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.

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.