to our second adulthood. Our first, which he believes is from about twelve years to forty, has been driven by ego. We don’t really know who we are and how to ‘adult’ so we just copy. Our sense of self comes via external validation. We copy our parents, external role models at work; it is a time that we are focused on establishing ourselves. At work by climbing the hierarchy of the organisation, buying property, cars, having children. Driven by the ego we constantly project outwards our unconscious parts of self we have not integrated, the parts of ourselves we split off from to survive. Our original essence that was squashed down to fit in with the demands of parents, family, culture, the world around us. Our childhood patterns created in times of overwhelm or potential abandonment to survive. There is no doubt that the cultural contexts that surround us, with their constant worship of youth, do little to support or encourage us to move toward this transition and see it as the step to emotional freedom that it is for most people.

Our second adulthood according to Hollis is about finding our purpose and realisation of who we really are. It starts when our projections start to dissolve and in search for an answer to the question, “Who am I?”. How do you know when this happens? My observation of coaching many people in this transition over the last 10 years is they start to question everything in their life. Their rose colored glasses have come off and they start to see life as it really is. They start to see through the politics and machiavellian behaviour in the workplace. They start to see side of their partner they haven’t taken notice of before. They actually start to recognise that their partner is human. They get a bit rebellious really. They yearn for change. Some people get depressed because they yearn for change but are so bogged down by the constraints of their current lifecycle they can see no way that they possibly can make changes to their life.

‘After the Middle Passage, no one can say where the journey will take us. We only know that we must accept responsibility for ourselves, that the path taken by others is not necessarily for us, and that what we are ultimately seeking lies within, not out there’.

James Hollis

The turbulence is they psyche's way of pointing us towards integration of self and wholeness. Our bodies are strong and wise, they seek wholeness and healing always. They are constantly sending us messages to point us toward this. Our psyche is saying to us you know those childhood parts of yourself you split off, it is time to go bring them back. Those emotions you were told were unacceptable, go find them and learn to experience them. That nervous system of yours, it needs rewiring so you really know what safety, love and belonging feel like in your body. I describe my body as the home I live in. The home of my soul. Do you know psyche is the greek word for soul? Our soul wants to have a good second half of life, it is telling us ok it is time for you to sort this out.

I’ve spent years studying adult development through a development psychology perspective. If I look at it through a developmental lens it is a time where we grow the shape of our thinking and change the pair of glasses that we see the world through. We move from seeing it as shades of grey to a colorful kaleidoscope of colors that move constantly in and out of each other. Do you remember Kaleidoscopes we had when we were children? I loved them. We are now starting to see the complexity of life in all its color and it is hard to learn the skills we need to thrive because it requires some big changes in our life.

The turbulence is normal and it is ok. It is perfectly normal to start to question. The answers are not outside of you, they are within. Midlife asks of us not to look outside of ourselves but within. Into our inner world. The answers will not be found outside of us. Not in a new relationship with another, not in a new car, not in a new face or new clothes. They reside within us. We are multi-dimensional beings, it is about learning to love all the parts of ourselves and accepting them. The middle passage is a journey to our 'home' and finding the divine within it. It will be hard and challenging, you will lose some friendships along the way because you will simply outgrow people. That is OK, walk away gracefully.

What are some of the ways you can partake in this inner journey? Well there is coaching of course, this is a journey I guide people through. Some people need therapy because they have a lot of trauma in their body that needs to be worked with slowly and carefully so the nervous system can be rewired ( in particular those who suffer from C-PTSD and PTSD). Somatic Experiencing and EMDR are two modalities that work specifically with trauma in a slow way. Talk therapy like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can be useful for some people. Embodied movement particularly for women, that brings them into connection with their Yoni, all their reproductive organs and connects them with their adult feminine power is an excellent practice. Feldenkrais, pilates and ecstatic dance are different practices that bring us back into our body. Breathwork is an excellent practice to work with trauma and unwind old habits and patterns. Mindfulness practices are excellent to start us on our journey to lead us on the journey inward. Traditional meditation where one sits very still are great, they are very masculine by nature. There are more dynamic forms of meditative practice like using a jade egg or kundalini yoga that uses movement, mantra and breath to expand conscious and create capacity in the nervous system.

Finally it is helpful to do this work in groups if you can. I know that sisterhood is a powerful container for healing and growth. There are womens and mens circles that exist everywhere. You can start one up. We move through rites of passage in a more supported and grounded way when we are supported by community.

The list is long. You can find something that works for you and it maybe that you work with a couple of modalities at once. The most important thing is that when you feel the turbulence, you start doing something to set yourself up well for your transition to your second half of life.

Please forward this onto a friend who may be interested. If you are interested in being coached through this transition please contact me for a free consultation call. I will be launching a course this year on Midlife transition for Women that supports transition through Midlife and Menopause. If you are interested sign up to my mail list so you receive information about it.

The healing power of Breathwork

I recently returned from 8 days of Breathwork facilitator training. It was a fantastic week where I got to learn and hang out with 19 other very engaged students learning to teach and facilitate Breathwork. By the end of our time together we had all developed extremely close bonds with each other, which is not surprising given we had spent all of that time breathing together and taking care of each other whilst processing lots of latent trauma.

Breathwork has been around for some time. You may have heard of it or know it as rebirthing, holotropic breathwork, alchemy of breath, BBTRS Breathwork, Breath of Bliss. These are all different teaching methods. Similar but different. There is no branding or copyright around Breathwork because it’s Breath.

So why is Breathwork so effective at moving old stuck energy, tension or trauma out of our body? Well the idea is that you charge up your body with oxygen through a connected breath, in and out, no pause in between. This brings you 100% into presence in your body, bypassing cortical control into an altered state of consciousness. In BBTRS breathwork, which is the modality I am learning, the idea is to bring the body into presence with this old energy and release it by triggering the flight or fight response to give the trauma the opportunity to complete its cycle.

What is the trauma I am speaking about? Well the best way to explain it is to use an example from Peter Levine’s book, “Waking the Tiger”. Imagine you see a Lion chasing a Zebra. The Zebra in an attempt to save itself falls to the ground and plays dead. It is frozen. The Lion, realising the chase is over, gets bored and runs away. Some moments later, knowing that danger has gone, the Zebra jumps up. It immediately starts running around, tremoring and shaking its body. It is discharging the frozen energy from its body. In his book Levine says the Freeze offers two benefits. Firstly, it saves the Zebra because the freeze allows it to run for its life, when danger has dissipated. Second, If the Zebra was eaten by the Lion, when frozen and numb it would not feel anything. Nature has built in compassion into a natural cycle. Humans and animals can both access the freeze response. However, for humans, our body doesn’t naturally do the discharge. We have to give it some help to do that. (for the sake of the article I’m just talking about latent general trauma, there are many different types of trauma the principle is the same).

Every day we experience the fight, flight or freeze response in our body in our autonomic nervous system. The danger coming our way may not be a lion chasing us but maybe it is an angry boss or spouse, or a lack of emotional or psychological safety in our work environment, angry drivers on the road yelling at us or a train stuck on the tracks doing nothing whilst we are stuck inside, worrying about getting to work on time. We have these scenarios happening all the time and because they have become normalised instances in our life, we don’t realise that constantly moving into these states of flight, fight or freeze is putting a lot of stress on our bodies. This is because we don’t have any opportunity to release that energy.

Trauma is the result of the freeze energy getting stuck in our body and not having the chance to complete its cycle. Trauma is not the result of what happened to us. Trauma is the result of how effective our nervous system was able to deal with that energy that was triggered in the traumatic situation. Two people can go through the exact same event, one feeling traumatised, the other being completely fine post the adverse event. It depends on whether the person went into freeze and stayed there or whether they went into flight or flight and were able to ‘save’ themselves. The good news is there are many different ways of releasing trauma frozen in our body. Breathwork is just one.

So how can Breathwork help?

As mentioned above, breathwork allows our body to release this stuck energy. Through charging the body with oxygen, the flight or fight kicks in and the body completes the cycle through discharge. This may be shaking, tremoring, crying, laughing, shouting, myofascial unwinding which is the body moving itself. Emotions that were never acknowledged at the time come back up, muscular tension releases. It creates a lot of space in the body.

People report feeling softer in their body, postural changes, feeling more ‘in’ their body, better at reinforcing their boundaries, feeling their emotions and actually enjoying that. A stronger sense of their own presence and feeling others’ presence.

For me personally, I have released really old tension, lots of trauma, I feel softer in my body, my skeleton actually feels quite different, aches and pains have disappeared. I am present with the sensations and emotions within my body and able to witness and observe them and I have noticed my capacity to be emotionally triggered has significantly decreased.

Breathwork is something you would do with a trained facilitator who can safely hold space for you. However it is your own body doing all the work, releasing all on its own, unwinding, your own breath healing you. You being your own healer. All the answers deep inside of you, all there waiting for you. Your body and its own innate ability to heal working its magic.

There are certain health conditions where Breathwork is contraindicated. These include pregnancy, severe asthma, heart disease, severe mental illness, epilepsy, diabetes, acute physical injuries. If you are unsure if you should try Breathwork, please consult your medical professional for advice.