Healing our abandonment wounds

Many of us have abandonment wounds. They are deeply imprinted in the nervous system, often at a very young age. When our early emotional needs weren’t met—when we lacked attunement, presence, or consistent caregiving—an abandonment wound can take root deep within us.

There are many reasons this happens, sometimes it is a really stressed or depressed parent, a parent who is extremely unwell themselves, and unable to connect and attune to us. Sometimes it is circumstance. I have worked with many people who were premature babies who spent their first few weeks in a humidity crib, so didn’t get the touch from their parents in those first few weeks to soothe their tiny nervous system. Even though one of their parents were most likely there with them all the time, sitting by them, they were separated by a little wall.

This is how deeply wired we are for connection and co-regulation when we are tiny. Our nervous system learns through regulation from our parents and caregivers.

Abandonment wounds are not always obvious. Sometimes they show up not as a gaping wound, but as a subtle hum of anxiety in our relationships. A feeling of being "too much" or "not enough." A belief that love must be earned, not received freely.

To avoid the unbearable terror of disconnection, many of us learned to fawn. We became hyper-attuned to the emotional landscape of others. We learned to appease, to over-function, to say yes when we meant no. We self-abandoned in hopes of staying connected.

Fawning is a survival strategy. It’s what our nervous system chose when fight, flight, or freeze didn’t feel safe or available. While it helped us survive, it often keeps us from truly living—because it asks us to leave ourselves behind.

Healing the abandonment wound isn’t about blaming our caregivers—it’s about reclaiming the parts of us that learned love meant losing ourselves.

Attunement is largely body based; eye contact, mirroring through action and language and most importantly, we attune through touch. These are all essential in establishing secure attachment. When these components are missing our nervous system learns to perceive that we will be left on our own.

Art - Giulia Rosa

For female nervous systems, which are more finely tuned to social engagement because we have lots of estrogen, which creates oxytocin, wiring us for connection and bonding - this perceived abandonment can often be felt more intensely. So we fawn to establish connection.

When we fawn, when we please, appease, over-function, we abandon our own needs. We stop asking for what we want, because we know our needs won’t be met. We hyper-attune or hyper-socialise to stay connected and receive the sense of love, safety and belonging that we all need at a very foundational level just so we can function.

Healing self abandonment begins when we learn not to abandon our selves. When we learn to feel our big sensations and emotions and stay in our body, expanding capacity inside of us to be with what what life throws our way. When we learn to self-soothe and have our little strategies to come back to our zone of resilience. This establishes a sense of safety and trust within ourselves and then we learn to trust others.

It starts with learning how to stay with ourselves. To feel what we couldn’t feel then. To expand our capacity to be with emotion and sensation—including the terror that once overwhelmed our small bodies.

Very slowly, as we learn to stay, something beautiful happens; we begin to trust that we will no longer abandon ourselves and that safety, the safety of self-attunement, becomes the foundation for all our relationships.

Why the feminine is the change maker - part 2

Last week I started this conversation about why the feminine energy in our culture tends to be the instigator of change. I know this is not always true but I do find that many women whether by choice or force of life events, tend to explore themselves deeply and the fact that we have this deep inner knowing which I talked about in last week’s blog which means we tend to read the ‘tea leaves’ and know when it’s time for change.

Anecdotally, when I think about all the training and professional development I have done over the years, there has always been a much higher percentage of female participants than male participants and so we notice this and we talk about it. You could complain about it and say men don’t do the hard work, but I don’t think this is entirely true because I have lots of male clients and friends who have committed to exploring themselves, but to be honest it is usually after something going really wrong in their lives. Maybe it is that it is women who are the instigators of change in relationships, in families, in cultures. Many studies of couples on relationships and marriages consistently show that around 70% of divorces are instigated by women.

There are many ways we can explore why this happens and I always love taking a Jungian lens on what is actually happening because it always explores the shadow side of everything which I find super interesting. If we look through a Jungian lens, It is always the masculine within the feminine that changes first. In Jungian parlance, the animus (the inner masculine in a woman) seeks direction, clarity, and forward motion. When a woman begins her transformation (say, through grief, menopause, creativity, or awakening), it’s often her inner masculine that reorients first, perhaps by finding new values, boundaries, or purpose. Once that internal alignment shifts, her outer relationships must also adjust. How I notice this in clients is they cannot pretend to be anything other than their authentic selves anymore and this often causes friction in different relationships in their lives as this authentic self in them is emerging. Things can be a bit wobbly for a while as she finds comfort with meeting these new parts of self.

And yes, often this catalyses change in the masculine partner or in the wider system. But not always right away. Sometimes the feminine awakens and moves first, and the masculine (whether internal or external) resists or lags—until it feels safe or necessary to catch up. That friction can either break the container or refine it.

Digital image - Womb in the Sky, Kellie Stirling

Why does the feminine change first?

In the simplest form, we are the ones who can create life and give birth to that. Even beyond biological birth, the feminine is the archetypal womb—the container that holds, gestates, dissolves, and re-emerges. This role isn’t limited to women, but in most systems, it is the feminine energy that initiates the deep work: the descent, the death, the regeneration. Women, especially at midlife, often step into this initiatory role on behalf of their families, partnerships, and communities.

It’s like we become the crucible in which the old dies and the new is born. Let’s look at it from a few different perspectives:

• Biologically: Our hormonal cycles force us into regular encounters with change. Life transitions like menstruation, pregnancy, birth, perimenopause, and menopause demand transformation. For example, every month when we have menstrual cycles, we are moving through a cycle of change, a cycle of birth, death, rebirth metaphorically speaking that is experienced in an embodied way with our menstrual cycles.

• Emotionally: The feminine is finely attuned to relational field dynamics because we have lots of estrogen which helps creates oxytocin. Our nervous system is regulated by oxytocin which acts as a neuro-modulator. Neuro-modulators fine tune and shape how our nervous system reacts to stimuli over time. So we become more relationally attuned and attuned to social safety. We feel what’s missing, what’s breaking down, or what wants to emerge sooner. So oxytocin plays an enormous role in regulating arousal, stress responses and healing.

• Spiritual/Archetypal: The feminine holds the wisdom of the underworld. We know how to descend and return with insight. That’s where true alchemy happens.

So when it comes to relationships, often, when a woman begins to change, it upsets the systemic homeostasis of the relationship. If she holds the relational field (as is often the case), any shift she makes is deeply felt by the other. This can either provoke resistance or invite the partner to evolve too. Sometimes both. In this sense, women often become the alchemical fire that either transforms or reveals what’s no longer sustainable.

Why the feminine are the change makers - part 1

I have been doing a bit of work with a biodynamic cranio osteopath on my pelvis. I have had pelvic issues for years, predominantly starting with a car accident as a kid, and things just go layered upon it. I have worked with different body workers over the years and I have to say it is in a pretty good state now. If you aren’t familiar with this modality it is a lot of neuro-affective touch work, and the body in all its wisdom and intelligence, reorganises, because it knows how to heal. It is very similar to the touch work we do sometimes in somatic experiencing.

My osteopath and I have big chats when I am on the table. Last session she asked me “do you think it is trauma that causes all the autoimmune issues in women”. (if you don’t know the stats, something like 80% of autoimmune condition sufferers are female bodies). I said sometimes, but I think it is because as women we carry so much of the relational field and after a while that takes an enormous toll on a woman’s body if there is not enough sharing of the load going on in the family system or she does not have a good circle of support around her. After a period of time the body screams whether it be relational rupture, physical pain or discomfort, illness. It tells us, things need to change now!

So let’s talk about that because there is a price we pay for holding the relational field.

Why do we hold the relational field and how does it prime us to lead change?

Well some of it is biological, some is cultural and some is archetypal.

Biologically and neurologically we are wired for connection. Our estrogen creates the oxytocin that drives us to connect and attune to our children.

Women’s bodies are literally designed to attune:

• Oxytocin, the bonding hormone, is more prevalent in women. It surges during intimacy, birth, breastfeeding—but also during conversation and emotional connection.

• Our mirror neuron systems, which help us sense and empathise with others' emotions, tend to be more active.

• From a nervous system lens, many women are socialised (and biologically primed) to track relational dynamics, often before we even understand we’re doing it.

The social conditioning is strong. From a young age, girls are typically taught to; caretake others’ feelings, keep the peace, maintain connection and be “good,” agreeable, relationally aware. We are socialised to value harmony over truth.

On a deeper level, the feminine principle (not just in women, but especially expressed through them) is associated with; holding, containing, gestating, weaving the web between things

So the relational field—that unseen space between people where emotion, meaning, energy, and nervous system cues travel—is often carried by the feminine. Not because it’s our duty, but because we feel it first, and most acutely.

Women tend to track what's happening in the in-between. This might look like noticing when something feels “off” even if nothing is said, adjusting ourselves to keep harmony, carrying the emotional labour of a relationship or family.

While this conditioning can be limiting, it also hones an early sensitivity to emotional tone, unspoken tensions, and disconnection. We’re trained, often unconsciously, to sense and hold the relational space around us. My neighbour always said to me, ‘if mum is okay the whole family functions well. If she is not the cracks start to occur’. We are the emotional anchor in the family system.

From a more archetypal or somatic-mystic view, the womb is not just a biological organ but a relational centre; a place where life is created, held, and nourished. Even for women who do not have a physical womb, the energetic imprint always remains. The womb and ovaries have a incredibly strong energetic imprint, so even if you have an hysterectomy, the energetic imprint never leaves you.

This womb-space can sense the field like a tuning fork. It picks up resonance and dissonance, and often prompts us to move toward repair, connection, or withdrawal. So even beyond personality, trauma history, or conditioning—there is an embodied deep knowing that many women carry. A sense of what’s happening in the space between.

The big challenge.

Many women hold the relational field at the expense of themselves.

We track everyone else’s nervous systems, needs, moods—and forget our own. We become hyper-attuned, hyper-responsible, and depleted. This is where somatic reclamation, reconnecting with our body, becomes essential. Learning the skills to come back to your body so you can hear it when it is speaking to you. We learn to track ourselves first, then engage from a resourced place. This is what transforms holding the relational field from a burden into a gift.

It is this gift, that tells us when change is needed.

Women don’t hold the relational field because we ‘should’, we hold it because we are tuned to life, to connection, to what moves between. To coherence in the field, to what is working well and what is not working well.

Midlife, when the cost and payment becomes due.

In midlife, the body begins to speak more loudly. Years of holding the field—of tracking, softening, absorbing—can begin to show up as: chronic fatigue, autoimmune conditions, thyroid dysfunction, mystery symptoms, emotional exhaustion and uproar or a sense of grief no one can name.

Many women reach a point where their bodies refuse to keep playing the role. Where the cost of emotional labor has accumulated and the body keeps the score. Not because we are broken. But because we are done.

I often wonder if all of these health issues in midlife or the tough perimenopause journey experienced by some midlife women are the body’s way of saying:

“You’ve spent a lifetime turning against yourself to preserve connection. Now I’m turning inward to get your attention.”

It’s not our fault. But it is our invitation—to begin again, from the inside out

But we’re also being called now to hold it differently; not by abandoning ourselves, but by anchoring into our bodies, our knowing, our rhythm.

That is where true healing begins, not just for us, but for the whole field we’re in.

The healing path isn’t about abandoning our relational gifts. It’s about reclaiming ourselves as part of the field we’re so attuned to.

It’s about learning to: track our own nervous systems first, let others hold space for us, to feel safe saying no, set boundaries without guilt and recognising that we are not here to carry it all alone

This is where deep nervous system healing and somatic work become essential. They help us untangle the pattern of self-abandonment woven into our care.

We were never meant to carry it all.

We are capable of holding so much but we were not meant to hold all of the emotional dysregulation of others, all of the unspoken weight of a relationship. Nor were we meant to hold all of the relational field of a family, the workplace, the world - at the cost and detriment of our own health.

This is a huge price to pay and our midlife transition is the initiation into change we need to let some or all of it go. When this initiation happens it causes change in all the relational fields we are in.

So if you are finding ourself, exhausted or unravelling at midlife, you are not failing, your are awakening. Your body is asking you to step out of the role of ‘holding all the relational energy’ return to yourself.

I work with women who are ready to listen to what their bodies are saying, to come home to their own rhythm, needs, and truth.

Part 2, coming next week…..

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.

The energetics of betrayal

Betrayal is one of the deepest wounds a human can carry — not just because of what happened, but because of the energetic imprint it leaves behind.

When betrayal comes early, it doesn't just teach the mind something — it teaches the body, the heart, and the nervous system. When the betrayal has come from our caregivers the very people who were supposed to love us, keep us safe, and foster our sense of belonging in the world, it teaches that connection isn’t safe, that trusting others is dangerous and that perhaps maybe, trusting myself is dangerous.

The very parts of us that long for closeness are forced to adapt. They learn to duck, weave, armour up, or disappear. They do whatever it takes to avoid feeling that devastating rupture again.

The Energetic Imprint of Early Betrayal

Betrayal creates a deep rupture in the fabric of trust and it doesn’t go away. For many people, the pain of betrayal doesn’t start in adult relationships. It begins much earlier, in the formative years of childhood or adolescence, when someone they relied on — a parent, caregiver, or close friend — didn’t show up in a way that felt safe or consistent.

When betrayal happens early, it etches a kind of template into the nervous system. One that says: “People can’t be trusted.” Or “I have to protect myself because no one else will.” These imprints often live just beneath the surface subtly shaping how we engage, withdraw, or defend ourselves in relationships.

In human terms, that energetic scar can show up as:

• Hypervigilance, constantly scanning for signs of disloyalty or danger.

• Emotional ducking and weaving , avoiding directness for fear of being hurt.

• Self-sabotage, abandoning ourselves or others before they can abandon us.

• Self-betrayal , silencing our needs and instincts in an effort to stay “safe.”

• Avoidance of connection, having relationships that are light or transactional to avoid getting hurt.

• Constant fawning an over-functioning to stay safe within relationships, over attaching, ignoring our own boundaries to avoid further harm.

At a body level, betrayal activates the primal fear of annihilation: "If the people I'm attached to hurt or abandon me, I might not survive." Many people with this wound feel misunderstood and lonely in relationships.

Early friendships and our first lessons in trust

While early caregiver betrayal leaves a profound mark, it's important to recognise that peer relationships — especially in late childhood and early adolescence — can also create powerful energetic imprints.

Many years ago, I was at a Trauma conference lead by Bessel van der Kolk. We were talking about how tween years developmentally, are important when it comes to relationships because they are the first experience we have with betrayal. He explained that the 9–12 year-old stage for kids and girls in particular, is a crucial time for learning about trust, loyalty, honesty, and boundaries. During this time, friendships often become intense and emotionally charged. Young people are testing the waters of emotional intimacy, authority, and social belonging outside of their families for the first time.

He said, ‘12 year old girls are the meanest people on the planet’, we all giggled because we could all relate at some level. This is not because they are inherently cruel, but because they are instinctively testing how far loyalty stretches, what betrayal feels like, and where their own boundaries begin and end.

These early friendship betrayals — being excluded, gossiped about, shamed, or losing a "best friend", can leave scars just as deep as familial betrayals. You may be thinking is there any way we can prevent this? Developmentally, these early close friendships give tweens practice for navigating their first intimate relationships in their teenage years. What is important as parents, is that we offer containment for our teenagers during these years so they are able to process these emotional experiences in a healthy way and they do this through our co-regulation. When you parent teenagers, you will find that what they need is a lot of containment to help them feel all the big feelings they are having which are often overwhelming because of their hormonal surges.

When they don’t receive that co-regulation and containment, they are left out on a limb to navigate this on their own and their nervous system will most likely be quite overwhelmed by this. They may develop unhealthy adaptive strategies to cope and what they will learn is that trust can be dangerous, speaking the truth gets you abandoned and ignored, and your vulnerability can be used against you.

For many women especially, these early relational wounds create an energetic template that later influences teenage romances, adult friendships, and even professional relationships.

Unless tended to, these imprints can quietly guide our choices, our trust levels, and our capacity for authentic connection, long into adulthood.

What happens when betrayal wounds show up at work?

Betrayal doesn’t just haunt our intimate relationships — it shows up everyday in our professional lives too. Most organisations lack any psychological safety and one of the reasons for this (there are many more) is that many people carry an unconscious expectation that colleagues, bosses, or teams will betray them.

As a result, they hold back: not speaking up in meetings, withholding ideas, disengaging from group dynamics, or interpreting neutral interactions through a lens of mistrust. Some may skip meetings or avoid collaborative projects altogether — not out of laziness, but because their nervous system is protecting them from what it perceives as a relational threat. The workplace becomes a battleground of unhealed childhood and teenage wounds, silently shaping how we show up or don’t.

What is the impact of our younger parts taking the lead in our adult relationships?

When betrayal wounds go unhealed, younger parts of ourselves — child parts, teenage parts — often step in to lead adult relationships.

These parts don’t have the skills for mature communication. They know how to survive, but not how to thrive. They know how to protect, but not how to open.

So we might find ourselves communicating indirectly, lashing out, withdrawing without explanation, testing others unconsciously, or assuming we’ll be misunderstood before we’ve even spoken. Our inner child has no place running our adult relationships and when it dominates our behaviour and decisions it often leads to poor choices and outcomes.

Poor communication is not just a skill gap; it's often a symptom of an unhealed betrayal wound.

How betrayal wounds shape who we draw in

One of the most painful patterns is that unhealed betrayal often pulls us toward people who cannot meet us, as friends, lovers or partners, unless they’ve done their own deep healing work.

Without realising it, we may magnetise:

• People who are unavailable, distracted, or unreliable.

• People who cannot understand or hold our unspoken pain.

• People who, energetically, mirror the early betrayals we experienced.

It's as if the energetic wound keeps echoing outward, unconsciously seeking resolution, while simultaneously protecting itself from getting too close. This will keep happening until we do our own healing, the pattern tends to repeat.

What most people find when they do the healing work on these relational wounds, is that they charge they felt when connecting with people who couldn’t meet their needs goes away. They start being attracted to a different type of person.

Image- Kellie Stirling

Healing the energetics of betrayal

Healing betrayal isn’t about telling yourself to "just trust people" again. It's about repairing the energetic fractures in your system, slowly, gently, consistently.

Here’s how it often begins:

1. Rebuilding Trust with Yourself

Betrayal healing involves learning to stay with yourself rather than abandoning your truth to stay safe. Tiny, consistent acts of self-loyalty rebuild trust from the inside out. Keeping promises to yourself. Honouring your needs. Setting boundaries by learning what a Yes, No and Maybe feels like in your body and then learning to listen to that in your body will help to build this skills. Each act sends a signal to your system: I am safe with myself now.

2. Listening to the Younger Parts

Instead of shaming the child or teenage parts for their survival strategies, we acknowledge them and we listen to them. We learn how to reparent them. We show up as the adult they needed but didn't have.

3. Creating Repair Experiences

In safe, steady relationships — whether with a friend, therapist, coach, or partner — you practice staying present through small ruptures and repairs. Many of us haven’t learn how to have a repair conversation when we have a relational rupture. This is an incredibly important relating skill to learn and it is something our children learn through our role modelling of it. Each moment of being seen, heard, and stayed-with, rewires the nervous system’s expectation that betrayal is inevitable.

4. Tending the Nervous System

Betrayal activates primal states of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Through somatic practices — grounding, orienting, gentle self-touch, breathwork — we teach the body that it is no longer trapped in the past.

Healing betrayal is like tending a storm-battered tree. We don't expect it to "get over" the damage overnight. This is slow, long and steady work. We nurture its roots, protect its tender branches, and trust that over time, it will grow stronger — not despite the scars, but through them.

Building a new kind of loyalty to yourself

When we heal the energetic imprints of betrayal — whether they originated from family or early friendships — we become fiercely loyal to ourselves. Not in a hardened, guarded, self-centred way, but in a rooted, emotionally mature, self-authoring way.

From there, we begin to choose relationships differently. We communicate more cleanly. We are able to ask for our desires and we learn to recognise when someone cannot meet us — and we no longer abandon ourselves trying to make them.

And most importantly, we remember: Betrayal does not define us.

The way we choose to heal, love, and live — that’s what shapes who we become.

If you need some support with betrayal wounds so that you can thrive in your relationships, come talk to me about relationship coaching or somatic experiencing.

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.

The fear response, a double edged sword

Fear is a master of disguise. It doesn’t always show up as a racing heart or sweaty palms; sometimes, it speaks in the language of logic, whispering that we’re “not ready yet.” It convinces us to set arbitrary deadlines, create endless prerequisites, or delay action under the guise of preparation. But if we look deeper, we often find that fear is at the root of our hesitation, quietly orchestrating our self-sabotage.

At its core, fear is a survival mechanism, designed to keep us safe from danger. But in modern life, fear doesn’t just react to physical threats—it responds to uncertainty, failure, judgment, and change. Our nervous system doesn’t distinguish between the fear of a tiger and the fear of speaking our truth, starting a business, or pursuing an intimate relationship. It just registers the discomfort and sounds the alarm.

This alarm triggers one of four responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Each of these can subtly shape our choices in ways we don’t always recognise and we create adaptive strategies to push through and avoid our feelings. Here are some examples:

• Fight: We overcompensate, push too hard, and exhaust ourselves with perfectionism.

• Flight: We distract ourselves with busyness, convincing ourselves we’re productive while avoiding the real work.

• Freeze: We get stuck in analysis paralysis, endlessly researching or seeking validation.

• Fawn: We over-prioritize others’ needs and expectations, losing sight of our own desires.

Fear as self sabotage

One of fear’s trickiest tactics is its ability to masquerade as prudence. We tell ourselves we’ll launch the business once we get one more certification, we’ll write the book when life is less hectic, or we’ll pursue love when we feel more secure in ourselves. These milestones often feel responsible and logical, but in reality, they are fear-driven delays.

Self-sabotage isn’t always about overt destruction; sometimes, it’s simply about waiting too long. The longer we delay, the more distant our desires feel. And the more distant they feel, the easier it becomes to believe they weren’t meant for us in the first place.

Ignoring our fears

Sometimes we develop adaptive strategies to ignore our fears and push through. This becomes problematic when we learn to ignore the limits of our own bodies and keep on pushing through. Some of us, to have more courage, learn to ignore our fears and push through (I used to do this a lot). The problem with this is that we are ignoring our bodies risk assessment system, our autonomic nervous system, and that ultimately can cause us to get run down, ill or so stressed that our focuses narrows so much we find it hard to function with the complexity of life. So I am not saying learn to push through your fears, I have saying learn to understand them and listen to them, what they feel like in your body. Learn to discern between levels of fear.

Making decisions from a survival state versus coherence and feeling safe

The state we are in when we make decisions matters. When we make choices from a place of survival mode—driven by fear, anxiety, or urgency—our nervous system is dysregulated. In this state, we tend to react rather than respond. Our thinking becomes narrow, focused on short-term relief rather than long-term impact. This can lead to reactive decision-making, avoidance of necessary risks, and choices that feel safe in the moment but create more complexity down the line.

On the other hand, when we make decisions from a state of coherence—where our nervous system is regulated, and we feel safe—our thinking is more expansive. We can be truly strategic, discerning, and appropriately prudent. We’re able to see the bigger picture, weigh options without urgency clouding our judgment, and engage with complexity without feeling overwhelmed.

This is why when we cultivate nervous system regulation—through practices like breathwork, grounding, or simply slowing down—we tend to make more sustainable, wise decisions. The more we develop the ability to recognise when we’re making decisions from fear in survival mode versus from a regulated state, the better we can lead ourselves and others.

“Courage does not always roar, sometimes it’s the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, I will try again tomorrow”

Mary Ann Radmacher

So how do we break free from fear’s grip and step toward what we truly want?

1. Recognise Fear’s Voice – Become aware of when fear is masquerading as logic, caution, or endless preparation. Notice when you’re setting unnecessary milestones that delay action.

2. Slow Down and Regulate – Instead of reacting from fear, pause. Use breathwork, grounding techniques, or somatic practices to settle your nervous system so you can make choices from a place of clarity rather than reactivity.

3. Make Micro-Moves – Fear thrives in the enormity of big leaps, but it loses power when we take small, consistent actions. Instead of waiting for the perfect moment, take one small step today. This goes for those of you having to make harder choices at work in your leadership role. Small iterative changes help people to adjust and accept change rather than big sweeping changes that often put people into their survival response and usually result in them trying to avoid the changes.

4. Reframe Fear as a Companion – Fear will never fully disappear, but it doesn’t have to lead. Instead of resisting it, acknowledge it: “Hello fear I see you, and I know you’re trying to protect me. But I choose to move forward anyway.”

5. Commit to Your Desire – If something truly calls to you, trust that desire. Your nervous system might resist, but deep down, your body knows what it longs for. Trust that wisdom.

In our big life transitions we often go through periods of review and reflection. The biggest regrets aren’t usually failures—they are the things we never tried, the dreams we postponed, and the desires we denied. They are often the relationships we didn’t foster or pay attention to. Fear will always try to keep us safe, but safety isn’t the same as fulfilment. The good news? We can choose differently.

What have you been delaying that your heart is calling you toward? What if you took one small step today? Because the truth is, you’re already ready.

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.

Midlife, the autumn season of our life. A time to pause, reflect and let go.

We humans are cyclical beings although our modern world doesn’t care or cater much to our cyclical nature. For those of us in female bodies, we are in a constant state of cycling through our menstrual cycles and this brings with it for many people a way of orienting and being in the world that provides a sense of feeling anchored to our cyclical nature. Our life is seasons within seasons, within seasons. Although many of us don’t always feel good about this all the time and I wonder if we talked about our inherent connection with nature and the natural rhythms of the world more, this would provide a sense of meaning to us at a deeper level.

Our midlife season is Autumn. It is a time to take stock, pause, reflect and let go of what we no longer need in our life so we can birth new parts of ourselves. I find this metaphor to be true for all midlife people I work with regardless of gender. It is a process of death and rebirth that happens where we are moving toward a soul oriented life. With this for many comes expanded consciousness where you are stepping into an unknown way of being in the world; this in itself can be overwhelming for many especially if you do not have roadmap or mentors to guide your through. The rebirth is your initiation into your wise woman power that is your authentic self. You are probably familiar wit the archetypes of maiden, mother and crone. This archetypal stage is called Maga which is the stage before Crone. Maga is Portuguese for sorceress and is the feminine of Magus, which is the sorcerer. We are the first generation of woman going through this because we are living longer than the other women in our female lineage.

For Males the archetypal equivalent is the Magician or the Sorcerer and to move to this is a rite of passage, a man needs support and community of wise elders supporting him. The Magician archetype when integrated in a man has the ability to turn disappointing situations and setbacks into opportunities to learn, grow and become a better man.

For all of us when we come to midlife their is often a great deal of inner work to be done for Autumn is the seasons of letting go. In the Celtic tradition, Autumn signifies a time of abundance because harvests are at their peak but also the season where we prepare for austerity, the winter season to come. Autumn is the season that brings the double outer and inner movement, a transition. By midlife we are ready for this big transition. It is the right time for this as we have the wisdom and perspective to really differentiate what is going on for us. Many of us may have been judged as having mental health or personal development needs in the past when they are in fact dealing with cultural overlays that are maligning our life. With our deep life experience we begin to see everything happening in our life for what it is.

Midlife is about healing any trauma or wounding from the first half of your life. When we move through this process of letting go, we are going through a process of dying metaphorically speaking. All the ideas you had about yourself, who you are, who you thought you were becoming, where you thought your life would take you may not have eventuated. So of course there will be anger, grief, resentment and maybe sadness that comes with that. You will find that what used to motivate you no longer does. You will start to pull back into yourself in a way, rather than giving your energy away.

This is because, for women in particular, you are leaving the archetypal mother phase of your life. With that comes some very real deep emotion. I think for many women there is grief regarding fertility ending. This is especially true for women who have not had children regardless of the reasons why, because all of a sudden choice is removed. There will no longer be any choice anymore, no possibility. I have also seen women who have had children experience this even though they were quite adamant that they did not want more children. The nervous system loves choice and agency, so when we are faced with the removal of choice, it does not surprise me that the body experiences either strong fight or flight responses like anger, anxiety and resentment because lack of choice backs us into a corner. But you also experience grief. Grief you see is the emotion that is the secret ingredient that helps us move on. You cannot let go without grief.

For grief to flow it needs the support of the community. it strikes me that at midlife, many of us feel like we are losing our true inner compass we got from our regular cycles and we are trying hard to orient to something new that we have no road map for because there is so much shame and denial in our culture about ageing. I think for males they experience something similar but often later maybe in their fifties is what I have noticed with my clients. All of us are looking for our ‘north star’ to anchor to something.

So why are these big emotional experiences in midlife so hard?

I think it is because we live in a culture where there is collective denial about our emotional lives. Many of us grew up in families where we did not have that emotional life fostered by our parents or caregivers. There was a complete lack of attunement to our needs. This has contributed to a huge array of hurt, trouble and physical symptoms for many people. When we are disconnected from our emotional body we become frozen on the inside, our emotions gets stuck with no means of freeing them. Our nervous system is very clever it will create all manner of management strategies to stop us from feeling that which is painful to us. This is deep work that is required. Learning to befriend our vulnerability so we can feel into our emotions, the harder ones in particular, opens the way to feeling the full spectrum of emotions - Joy, Love, Anger, Amazement, Wonder and Delight. It broadens your emotional landscape.

In midlife, we need our community around us to support us through this transition. But you know what, we need community all the time. Humans are not wired do life on their own. Our interpersonal neurobiology is wired to connect with others for co-regulation. Co-regulation helps us feel like we don’t have to carry the burdens of life all on our own.

Image - Visions in Blue

As my teacher Francis Weller says in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow “Private pain is a legacy of the creed of rugged individualism. In this narrow story, we find ourselves caught in the shadow of the heroic archetype. We are conditioned from birth to the image of the hero, the one who needs no one, the one who rises above his or her pain, the one who is always in control and never vulnerable. We are imprisoned by this image, forced into a fiction of false independence that severs our kinship with the earth, with sensuous reality and with the myriad wonders of the world”.

The hero archetype, which so many of our stores are centred around, disconnects us from nature, from our cyclical nature, from our natural rhythms and our inner seasons.

Is it any wonder that our rites of passage feel so hard and so overwhelming. They are super complex and we need a circle of support around us to get through and for many of us that is simply not there nor do we know how to put it together.

So how do we navigate midlife better? We face it together we build a circle of support around ourselves. Each life stage has a developmental task that is asked of us, and in midlife it is radical honestly with ourselves, discern our truth. To learn to be kind to ourselves and to stay present to our life. For many of us this might be the first time we have had to do this it re requires vulnerability and acceptance of ourselves for who we are right now. Once we can accept ourselves as we are we start to connect with our unique gifts and slowly we are ready to put them out into the world.

One the principles I really like that helps us frame this experience comes from Japanese aesthetics and it is the world view that is called Wabi Sabi. Wabi Sabi is centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. This aesthetic appreciates that beauty is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete. This can be seen in Japanese art.

I think it is a beautiful way of framing life because it helps us to appreciate that all of life is fluid and we are always learning growing, that there is no such thing as perfection. We are all perfectly imperfect.

There is no right way to do your midlife transition. There is your way because you are unique and your life experience are unique and whatever comes up for you, whilst it might have something in common with someone else, will be uniquely your experience to learn from.

The midlife reckoning and initiation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is the muse?

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

Midlife and Menopause ebook, Kellie Stirling

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

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

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

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

How emotional neglect and abandonment in childhood fosters a fawning response in us

If in childhood we experienced our caregivers not supporting our emotional lives, abandoning supporting us when we were feeling big feelings, it created a big and deep primal response of being isolated and separated. To a child this feels like death.

We will begin to seek any feeling that will block or override feeling that isolation, that feeling of death in our body.

We need our caregivers to co-regulate us when we are young because we don't have the capacity in our nervous system to regulate ourselves AND we don't have the emotional maturity to contextualise our experience. We just know we are overwhelmed and flooded with feelings.

We are hardwired for connection and being with others. It is in community that we most often feel safe and have a greater chance of survival. We enjoy that feeling of togetherness.

When we are in this pattern of avoiding our big emotions and feelings, of overriding feeling the isolation we experienced as little ones, we disconnect from from our bodies. This brings with it anxiety, auto immune issues and chronic illness.

Many of us also develop a nervous system strategy of fawn, also known as appeasement or people pleasing. We disconnect from our emotions because we are afraid that if we express them, we will be abandoned. That old story of death if we are abandoned is wired into our nervous system.
When we are under threat, the old story is playing out in the present all the time. Like a broken record that keeps returning to the scratch.

Healing happens in the presence of a compassionate witness that can hold space for you to connect with your body somatically.

Trauma happens in the absence of a compassionate witness or community so it makes sense that healing happens with a compassionate witness and within community.

image stockcake.com - mother embracing child, AI generated.

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.

Are you a midlife lady and your libido has disappeared? You are not broken

Midlife transition is a time of enormous upheaval for most of us. The developmental challenge of midlife is for us to be radically honest with ourselves about where we are right now in our life. It is a healing journey and it gives you the opportunity to make some changes, to do some deep inner work, if we need it, to heal childhood wounding. Recently I saw a social media post that said we spend the second half of our life undoing our experience of the first half of life. There is is no doubt in my mind that this is true.

In childhood we will always choose being our adaptive selves over our authentic selves. We create these adaptive strategies to ensure attachment to our caregivers, so that our basic survival needs are met. This is a primal survival response. As Gabor Mate says, adaptation over authenticity every time. That means for most of us, there is a lot to unpick in midlife because whilst those adaptive strategies kept us safe and alive as children, rarely do they serve us well as adults.

If you live in a female body you have menopause happening, often at the same time. This is a lot to handle. Menopause is a mind-bending, shapeshifting transition. Over this time, the deepest system in our body, the endocrine system, goes through a massive act of rearranging itself. This affects us physically, mentally and how we orient and show up socially and culturally. There is no way that this hormonal shift does not affect how we think, feel and perceive the reality of our life. It happens over time. (Unless it is induced by surgery or cancer treatments) Perimenopause is the 5-10 years of gradual change before we arrive at Menopause. That one day when it has been 12 months since we have had a period.

I will tell you something awesome about perimenopause. It is the start of a new phase or your life. Perimenopause is a transition to a time where you focus shifts to be on you. You are at the centre of your world. So often we need to make some changes to ensure that happens.

During this time, many women notice that their libido seems to either go away or change. A changed rhythm is both normal and common. Our rhythm of our desire changes many times during our lives, but for most women the period where they notice it is the most, is either post-partum and perimenopause. Both times we have massive hormonal changes going on in the body.

Don’t worry it is not all over. Well it can be if you want. What I have found with my clients, is that post menopause, many women experience the best sex of their lives. Midlife can be a time of great fun and exploration.

“Sex isn’t just about who we do and how we do them, and it it isn’t only about the ways we get aroused and orgasmic, either. Your sexuality goes to the heart of who you are. All of your relationships, not just your actively sexual ones, grow from this root.

When I say ‘all of your relationships’ I mean that literally…including the most significant connection of all, your relationship you have with yourself.

If you want to have better sex and more satisfying intimate relationships, the place to begin is with yourself - and more specifically, with your relationship to your own sexuality”.

Sheri Winston, Women’s Anatomy of Arousal

Let’s talk about some of the reasons why you are not feeling turned on, on the inside.

Many women have never explored their sexuality. We have just ridden the hormonal waves for years. What brings you pleasure? This transition offers you an opportunity to explore what your body really likes when it comes to what turns you on, what brings you pleasure. Most of us learn about sexuality through popular culture and this is shown predominantly through the male lens, as it is centred around a male body and its arousal patterns. Often, women wonder why does it take them so long to become aroused. The reason it is that it is normal for female bodies to take longer to become aroused because most of us have responsive desire. The alternative arousal pattern being spontaneous arousal which as it suggests happens spontaneously. Most female bodies are responsive, they respond to stimulus.

What many people notice during the menopausal transition is that it takes them longer to become aroused, this is normal. Get curious and most importantly start to tune into what brings you pleasure. I often feel with most of my midlife clients that their body is truly speaking to them and telling them that what they have been doing does not work for it. Imagine you body is yelling at you and saying '“This doesn’t work for me, find out what does”. You can have a lot of fun exploring both on your own and with a partner (if you are coupled) what works for you.

Emotional upheaval is a pretty normal experience for women in perimenopause. Some of this is due to the hormonal changes impacting the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and it become a little dysregulated. Our ANS state drives our behaviour. Think back to what I said about midlife being about being truthful with yourself. Many of us learn to repress ‘negative’ emotions like anger, frustration, sadness, fear, grief for example. There is no such thing as a negative emotion, this is a cultural belief system you have internalised. Your body is asking you to reconnect with these emotions. All emotions are useful and necessary, they orient us toward pleasure and pain and help us navigate the world. Anger is an important emotion for honouring our boundaries, we need it. Grief helps us let go of what we have loved and move through life transitions. If you start feeling these emotions and you have repressed them for year, your body will feel unsafe. When it feels unsafe it will produce stress hormones. You cannot produce stress hormones and sex hormones at the same time, you body will always prioritise safety and survival over procreation. So it makes sense that when you are feeling very stressed that the last thing you feel like sex. Your body will be constricted and tense, the opposite of being open to receive. Make it your mission to develop a new relationship with all your emotions. When you repress one you repress them all. You will be amazed and how alive you can feel when you slowly start to connect with all your emotions.

Pelvic health is super impacted by this transition because estrogen is the hormone that makes our skin, tissue, ligaments, tendons and joints all juicy and supple. it supports the production of collagen which does all the repair work at night on skin and joins. So less estrogen means less hydration. This can be experienced as joint discomfort all over but particularly in the pelvis, vaginal dryness and potentially gynaecological and pelvic health issues. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Make your pelvic health a priority. So whether you become a pilates devotee, yoga aficionado or make pelvic work a priority in the gym, all are good options. You might also need some hormonal support with estrogen for your vagina or maybe use a good internal moisturiser. All are good options. Talk to your GP or Gynaecologist about them.

Perimenopause has this way of highlighting our vulnerabilities showing us where we need to focus. This becomes very obvious with many of us when it comes to our relationships. Many women lose their libido because they are simply bored in their sex life with their partner. Rather than giving up on each other, look at this as an opportunity to explore something new. All of our bodies are changing. Good communication is the foundation of intimacy in a relationship. Intimacy is being able to speak out hearts truth to another and your sex life will become a lot more fun if you are able to talk honestly and truthfully with each other.

There is a cultural expectation that women will be ‘over the hill’, washed up and grumpy. This is simply not true. What is true is that many people experience burnout. If you are exhausted, your libido will go. Again it comes back to those stress hormones being front and centre. There is an emotional burden that women carry in society. The unrealistic expectations of mothering alone. It is simply unrealistic that anyone is able to mother and do all of that work on their own. The problem here is our culture not perimenopause. Make rest your priority.

So what can we do?

Well for a start, make rest and understanding your sleep your priority. Yoga Nidra is amazing when you are feeling exhausted during the day. Rest is part of your erotic practice, make it a priority.

Start with your sensuality. Your 5 senses are the language of your nervous system. What brings you sensual pleasure and really tune into exploring that and practicing it. Explore healthy pleasure. I just might add when it comes to our taste, wine and coffee are not healthy sensual pleasures. Alcohol is a depressant that brings an overstimulated nervous system down and coffee does the opposite. If you are feeling flat and a bit freezy it produces adrenaline and lifts you up. Make sure your sensual pleasures promote health. Food also affects mood, healthy food is medicine for the body. Eat the rainbow.

Explore your desire and erotic blueprint. We each have our own blueprint of arousal. Some good resources are Emily Nagowski’s book, Come as you are or Miss Jaiya’s erotic blueprint quiz. Discover what your turn on’s and turn off’s are.

Work on your trauma. If you are experiencing old trauma coming up in perimenopause work with someone who does somatic work, to help you befriend and connect with your body. This is the work I do, you can book a call with me if you want to talk about this.

If you need to do some deep inner work on reconnecting with your emotions, work with either a somatic therapist or coach, who can work with you to help you to expand your capacity to feel your emotions in your body. This is life changing work, that supports you maturing into emotional adulthood, I do this work with all of my clients.

Read and learn about your body. There are so many good books out there now about perimenopause. I have a great resource list you can look at.

Bust up any cultural beliefs about ageing. These will be stuck in your body, this requires some pretty deep inner work.

You might need to change the way you exercise. Stress is not our friend in perimenopause, it is the biggest hormone disrupter of all. High impact exercise stimulates cortisol (stress hormone) and it can be very easy to become cortisol dominant because we don’t have the estrogen levels to balance it. What most women find is that they actually need to do less exercise but do it daily. In small bits. Low impact and resistance based exercise seems to work best for our bodies as we age. Stacy Sims has written an excellent book on this and has loads of information about training female bodies as they age and to cater for menstrual cycles.

Have fun exploring your own pleasure. When you know what works for you then you can communicate it to your partner. You might need some help from a coach where you can work 1 -1 or you might do a group course but there is a lot of information out there about women’s sexuality. Get curious.

Putting yourself first, is not a self indulgence. it is actually a way of being and an act of self preservation. It is so important for us to ensure we set ourselves up to live well and thrive in our second half of life.

Ten things I wish I had known before I started my midlife transition

I ran into an old friend a few weeks back and we were talking about our work. We cross over on the trauma resolution and nervous system work. This friend is in her thirties and we were talking about midlife and menopause and supporting women in this transition and how important it is because it is such a time of overall transition AND it is a gateway to ageing. It is an important transition and we really need to review our life and all aspects of it so that she can set herself up to live well in her second half of life.

I went home and thought what would be the top 10 things I wish I had known before I started midlife? If we had a crystal ball we could stare into that would helps us, what would be the most helpful tips. So here you go.

1.We go through two transitions midlife and menopause at this time in our lives if we live in female bodies. Menopause is the end of our fertility with that comes not just physical change but psychological growth and healing. The developmental challenge at midlife is being radically honest and truthful with yourself about where you are at right now and who you are.

2. Learning about hormone health is absolutely key at this time in life, if you can learn earlier go do it. It is not just your sex hormones that change, they affect all our other hormones, like thyroid, insulin, our stomach hormones and stress hormones because of the change.

3. You cannot push your way through these transitions. The way through is going inward, slowing down and learning to rest.

4. You will get restless, question everything and intuitively feel like you need change in your life. Don't project this all out, explore your inner world.

5. Your body is the home that you live in. Take very good care of it. The overarching question that covers these transitions is "How can I set myself up to live well in the second half of life?". Use that as your guide and refer back to it constantly.

6. Old trauma will come up for resolution at this time and the hormone changes often impact the nervous system to cause that to happen. Remember our body is wise, intelligent and has an innate capacity and orientation to healing.

7. Get the support and help you need. You are the CEO of your body, it is OK to work with different professionals to get the support you need. (I count my chiropractor, shiatsu practitioner, GP, oncologist, massage therapist and somatic experiencing teachers just to name a few in that group)

8. Estrogen is a hormone that fosters connection with others and bonding AND it gives us rose coloured glasses. All of a sudden you will start to see the world differently when it declines. This is normal, you will get mad and annoyed. All of this is OK, you cannot 'unsee' things now, this will help promote your passion and purpose as you move through menopause.

9. You will come face to face with your cultural conditioning around ageing, sexuality and sensuality. Face into it, don't let it hold you back from growing and be radically honest with yourself.

10. Pelvic health is critical at this time in our life. The Pelvis is a incredibly important part of our body that connects the top and bottom of our body. Within it are our reproductive organs and and our organs that get rid of waste. We hold so much old emotional stress and tension in our pelvic floor and this impacts us physically, emotionally and sexually. It is ok to get obsessed about pelvic floor health in my opinion. Do pelvic floor exercises, pilates, jade egg exercises, whatever you need, find people who really know what they are doing.

And one more just because...... you are letting go of parts of yourself you don't need anymore and birthing a new part of yourself, your inner wise women is on the way!

Slow down to speed up

I write a lot about slowing down. It has been one of the big learnings for me in my life but overall, if I think of all the people I’ve coached over the years I think on of the biggest issues most of us face is the disconnection from our bodies. This is pretty serious, it is causing lots of health issues, combined with the crazy pace that most people are expected to work at now, it is causing lots of dysregulated nervous systems. This causes some pretty poor decision making and poor behaviour to emerge.

When we slow down we are able to be more present with our life, with what is happening right now. That is where life is happening.

I think one of the most important skills we can learn is to recognise our stress responses and what our habitual patterns are when it comes to reacting to stress. Fight, flight, freeze or fawn? What do you do? Do you get angry, do you want to move, can you not stop talking, do you go into people pleasing mode, do you words escape you and your feel overcome with brain fog? These are all typical signs of a stress response. I generally want to argue or walk away. Sometimes I please, although this is a very atypical for me and the times I have done I’ve been able to observe myself in the moment and thought why are you acting like this?

When we are in overdrive we are making decisions and choices that often are not well thought through, may come from a child part of us, or we spray our emotional response all over people and that takes time to clean up. Or some of us just collapse and withdraw and this is not a great place to be stuck in your nervous system.

When you can start to be aware of your stress response in action this is when you can start to take put practices in place that help you regulate yourself back to a place in your autonomic nervous system that is a bit more grounded and calmer. Practices that help you soothe yourself in the moment. One of the best ways to do this is by learning how to listen to your body and identify the sensations that you are feeling right in the moment of the trigger.

When we slow down and check in with our bodies, take the time to ourselves each day for time out, we are actually able to access so much more information than we would guess. Do you know our body takes in 90% more data than our brains. In truth our body and brain are one but our body is reading our environment all the time. 90% is quite unbelievable isn’t it? When we don’t check in with ourselves we miss all of this.

This becomes super important when we are going through big life transitions because they are generally times of great change so we can easily get overwhelmed. Slowing down has a tremendously positive impact on our quality of life because we start to be aware of what is going on around us all the time. All those parts of life happening that we were missing, we start to notice. We start to build a bit more capacity to regulate ourselves in our nervous system when we practice slowing down techniques like using our breath, or body check ins and that brings us into presence. It is a good place to be.

What I notice in people I coach who are in midlife is that when they start to slow down, their health and wellbeing improves, their perimenopause physical symptoms often dissipate and this gives them more time and confidence to explore the existential questions that they find themselves facing. It gives you more time to reflect on how you can set yourself up to live well in your second half of life. It gives you more time to think and feel into what feels meaningful and purposeful to you.

This is why we can speed up when we slow down, we have more clarity, we are more conscious and deliberate and can take in more perspective.

What would happen if you gave yourself permission to have thirty minutes each day of slow time?