Falling Apart Can Lead To Healing
My client showed up to our session together and shared her intention…
“I want to trust myself again. I’ve had so much chaos in my body lately. Sheer terror, struggle to focus, can’t make decisions, not grounded. Can’t keep it together. I can’t control it.
The thought on repeat in my mind is “I can’t trust myself.” I’m not holding it all together like I usually do.
People always told my mom, She’s the perfect child. She’s so good. I always hated that. I didn’t feel that way on the inside. This was the “me” I only showed to the world and the rest of me was hidden. Something in me hated that that was all they could see.
Keep it all together. Be capable and competent.
(These were the parts that emerged as my client’s identity. Those parts got her praise and kept her safe. And these parts showed up when her family fell apart and trauma ensued. Hold it together. Be capable. Be competent. Control.)
And now I’m not able to even do this anymore. I can no longer show up to my job, I’m waking up in the night from panic. I literally can’t speak up in a meeting without wanting to cry so I turn my camera off on zoom. I can’t keep going this way.
Nothing like this has ever happened before. I know it’s not physical. I’ve done the doctors, the nutrition stuff and yet, my body is shutting down.
If I can’t hold it together anymore, can I trust myself?
In our session, we paused and I shared a question with my client:
Me: “If you did completely trust yourself and your body in this moment, what would your body tell you about this?”
Client: What if my body is trying to tell me, scream at me, that it’s time to stop?! To let it all fall apart so I can come back together as ALL of me. Not just the good girl, the capable one, the competent one, but the creative one, the daring one, the curious one? What if I trust she’s falling apart so I can WAKE UP? What if this is my AWAKENING? If I look back, there have been whispers for years and I ignored them. Only until the screams, did I finally say enough. My body shutting down is my turning point. I get to decide from here to push through and continue to suffer or to PAUSE.
My client decided that day to truly listen to her body and trust what was happening was a huge message. A massive wake-up call.
She decided she was all in to continue to deepen into this healing work and to continue to discover who she is, what she longs for, and to remember herself, her truest true self that isn't always good in the pleasing way to please everyone else or prove she’s enough, but ALL OF HER, the her that holds all the emotions and colors and desires and needs and ideas and curiosity. The part of her who lets go of gripping so tightly to competent and capable that there is no more room for the rest of all of the light that lives inside.
The self that can be competent and capable AND joyful and funny and messy and wild!
Client: I don’t know how to allow her yet, but I CAN’T go back. Now I’m choosing to go deeper. To discover me. To allow me. This is scary, but this is my AWAKENING.
We paused and I led her into a conscious connected breathwork session to allow all of what had come through to move through her body through the breath. To move any stuck emotional energy out of the body and integrate her breakthroughs by bringing them into the body.
Her breathwork…
During breathwork, she felt so much energy trying to push out and it wouldn’t go. Holding onto fear. Told it to release. It could go. Felt an opening, a receiving. She felt tapped for something. She felt a tunnel from the right side of her head appear, like a pipe, a cylinder, big and wide.
She heard, Be aware. Be open. She could see the color green appear. She described feeling an opening to more, something more powerful.
New Intention: Stay Open.
New action: To daily practice listening to her body and responding with love. To practice staying open when she feels herself shutting down from fear. To begin to work with her fear using her new tools she is learning.
She set new boundaries and ways to respond and set a new intention.
Her backstory…
You see my client’s wound of not-enoughness showed up in childhood as a response to everything in her life feeling out of control. Her parents' marriage breaking up, trauma, abandonment. Her good girl showed up to protect her.
I’ll be good. I’ll be pleasing. I’ll be competent and capable. I’ll take care of everyone else so there’s no conflict. I’ll hold it all together and take care of everything.
It made sense as a little one. This felt like a great strategy. It will work. And for a while, it felt like it did It felt safer than the conflict, the unknown, the feelings of abandonment, and the fear. It felt more manageable. More tolerable.
But as she grew, she took this identity and belief out into the world and it affected her marriage, her life as a mom and her career. She took a job that were “safe” to provide for her family because she took on ALL the responsibility of making sure they would all be ok.
And holding it all together and taking care of everything never allowed her to receive. Her life had become constant outflow and no inflow.
She thought she just needed to figure out how to get out of her job so she could be in a more creative role, the one she always wanted to be in, the creative job working with color and design. If I can just figure out how to do that, everything will be great!
But after a few sessions, she was noticing she wasn’t able to move forward, make a move in a new direction.
The unhealed wounds and beliefs inside of her, had a firm grip on her internal world, showing up as not being able to take new steps forward in her outer world, even though she desperately wanted to.
She had been pushing for so long, pushing through, not listening to the whispers of her longings, not allowing herself to pause and take a step back and things at work began to feel unbearable. She was given a team at work that wasn’t responsive. She was taking on fixing projects that were in shambles and she was taking all the responsibility on herself to figure it out, even though that wasn’t her role.
The internal pressure she felt inside to manage the unmanageable that had been building for years had led her to this place in her job, was the moment she finally had ENOUGH.
Her whole life she had believed I must only be “competent and capable” to be safe and to be loved, so that is what I will be. And situations kept showing up in her life, like her job, for her to keep proving she was competent and capable, to fix it all, to prove she was enough. To clean up the chaos. However, the truth is this was NOT all of who she was and her soul, made up of all of her beautiful parts was screaming at this point to be fully known and expressed.
Then her body got on board and said NO MORE.
She would have kept going, but her BODY… Her body spoke up and spoke up LOUDLY.
“No,” it said. “I mean it. You wouldn’t listen before, so now I’m going to shut down so you will listen.”
The morning she woke up to open her computer before a big meeting and the message “your hard drive has crashed” was the day it all came crumbling down.
Reading those words on the screen jumped off at her and it was as if she was looking at a giant mirror reflecting back, spelling out exactly what was happening to her on the inside.
Her internal hard drive had crashed.
She called in sick that day and she’s been listening, diving deep, learning to trust, respond and uncover all the wounds and beliefs that got her there, to the beautiful day her external hard drive crashed and her internal world cracked open.
And she will eventually change jobs to something creative. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind. However, what that new job will be will be made clear by the healing work she is doing to allow her most authentic self to emerge. The new job she will step into will be an extension of the inner reclamation of all of her parts to come together.
What she thought was the lowest point in her life so far, she now says was the day of her AWAKENING.
Final Thoughts…
I share this powerful client story so you can see how powerful our beliefs can be and how early we decide what is safe and manageable and how early we are conditioned to put all our other parts in the shadows. We banish them all to the dark cave, so we can get on with the business of being safe, surviving and making sure we will be loved. And we must see all of this with compassion. We were all doing the best we could. My client was doing the best she could.
And when you finally wake up to this knowing, there is no room for judgment, only an invitation to finally see yourself through the lens of compassion for everything you did to survive. From this new place, you can begin to understand what beliefs need to be rewritten, what old wounds need healing, and begin to take one step at a time.
This is the journey that will lead you all the way to freedom and all the way home to your truest self and to unleash your light.
And if you have a desire in your heart to create something new, share something, connect in meaningful ways, experience true joy and abundance, it all begins with being willing to go into the dark places inside and finally bring them into the light so they can heal.
And most often it will be messy and crack you open and you will have fear and doubt and your whole world may feel like it’s falling apart. And this, I promise you, is actually your awakening.
From here, your only job is to allow yourself to finally ask for support because healing and transformation don’t happen alone and to keep showing up. It’s not a one-person job. Transformation happens together and healing happens when you allow yourself to be witnessed in your pain and in your wounds and to receive.
This is what allows you to heal and take NEW ACTION! This is the key to being able to unlock the door that leads to all of your other parts and possibilities and healing, open that new door and walk through it!
It’s not easy, but it’s SO WORTH IT and you, my friend, are worth EVERYTHING because you are. Because you exist. Not because of anything you may “do” but because YOU ARE.
I share this because I’ve walked this journey myself and knew in my bones all I wanted was to share this kind of healing with women like you.
If you read this and saw any part of yourself in my client’s story and felt something inside you called forward, I encourage you to answer the call.
If you would like to connect and find out how to work together, click here to book a call.
With so much love, Laura
Upcoming Events:
Water Breathwork Weekend: May 20-22, 2022
I’m excited to share my next in person experience for you to experience healing and allow for more intimacy in your life. I’m partnering with two other powerful transformational practitioners here in Nashville at the Restore and Allow Retreat.
Click here to book a free call with me to find out if this experience is a good fit for you.
Click here to learn more about the experience - you will be re-directed to Juliana Ericson’s website, one of the leaders of this retreat.
I’ll be sharing more in the coming days about breathwork and share some of my own story of healing through this powerful breathwork practice.
Spotify Song:
I’m singing this song these days and thought I’d share! Enjoy!