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.

The anatomy of life transitions

Transitions are not problems to fix, they are patterns to Inhabit

We often think of change as linear but it is not at all, it is often a spiral, or a network of spirals. Life transitions are the unspoken pulses that shape our lives. Like the changing of seasons, they are natural and inevitable but they often catch us off guard, pulling us into the unknown. Whether it's the end of a relationship, a career shift, menopause or a profound personal awakening, transitions are both a death and a birth — a letting go and a stepping forward.

When big change happens in our life we are taught to treat change like an emergency. Something is really wrong with us. We search for clarity, next steps, and solutions as if something has gone wrong.

But what if transition isn’t something to fix?

What if it’s a pattern to inhabit?

I’ve come to see life transitions not as interruptions to life, but as part of its underlying design. The common model of life transitions is ending, the liminal space in between and then emergence or new beginnings. Whilst I think this is true to an extent, I believe its actually a bit more complex than that. The metaphor that captures this most powerfully for me is the torus: a self-renewing, spiralling field found everywhere in nature—from galaxies to trees, to the electromagnetic field of the human heart.

The Toroidal Field: A Natural Pattern of Change

A torus is a continuous, dynamic flow. It is not linear. It is not chaotic. It is regenerative. If you can’t picture it in your head it is a donut shaped field where energy moves up the middle and around the edges to the bottom and back up again. The heart has a toroidal field. The earth is a toroidal field.

Image source here

In nature, we see it in the vortex of a storm, the flow of sap in trees, the shape of magnetic fields, the inhale and exhale of breath. In us, it shows up in the rhythm of emotions, healing, grief, growth, and yes—transitions.

The torus reminds us that everything alive follows a rhythm of emergence, dissolution, and return. This rhythm can help us reframe how we experience life changes: not as problems to solve, but as intelligent patterns we are invited to move with.

The Four Phases of Transition (Through the Lens of the Torus)

Transitions often unfold in four phases, which mirror the toroidal flow:

1. The Known Self (Center)

This is the phase of structure and identity. You know who you are, what your roles are, and how the world responds to you. There is stability, predictability, and sometimes stagnation.

2. The Stretch (Expansion)

Something begins to shift. A role no longer fits, perimenopause starts, a relationship starts to change, a loss arrives, or a new longing awakens. You begin to spiral outward, away from the known. This phase can bring both fear and discomfort one minute and exhilaration and joy the next. It often triggers urgency—we want to know what’s next. We feel thrown off our centre - which we literally are because we are moving to the edges of the torus shape.

This is the start of what feels like a wild ride, it begins to get tough but this is a necessary unwinding.

Resistance often comes up here. Whilst this is to be expected, our nervous system feels very uncomfortable often at this point, it is bound to constrict and pull in with fear or anger as a defensive strategy if we have no context to make sense of what is happening. Or maybe we collapse into sadness and grief. This is the time to ask for help or support.

3. The Void (Outer Edge)

The old story has fallen away, but the new one hasn’t formed yet. This is the liminal phase—a sacred pause. It can feel like floating in the dark, ungrounded. We can feel like we have completely lost our connection with our north star or our rudder is missing. This is where many people feel most lost, because the inner compass that once guided them is no longer available. It can feel like being on a road less travelled—or in some cases, a road never travelled before.

This inner void is like a composting process. What no longer serves begins to break down and dissolve. Old identities, beliefs, or stories decompose in the darkness. And just like on a forest floor, that breakdown nourishes the ground of becoming. It's slow, it's unseen, and it's absolutely essential. Composting isn’t glamorous—it’s earthy, rich, and full of alchemy. Nothing is wasted here.

This space is deeply fertile. This is where integration, rest, and surrender happen. The soil of transformation is richest here. This is the time we often need the most support, to hold space for us through the via negativa, the road of letting go. This can also be the hardest because most of us have never experienced what it feels like to let go, we are afraid we may never get up if we do completely let go.

Again at this point more resistance can come up.

When we resist, it adds turbulence to the natural movement of the spiral out, and that can create loops of stagnation, denial and reactivity which shows up somatically in our bodies as tiredness, fatigue, over-activation, as our system tries to hold onto what is known but dissolving, or alternatively rush hard into what is emerging without allowing time to fully metabolise the middle.

4. The Return (Integration)

Eventually, something new takes shape. Not as a quick fix, but as a deeper coherence. You begin spiralling back inward, bringing with you what you’ve learned. You emerge changed. Not a return to the old self, but a return to your centre—wiser, more whole.

I always say to my midlife clients, the developmental challenge of midlife is to be radically honest with ourselves. So that means there is a lot of busting up belief systems, reconnecting with parts of ourselves we have pushed into our unconscious. It is time to do your healing work and come back to that very core essence of who you are. Let go of all the ego strategies that have got you here that don’t serve you well anymore in your adult life. Come back to the real you. You can see that by using the metaphor of the Torus, the core isn’t just a psychological concept, it is also physically coming back to your core.

I see this also in somatic experiencing because the toroidal field shows a natural expression of our vitality and coherence. What I learned form Brigit Viksnins, who is a pretty fabulous trauma resolution teacher is this. The core in the toroidal field is our life force, our true selves, our inner sovereignty. This supports boundaries, presence and our capacity to be with our own emotions and the emotions of others. It sets our blueprint of health. Trauma disrupts the flow of energy, we fragment, collapse in, leak outward, get disorganised, freeze and get stuck outside of our true centre. Our trauma leaves an imprint that can make it hard for us to get back to our centre.

These four phases are not steps to rush through. They are invitations to inhabit. They are cyclical, often overlapping. You may revisit them again and again in any given transition.

Inhabiting the Pattern

Most of us are conditioned to resist the stretch and rush through the void. But when we orient to transitions as toroidal patterns, we allow ourselves to stay in the flow of life itself.

In somatic work, I see how the body holds these transitions intimately: the contraction of loss, the expansion of grief, the trembling spaciousness of the void, the grounded return of integration. Nature doesn’t rush its seasons—why should we?

Whether it’s menopause, a relationship ending, a career shift, or a spiritual awakening, each transition carries the same energetic intelligence. We are being stretched, softened, and re-shaped. And the more we honour the pattern, the more we can inhabit the change with greater ease.

A New Orientation

If you’re in the middle of the stretch, or sitting in the void, you are not broken. You are in motion. You are in the field. The torus is holding you.

Transitions are not detours.

They are invitations into deeper coherence.

So the next time change arrives, try asking not "How do I fix this?" but instead:

"Where am I in the pattern?"

And then, with grace, let yourself inhabit the unfolding.

Reflection Questions for you

• Where in your life are you being stretched or dissolved?

• Can you name the phase of the transition you are in?

• What might shift if you trusted this phase as intelligent, necessary, and even sacred?

Breaking the cycles of ancestral trauma, a pathway to freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reclaiming menopause as a sacred rite

Somewhere along the way, we have lost our way about the life transition in midlife.

Menopause—this sacred threshold in a woman’s life—has been reduced in the dominant narrative to a list of symptoms to manage, a decline to delay, a hormonal malfunction to correct. It’s treated as pathology. As though something is wrong with you. As though you are breaking down.

And every time I hear that framing, I feel a deep ache in my gut. Because it’s not only wrong—it’s harmful. It robs us of the true power and meaning of this life stage. It narrows it down and over simplifies it. More than that, it obscures the possibility that this transition could be the beginning of something more, not less.

In my work with women moving through midlife, I see something astonishing. When the noise of cultural conditioning is quieted—when we slow down enough to listen to our bodies and our deeper rhythms—what emerges is not depletion. It’s ripening. A flourishing. Something ancient and wise begins to move through. The psyche softens. The soul speaks louder. A different kind of power shows up.

A Culture That Fears Ageing

We live in a world obsessed with youth and productivity. That obsession comes at a great cost. It leaves little room for the natural seasons of life and no roadmap for the descent that midlife brings.

In the medical system, menopause is often treated as a condition to be treated. In the workplace, it’s barely acknowledged. Even in leadership and personal development spaces, there’s an undercurrent of “fix it, push through, stay relevant.” But menopause isn’t asking us to push through. It’s asking us to look deep within and to go downward.

It is, in many ways, an initiation our culture has forgotten how to hold.

The Sacred Descent of Midlife

There is a path in the mystical traditions known as the via negativa—the path of unmaking, undoing, letting go. It is not a glamorous path, but it is a sacred one. Many times during our life we are called into the path of the via negtiva. It is the path of letting go.

Midlife calls us into that descent. It asks us to shed identities we’ve outgrown. To let go of belief systems that no longer serve us. To lay down roles that once defined us. To grieve the things that will never be. And in that letting go, we begin to remember who we are beneath the masks.

This descent is not a breakdown. It is a re-rooting. It is the composting of what no longer serves into the fertile soil of wisdom. And yes, it can be disorienting. But it can also be deeply freeing.

Becoming Ourselves by Deepening, Not Striving

In this season of life, with our hormonal cocktail changing, the nervous system begins to tell the truth we may have avoided for years. The body no longer tolerates what once was bearable. The soul begins to whisper (or sometimes roar), asking for integrity, alignment, authenticity.

This isn’t about striving to become some upgraded version of ourselves. It’s about softening into who we’ve always been. It’s about expanding our capacity to feel—grief, joy, awe—and to live from a place that’s more honest, more grounded, more whole.

This is where somatic work is a game-changer. By learning to be with our sensations, to regulate our systems, to hold ourselves in the tender places, we create the space to truly meet ourselves. Not as a project to fix, but as a mystery to unfold.

Stepping Into Stewardship

The journey doesn’t stop with self-discovery. There is another unfolding—one that calls us into relationship with community, with the next generation, with the wider web of life. We often find our passions and interests broadening to issues of the wider system, of community.

This is the forgotten role of the elder. Not just someone who is older, but someone who has metabolized their life experience into wisdom. Someone who can hold space for others, offer perspective, and serve as a steady presence in uncertain times.

Our communities are starved of elders. Not because they don’t exist, but because the path to eldership has been erased. What if we reclaimed it? What if menopause was not the end of relevance, but the beginning of true leadership?

We don’t just become an elder by getting older. This work requires us to do the deep self inquiry, the deep integration work on ourselves. When we can reclaim the lost parts of ourselves and invite them all to coexist together. When we can honour their voices and tend to them when they need support.

Regulation as a Return to our Blueprint

One of the most powerful shifts I witness in the women I work with—one I’ve lived myself—is what happens when we begin to create more capacity in the nervous system.

It sounds simple. But it’s deeply radical.

So many women have been running on high alert for decades—juggling careers, caregiving, emotional labor, all while trying to keep it together. Their bodies are stuck in “go” mode, and rest doesn’t feel safe. Stillness feels unfamiliar. Slowing down can feel like failure—or worse, danger.

So the work begins gently. We slow down, yes—but we also build the internal scaffolding to support that slowing down. We build safety in the body through somatic practices. We learn to recognize sensation without needing to fix it. We explore the thinking patterns that reinforce overdoing. And little by little, something begins to shift.

There’s more space inside.

And in that space, something magical happens. Life doesn’t get easier—but it becomes more liveable. Triggers still arise, but they’re like whispers instead of alarms. You start to notice: “Ah, there’s that pattern again”—and you choose how to respond instead of being hijacked by it. The nervous system no longer dictates your reactions. You come home to yourself.

This is what I mean by returning to our core, our blueprint.

Not just physically—though that’s part of it. But to the energetic and psychological centre of who you are. That place in the body where you are most you—before the world told you who to be. That grounded, wise, tender place that knows how to move through life with presence.

It’s not about becoming someone new. It’s about remembering who you’ve always been—beneath the striving, beneath the masks, beneath the noise.

And that remembering? That is the real gift of this life stage.

This return to the core also supports what I believe is the central developmental challenge of midlife: radical honesty. Not the performative kind, but the deeply embodied kind—the honesty that arises when you’re no longer willing to betray yourself. At this life stage, we’re invited to tell the truth about where we are. About what hurts. About what we want. About who we’re becoming. And the more capacity we have in our nervous system, the more we can meet those truths without collapse or denial. We can meet them with presence. With curiosity. With love.

"At midlife, the call is not to climb higher, but to descend deeper — into the ground of the soul, into the roots of being, into the core of what is most genuine and lasting in us."
— Michael Meade

A New Story

I believe we are being called to tell a new story—or perhaps to remember an old one.

A story where menopause is not a problem, but a portal.
Where aging is not decline, but deepening.
Where midlife is not a crisis, but a rite of passage.
And where those who walk through it with presence and courage emerge as the elders and stewards we so deeply need.

If you’re in this threshold season, you’re not alone. And there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re ripening. And the world needs your wisdom.

Becoming in Midlife

What if midlife isn’t a crisis, but a threshold?

Not the beginning of decline, but the beginning of becoming. A shedding of what no longer fits, and a ripening into who we were always meant to be. Not the self built to survive—but the self born to belong. To the body. To the truth. To community. To the wider web of life.

This isn’t a solo journey. We need spaces—safe, regulated, and wise—where we can do this work together. Spaces where we can slow down enough to hear our own knowing. Where our nervous systems can root into rest. Where radical honesty is welcomed, not feared. And where the fullness of this life stage can be honored as the powerful initiation it truly is.

Because when women reclaim midlife, they don’t just change themselves.

They become stewards. Guides. Elders-in-the-making. Not in the hierarchical sense, but in the soulful sense—those who carry the flame of embodied wisdom forward for others to gather around.

This is the gift. This is the work. And it’s time we told a different story about what it means to grow older.

If you would like to explore your deepening come talk to me about life transitions coaching or somatic experiencing.

If you are based in Melbourne, I will be holding a talk on Tuesday 13th May at the Tree of Life Integral Centre, 3 Denmark St Kew at 6pm. Click here to book your spot as we explore Midlife as a sacred rite of passage.

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.

Constant Striving, the hidden fawn behind 'not enough'

So many of my clients arrive with heavy hearts masked by impressive resumes. They're driven, capable, endlessly striving. And quietly, they carry a question they rarely say aloud: ‘Why do I still feel like I’m not enough?

Often what brings them to me is they desperately want something in their life and the way they currently orient in the world is not helping them get there. So whether it is a healthy conscious relationship where they can be their true selves, or wanting to overcome burnout, or to find more meaning or purpose in their life; what sits underneath all of this is a body in desperate need of rest and a new way of showing up in the world. They are so used to pushing their way through life and they have will power in spades, that fuels that constant striving toward their goals. They are so wired for productivity and to keep on going, that it does not feel safe in their nervous system to slow down.

Striving can be a survival strategy. It looks like lots of ambition but underneath it is actually an adaptation, as the nervous system has wired itself to fawn, seeking safety through performance, achievement, pleasing and perfecting. So it is just not about saying yes to others, it is about proving your worth to stay connected to them.

Where does this strategy arise from?

It often comes from having caregivers who were conditional in giving us their attuned presence, where love or safety and connection were conditional. Often we received the love we needed when we did something brilliant, or we were easy to deal with, ‘good kids’. This is not a flaw we have but actually a rather brilliant adaptive response by the body to keep us safe. The belief system that is created is “If I can just be good enough, useful enough, impressive enough—maybe then I’ll be safe, loved, or chosen”.

It’s survival through self-erasure. And it’s so deeply ingrained in many of us that it can feel like “who we are,” when it’s actually a brilliant adaptation.

How does culture reinforce the need to strive?

This isn’t just personal it can also be cultural. I also believe that productivity culture has been a major influence on this response in many adults. It’s not just personal history that shapes the fawn-strive pattern—it’s cultural, systemic, and reinforced daily in many workplaces. Productivity becomes a proxy for worth. And in that system, rest feels risky.

Productivity culture has institutionalised the fawn response. It rewards over-functioning and punishes rest. In many workplaces, people have internalised the belief: “My value is in what I produce.” “If I slow down, I’ll fall behind, or be seen as lazy, dispensable, or weak.”

So even outside of trauma histories, entire cultural systems are designed to keep nervous systems in a low-grade state of doing to survive. Especially in organisations where performance is tied to identity, job security, or belonging.

How does this striving response show up in adults?

Striving isn’t just a fawning response that is about people-pleasing in obvious ways—it can look like:

• Overachieving to be seen as valuable or loveable,

• Taking on too much to avoid being abandoned or criticised,

• Hustling for worth, because rest feels dangerous or "lazy",

• Always being the one who fixes, leads, or holds it all together,

• Adapting your identity to meet what others need or expect,

• Over functioning in relationships.

In essence, striving is a fawning nervous system response. It says: If I can just be good enough, useful enough, impressive enough—maybe then I’ll be safe, loved, or chosen.

Cant Stop, won’t stop

We joke about ‘can’t stop, won’t stop,’ but for many, it’s not a quirky motto—it’s a trauma response. It’s the body never having felt safe enough to slow down and rest. We wear it as a a badge of honour, or even an odd personality trait—but underneath it, for so many, it’s the body saying:
“If I stop, it might all fall apart.” “If I rest, who will I be?” “If I slow down, will the pain catch up with me?”

It’s not hustle culture—it’s hypervigilance dressed in productivity. It’s a nervous system that has never known true safety, only safety-through-doing. This is so deeply woven into high-functioning, heart-centred people who’ve built their worth through care-taking, fixing, over-responsibility, and striving to be irreplaceable.

The laugh we attach to “can’t stop, won’t stop” is often a nervous system trying to normalise its own exhaustion, because admitting we’re tired or scared feels too vulnerable.

Striving is often the voice of a nervous system that never felt safe to simply be.

What are the costs of constant striving?

The costs are high for many people. They include: Transactional relationships that are based on performance not presence and this leaves many people feeling lonely and disconnected from their peers at work, feeling like they are misunderstood or that they don’t fit into the organisation they work for. This sense of belonging is not there. It is also the body never getting to rest, and after many years, we see that manifest in burnout, health issues, anxiety and disconnection from the self.

What are we really longing for?

Contentment and belonging are the deep yearning we are searching for when we are striving, So often, we think we’re chasing success, or mastery, or healing—but underneath it all, we’re chasing that feeling:
That feeling can be: The deep exhale of contentment; the relief of being with people who see us, know us, and don’t need us to be any different, the safety of not having to perform, strive, or explain ourselves, the belonging that whispers: “You are enough, just as you are, and you always have been.”

It’s the nervous system’s longing to come out of hypervigilance and into co-regulation. To be met, not managed. Held, not judged. Loved, not evaluated.

And it’s not a small thing. That kind of contentment rewires us. It gives us a new blueprint for what’s possible in connection—with ourselves and with others. It helps us to feel safe enough to slow down

Where do we start with healing?

Striving may have kept us safe, but it’s not the same as being truly seen. Slowly, we begin to rebuild safety in being, not just in doing. We need to titrate our experience of slowing down because it will feel unsafe for the nervous system to just stop. So our path is to move from fawning to feel comfortable just being. This is somatic work working deeply with the autonomic nervous system because we are dealing with unconscious trauma imprints.

Imagine your body as a riverbed that has been carved deeply by years of rushing water—this water is your striving. It’s fast, focused, and relentless, always moving toward the next bend. The river believes if it can just keep flowing fast enough, it will reach some final place where it can finally rest.

But the riverbed is tired. It longs for a gentle stream. For stillness. For the moss to grow again on its rocks. It longs for a pause so life can return to its banks.

Some things you could try on your own:

The micro pause

This is a micro-practice to do anytime you feel the drive to prove, do, or fix surging up. You can try it right now if you like.

1. Settle – Let your body arrive where it is. Feel the weight of gravity. Feel the support of the earth or chair beneath you.

2. Place a hand on your heart or belly – Choose what feels most tender or accessible.

3. Say softly, either out loud or silently:
   “Right now, in this moment, I am enough.”
   (Even if part of you doesn’t believe it—just let it land and see what happens.)

4. Notice what shifts – Is there any softening, resistance, warmth, tears, numbness? All responses are welcome.

5. Stay with the sensation for 30 seconds or so. No need to fix or change it. Just witness your being—not your doing.

When your body is giving you signs to slow down, know that you are not broken. Trust the innate wisdom and intelligence of your body and what it is trying to say to you. You have adapted brilliantly but now your body is ready for something new. If you would like to explore your pathway to slowing down, to being more present, to stop being everything to everyone, to stop hustling, come talk to me about somatic experiencing or coaching.

Fawning and hypersocialisation, when survival becomes over accommodation

I have talked quite a lot about the fawning response before. A few years ago I was introduced to Brigit Viksnins work. In it, I was introduced to the concept of hypersocialisation, and as I thought about my own fawning response it made a lot of sense.

We often think of fawning showing up as people pleasing behaviour, which it is. But do you know it is actually more complex than that. Fawning which was coined by therapist Pete Walker, refers to the instinct to appease and accommodate others as a way to stay safe. When we fawn we use our social engagement system, which is the part of our nervous system where we usually feel safe and connected, as a survival response. Women and children are more predisposed to do this for a couple of reasons. Children because of relational power dynamics and the fact they have less physical strength, will use fawning as a response to evade danger. Women because they have estrogen and oxytocin which wires them for deep attunement and connection, will also use this strategy for the same reasons of power and strength, but also because they are biologically wired to connect. For those people with developmental trauma, fawning can become a deeply ingrained survival strategy, shaping how they relate to others and even to themselves.

Brigit Viksnins, a somatic trauma practitioner, expands on this concept with the term hypersocialisation. She describes hypersocialisation as an extreme form of fawning, where the nervous system is wired to prioritise social connection at all costs—even at the expense of one’s own needs, boundaries, and authenticity. Hypersocialisation isn’t just about being ‘nice’ or ‘people-pleasing’; it’s a profound survival adaptation rooted in early experiences where belonging and attunement to others felt like a matter of life or death.

Where I have seen this within myself and with clients is when we over function and over accommodate at the expense of our own needs. Yes, some people do develop this in their family system, and, I think the rough and tumble of the playground at school can deeply hone some nervous systems to develop this response to stay safe, as can some pretty toxic workplaces. With this, it brings some profound strengths. For me it is deep empathy, a sixth sense for what people are feeling which is of course a gift of being hypervigilant and the ability to read a room or space very quickly down to a somatic level. When we fawn like this we are putting on a mask and hiding behind it for protection. This disconnects us from our authentic self and from making deep authentic connections with others.

Understanding Hypersocialisation as a Trauma Response

Hypersocialisation emerges when a child’s primary survival strategy is to attune to others so finely that they anticipate and meet the needs of caregivers before their own needs are even acknowledged. This pattern often develops in environments where emotional safety was inconsistent or where a parent’s approval, love, or even basic presence was conditional. Rather than risk conflict, rejection, or abandonment, the child unconsciously learns that being hyper-aware of social cues and modifying their behaviour accordingly offers the best chance of maintaining attachment.

This adaptation doesn’t just disappear in adulthood. Instead, it can manifest in ways that are often mistaken for positive traits: being highly empathetic, socially skilled, and attuned to group dynamics. However, the cost of hypersocialisation is high—it often results in chronic exhaustion, resentment, and a disconnection from one’s own truth.

Signs of Hypersocialisation in Adults

• Chronic Over-Attunement: Constantly scanning for social cues, micro-expressions, or shifts in others' emotions to adjust behaviour accordingly.

• Shape-Shifting: Adapting personality, opinions, or emotional expressions based on the perceived expectations of others.

• Difficulty Setting Boundaries: Feeling guilty or anxious when asserting needs or saying no.

• Fear of Rejection or Conflict: Feeling emotionally unsafe if others are displeased, leading to habitual self-silencing.

• Emotional Exhaustion: Overextending in relationships and social interactions, leaving little energy for self-care.

Healing from Hypersocialisation

Recovering from hypersocialisation requires a gradual process of reclaiming one’s inner truth, bodily autonomy, and emotional safety. Some key elements of healing include:

1. Reconnecting with the Body: Because hypersocialisation is a nervous system response, somatic practices like breathwork, grounding, and body-based therapies (such as Somatic Experiencing) can help restore a felt sense of safety.

2. Developing Internal Awareness: Journaling, meditation, and self-inquiry can help identify the automatic patterns of fawning and where they show up in daily life.

3. Practicing Boundary-Setting: Learning to say no, even in small ways, can be a powerful act of reclaiming agency.

4. Titrating Social Exposure: If social interactions are a primary trigger for hypersocialisation, gradually practicing authenticity in low-stakes environments can help retrain the nervous system to tolerate healthy differentiation from others.

5. Building Secure Relationships: Finding relationships where authenticity is welcomed—and not contingent on over-accommodation—can be deeply reparative.

Digital art - Kellie Stirling

Beyond Fawning: Reclaiming Authentic Connection

The paradox of hypersocialisation is that, in an effort to maintain connection, it often leads to self-abandonment. True connection, however, doesn’t require over-accommodation—it flourishes when both people can show up as they truly are. Healing from hypersocialisation is about shifting from relational survival to relational agency. It’s about allowing the nervous system to trust that being real is not only safe, but also the foundation for deeper, more fulfilling relationships.

For those who recognise themselves in this pattern, healing is not about becoming less social or less empathetic—it’s about integrating those gifts with a deep and abiding connection to self. From that place, true belonging can emerge—not because we’ve molded ourselves to fit, but because we’ve learned to stand fully in who we are. Connecting with desire and understanding our boundaries, supports us to move to this place of being comfortable and safe being in our own bodies.

If you think you might be abandoning yourself through fawning and hypersocialisation, come talk to me about somatic experiencing or relationship coaching. We can work with your nervous system so you can feel comfortable to express your boundaries and feel safe to be your true self.

If you want to understand your survival responses a little better, click on this link to download a complimentary copy of my short explanation of your brilliant nervous system's survival responses.

Healing Our Trauma: Reclaiming Our Connection with Nature

For me, there is nothing better than walking barefoot in the sand on the beach, then having a dip in the sea. I love floating in sea water and the rocking that comes with floating on top of waves as they ebb and flow. It is highly restorative. It grounds me and brings me back into my body. I can feel my nervous system coming into my zone of resilience.

In the quiet of a forest, the crash of ocean waves, or the vast openness of a starlit sky, many of us feel something stir within—a longing, a recognition, a sense of home, a feeling of belonging. But for many, that connection feels distant, as if nature is something separate from us rather than a living web in which we belong.

Much of this disconnection stems not just from modern life but from unhealed trauma—both personal and collective. Our nervous systems, shaped by past wounds, can keep us in states of hypervigilance or numbness, making it difficult to truly be present with the natural world. However, as we heal, something shifts. We begin to experience nature not just as scenery but as an extension of ourselves, rich with wisdom and reciprocity.

So how does trauma disconnect us from nature?

When we experience trauma, our nervous system adapts to keep us safe. If safety was scarce, our body may have learned to stay on high alert, scanning for danger even in peaceful settings. If overwhelming experiences left us feeling powerless, we may have learned to disconnect, numbing ourselves to sensations—including the subtle, grounding presence of nature.

Maybe you are thinking but I haven’t really experienced trauma why do I feel disconnected from my body. Well, modern life is very challenging and often it is the micro-aggressions of daily life that overwhelm us and this stacks up in our nervous system. All of these moments of overwhelm sometimes hit us when we least expect it and we experience pain, illness or relational rupture.

Many of us also carry inherited trauma, passed down through generations. Our ancestors may have lived through displacement, war, colonisation, or environmental destruction, severing their relationship with the land. That rupture doesn’t just exist in history books—it lives in our bodies, shaping how we relate to the earth. The study of epigenetics has explained this to us, so we can see how this unhealed trauma is passed down through generations in both cell expression but also in the attachment system in each of us, that is formed through the maternal bond between an baby and their caregivers.

In modern life, this disconnection manifests in subtle ways as we project our internal disconnection outwards and this shapes how we relate to ourselves, others, the world and life itself. We may find it hard to slow down enough to notice the intricate beauty of a leaf, the rhythmic cycles of the seasons, or the deep nourishment that comes from being immersed in nature. We are stuck on the hamster wheel of flight and fight. Instead of feeling like we belong to the land, we often treat it as a resource to be extracted and used, a background to our human-centered world.

How does healing our trauma restore our sense of belonging within us and also to something greater than us?

The good news is that healing our trauma—whether through somatic work, deep nervous system repair, or ancestral healing—opens the door to a profound reconnection with nature. As we learn to regulate our nervous system, we develop the capacity to be present, to notice, and to receive. The very same skills that allow us to process and release trauma—slowing down, attuning to our sensations, and cultivating safety—are the ones that allow us to feel at home in the natural world.

When we heal, we begin to:

Feel the land as alive – Instead of seeing nature as an object, we start to sense its intelligence, its rhythms, and its ability to communicate. We might begin to feel the energy of trees, the presence of the wind, or the way a particular landscape holds us.

Move beyond fear and control – Trauma often teaches us to control our environment for safety. As we heal, we can interact with nature in a more reciprocal way—learning from it rather than trying to dominate it. When we feel safe in our own bodies, we can soften into a sense of safety in the world.

Trust the body’s belonging – Nature is not something we visit; it is something we are. As we learn to listen to and trust our body and appreciate its deep wisdom, we also learn to trust the wisdom of the earth. We develop a deep understanding of the rhythms of nature and the rhythms in our body. Our understanding of one pattern helps us see this replicated through our own body and other systems we interact within.

Feel the cycles of life more deeply – Instead of fearing endings and beginnings, we start to embrace the cycles of nature as part of us. We see death, decay, rebirth, and renewal not just in the world around us but in our own emotional and spiritual journeys.

Increased self-awareness and environmental awareness - When we tend to our inner landscapes, we become more attuned to the landscapes around us.

Healing give us a new way of relating to each other and a new way of orienting ourselves in the world.

As we heal, we begin to walk through the world differently. We no longer see ourselves as separate from nature but as part of an ongoing conversation with it. We listen more deeply, honour its gifts, and recognise that the earth, like us, holds both wounds and the capacity for regeneration.

Our personal healing ripples outward. When we feel connected to the land, we are more likely to protect it, not from a place of fear or guilt but from love and reverence. Our actions shift from extraction to reciprocity, from dominance to stewardship.

Healing trauma is not just personal work—it is planetary work. As we reconnect with ourselves, we reconnect with the earth. And as we learn to belong to our own bodies, we remember that we have always belonged to the web of life.

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling

What if healing is not just about feeling better, but about remembering our place in the great unfolding story of the earth?

Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to slow down, place our hands on the earth, and listen.

Healing happens in community and when we connect with something bigger than us. There are many ways we can look at nature and draw a comparison with our body and its innate intelligence and understanding of how to heal.

Just as nature moves through seasons of growth, rest, decay, and renewal, our nervous system cycles through activation, integration, and restoration. Honouring these natural rhythms supports long-term well-being. Here are some other comparisons that might deepen you understanding of both our body and nature’s capacity to generate healing and growth through the building of virtuous cycles and coherence.

Roots & Grounding – Trees grow strong by sending their roots deep into the earth. Similarly, we cultivate resilience by grounding ourselves in connection—whether to our breath, body, relationships, or a sense of purpose.

Storms & Emotional Intensity – A thunderstorm may feel chaotic, but it brings necessary rain and clears the air. Intense emotions may feel overwhelming, but when we allow them to move through us, they can bring clarity and transformation. Emotions like natures storms pass through us when we let them be expressed. When we allow ourselves to feel emotions fully, we become more open to experiencing the depth of nature.

Ebb & Flow of the Ocean – The tides rise and fall in a constant dance with the moon, just as our emotions and energy levels naturally fluctuate. Trying to force constant calmness is like trying to stop the ocean’s waves—it’s unnatural.

Symbiosis & Co-Regulation – Ecosystems thrive through interdependence; plants, animals, fungi, and microbes all support each other. Likewise, humans regulate best in connection—our nervous systems co-regulate through relationships, just as trees share nutrients through their roots.

Fire & Transformation – I have always been fascinated by the dual nature of fire. It can be a force for regeneration and a force of destruction. Wildfires, though destructive, create space for new growth by clearing out the old. In our nervous system, moments of challenge or breakdown can lead to profound transformation when we move through them with support.

Where do we start?

Of course you can start with the simple connections you can make with nature around you. Even if it is taking a walk on the grass in your bare feet start there. Do it with a friend or your partner, take a walk together. Trauma occurs in the absence of a compassionate witness, so healing happens in the connection with one and in the presence of community. We are wired for social connection, we are not meant to do life on on our own.

The web of life, we are not just in nature, we are nature.

For centuries, humans have told themselves a story: that we stand apart from nature. We build cities, design technologies, and shape landscapes to meet our needs. We name ourselves as observers of nature, as though it is something out there—separate from us. But this illusion of separation is just that—an illusion.

The truth is, we are not just in nature. We are nature.

We have this myth of separation, a mental model that we hold that we are separate to nature. We need sunlight, water and oxygen to survive. We take all that in, plus food (from nature) and we breath out carbon dioxide which the trees take in to make oxygen. We are a system living within a system.

Somewhere along the way, many human cultures began to see nature as something to be tamed, managed, or extracted from. The industrial revolution accelerated this thinking, and modern life often reinforces it. We go from temperature-controlled homes to air-conditioned cars to office buildings, rarely touching the earth with bare feet or feeling the true rhythm of the seasons.

But no matter how much concrete we pour, how many walls we build, or how advanced our technology becomes, we are still living, breathing organisms shaped by the same forces that shape the forests, the rivers, and the wind.

Our bodies speak the language of the earth even, when we forget our connection, our bodies remember.

We have our own rhythms and cycles just liken nature, some of these are:
- The circadian rhythms that govern our sleep are tuned to the rising and setting of the sun.
- Our lungs evolved in partnership with trees, exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide in a continuous, reciprocal dance.
- The minerals in our bones were once part of ancient mountains.
- The water that makes up most of our bodies has cycled through clouds, rivers, and oceans for billions of years.

We are the land, the sea, the sky—just temporarily arranged in the form of human beings.

Human beings are relational beings, we are wired for connection and we need other people around us to co-regulate our nervous systems - we are not wired to do life on our own. In nature, everything is relational. Forests are not just collections of trees; they are living systems where roots exchange nutrients, fungi form underground networks of communication, and birds and insects pollinate plants, sustaining the whole.

Humans, too, are part of these systems. We have always been in relationship with the land, with animals, with each other. Indigenous cultures have long recognized this interdependence, honoring the earth not as a resource to exploit, but as kin to respect.

When we embrace this view, our decisions shift. We stop seeing ourselves as rulers of nature and instead become participants—stewards in an ancient, living network.

So how do we connect back to our natural place in nature?

Remembering our place in nature is not about abandoning modern life. It’s about reweaving our awareness into the fabric of the world.

We can start small:
- Walking barefoot on the earth, this is one of my favourites and I often do laps each night in a park in my house,
- Swimming in natural bodies of water,
- Noticing the phases of the moon,
- Eating food that actually comes from the soil, not just a package,
- Listening to birdsong in the morning.

Our body actually loves being in nature and connecting with the earth helps to anchor us back down into our bodies when the daily machinations of modern life and technology lift us out of it.

These simple acts reconnect us to something ancient within ourselves. They remind us that we are not just visitors here—we belong. Whilst these are great activities we can do on our own, they are even better when we do them with friends. We build little spots of coherence in our life with these activities and coherence has the capacity to shift a system. Coherence. both within our nervous system and in ecosystems, act as small attractors and they pull the system toward greater organisation. This is because systems are often fractal, which means that small patterns reflect and influence the larger whole.

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling

So in a system that is dysregulated, a single stable rhythm, like a leader modelling nervous system regulation in a group, can influence a group to entrain to steadiness and calm.

Our nervous system is not separate from nature—it is nature. The same principles that govern ecosystems also govern our inner world:

Just as a forest needs diversity and resilience to thrive, our nervous system needs a range of experiences and emotions to stay regulated..

Just as a river adapts to the landscape it moves through, we heal by allowing our emotions and sensations to flow rather than becoming stagnant.

Just as animals shake off stress to reset their systems, we can release stored trauma through therapeutic modalities like somatic experiencing that work with the natural rhythm of the body and we can use somatic practices that restore regulation

How do we come home to ourselves?

The climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and ecological destruction we face today stem, in part, from our belief in separation. But if separation is the problem, then reconnection is the medicine.

When we stop seeing nature as something outside of us and start feeling it within us—as us—we open the door to a different way of living. A way that honours interdependence. A way that leads us back home.

Because we were never separate. We just forgot.

Now is the time to remember. Although we face many big global problems, act as that small port of coherence, start local. Start with yourself and in your systems you interact with.

Shame and our bodies

Shame has a huge influence over how we perceive and see our bodies. Many people have been strongly influenced culturally to compare our bodies to others, particularly those others we see in the media and popular culture. These are impossible standards to live up to, particularly when we know that technology allows manipulation of photographic images. What we are looking at is not reality.
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So much of what we believe about ourselves, when it comes to body image, comes from outside of ourselves. It comes from our family and larger society. From a very young age we internalise messaging about what we are supposed to eat, how we are supposed to look, who we are supposed to be, who we should love, what we should be able to do.

Our body is centred in all of this.
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Notice there are a lot of should and supposed to be there.

When you look around the world, what is considered healthy and acceptable, changes culturally. Although this has morphed and blended with social media.

Image - Mohammed Nohasi

I was a teenager in the 80s and young adult in the 90s and this was the time where diet culture was everywhere in popular media. It was aerobics everywhere, hello Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons. I was an aerobics queen, don't get me wrong it was a lot of fun and a great thing to do with friends, but the body standards were impossible and dangerous. The leotards were ace though!
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This was also the generation in modelling of the waif. Remember Kate Moss when she started out, impossibly thin. So there is a whole generation of 40 and 50 year olds out there who whose mental models of acceptable beauty are based on, excessive exercise, starving yourself and dangerously thin models.
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We are very impressionable in our early years and these impressions around body image last for years. When we don't look like what is portrayed in popular culture as normal, we feel like we aren't enough, like we don't belong. Some of us will go to extremes to fit in. This need to belong is hardwired into our DNA. In Tribal days, we relied on the tribe to be protected and fed. So it literally can feel like a life or death situation when we feel like to don't belong. It puts us into survival mode.
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So as you can see, shame has a lot to say about how we perceive our bodies. We have these internal versions of ourselves based on these external images that relate to our self-esteem. Some of us who suffer pervasive shame over our body image, have some very harsh inner critics. Some of these inner critic parts live deep in our unconscious so they are not always that easy to detect and hear. They way to diminish them is to talk about them. Shame thrives on secrecy; when we talk about our inner critic we starve them of their supply.
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There is a particular type of shame a lot of us feel as we get older. We compare how we are now to our younger selves. We remember when we were really fit and healthy and could do a lot. We remember our young faces, without wrinkles and saggy skin. We remember our hair before it was grey. Some of us go to great lengths to avoid this. There is a particular strength that can be found in accepting ourselves just as we are right now. A happiness, a contentment, a sense of joy.
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Whats the antidote to all this shame?
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Pride, curiousity and open conversations, shut shame down. Learning to love your body and all the amazing things they have done for you is the way through. It might not be easy but it is totally doable.

Need some help? Come talk to me.

How freeze physiology in our nervous system can impact our self-confidence

Freeze physiology in our nervous system can manifest in many different ways. Many of us walk around every day in a state of functional freeze. I did for a very long time. We often think of freeze as flat but that is often not the case. What we can see in freeze is a permanent state of contraction. Just like we see a snail or turtle moved into its protective shell when it feels threatened, the human body can move into a contracted posture when placed in a situation that evokes fear.

Freeze can be a stuck startle response or stuck fight and flight energy. Imagine all the times when you have been startled by something that you have seen and never got to discharge that energy. That response gets frozen in your system. It doesn't matter what the story of the situation is, it is something that overwhelmed us that was too much, too fast, too soon for our nervous system, or maybe too little for too long.

As the years go by, we absorb and adjust to this physiology so we can function well in life. However it can come at the expense of certain characteristics that we might like to develop. Like Self-Confidence. Why is this so hard? Well it has a little to do with the qualities of expansion and contraction.

Confidence is an expansive quality. It allows us to stand up for ourselves, speak more freely and take actions we might not take in other circumstances. However it is hard to expand when we have a contracted position stuck within. It needs the qualities of openness to emerge and stay available to us.

Sometimes we do a lot of mindset work to feel more confident. Sometimes a lot of exercise helps us to feel better in our body, more connected to it and more confident. However when we don't do the work on our nervous system, these benefits don't stick around. We wonder why, what is happening why is my confidence really up and down. Well it is normal to have up and down moments in life, but if we don't work on the functional freeze, the patterns of contraction in our nervous system keep pulling us back. Just like the turtle or the snail we contract back hard into our shell under a situation that stimulates the fear response. Sometimes this is why some of us cannot speak up in meetings or for something we care about when the stakes are high.

It can also impact us in our relationships, being able to speak up for what we desire most in life. In our dating life, it helps us so much to be able to ask for what we want in relationships. In our work life it helps us in so many ways move towards work that supports us and nourishes us, that allows us to feel confident to be our authentic selves.

Emotional Starvation

The midlife crisis is not really a crisis. It is a slow wake up call from your bodymind asking you for big changes. Come back to who you are, come back to the body. So much of our culture does not support people thriving and being able to be their real selves. Instead it encourages the ego, those survival strategies you built as a kid to get by, to run the show. It traumatises us time and again. So many people I have worked with push themselves outside their window of tolerance time and again, just so they can function in the workplace.

Midlife is the time when you have a chance to set yourself up to thrive in the second half of life. It asks you to take a deep inward look and really commit to sorting out what needs to be healed, whether it is physical, emotional, social or cultural. Lets undo these survival strategies you have going, that are stored in your unconscious so you can come back to the truth of who you really are.

There is nothing wrong with most of us, it is the system that is broken. The culture telling us how we should be, often this is far from our own reality and lived experience.

Your body has an innate intelligence around healing. You don’t have to tell your body to do anything when you cut your finger, it knows what to do. However our brain can override many of the actions that bring us back to homeostasis. This impacts us significantly when it comes to our emotions and the feelings associated with them. We’ve been trained to ignore the bad stuff like the feeling of anger or sadness or grief in our body, so we override it using our powerful brains and coping strategies to numb ourselves.

The common survival patterns I see that are distracting us from this are: I work too hard, I eat too much, I don’t eat enough, I exercise too much, I diet too much, I drink too much, I shop too much, I give too much. And there is a still a sense of hunger within all of us that cannot be touched because really what we want is to feel.

Emotional Starvation I call it. We starve ourselves of feeling these tough emotions so that we can feel safe, fit in and belong and receive love.

We are doing all the “too much” just to keep up in a culture that numbs us to the sensations and emotions we feel in our bodies. We ignore our own need for pleasure. We ignore the warning systems of our nervous system and over ride our own boundaries to fit in and please.

Our ability to be honest with ourselves, intimate with ourselves, comfortable in our own skin become so confined and limited. We go to all the ‘too much’ activities to avoid looking inside, to avoid noticing the basic sensations, messages our body is trying to give us. When we cannot be honest with ourselves, honour our own feelings, emotions and needs it makes intimacy with another really hard.

How can we connect with ourselves? Through connecting with our pleasure. Feeling the sensations is the important guide. We experience the world through our five senses, they are what tells us if something is pleasurable or painful. When we consciously choose pleasure, and bring attention to the sensations of that, we start to recalibrate our system.

Feeling tells us what is safe and what is not, it connects us to what we really want in our life - our desires, and it puts us in touch with our nervous system, teaching us how to listen to it. Pleasure comes from inside of us, we can create it for ourselves.

Next time you feel like doing one of the “too much activities’, see if you can stop yourself in the moment and choose something that is pleasurable to your senses. Create a sensual experience that brings pleasure to you, that allows you to focus on that feeling of it inside of you.

It’s not too hard, start small, walk in the park, consciously eating nutritious food, dance to music your love. Start small, small steps are more sustainable than grand gestures. That is how change happens.

Choose you.