I ended up writing my advice on a poem called Stay a Little Longer.

The idea was to remind them that relationships aren’t only built in big moments, but rather in a medley of small and simple ones that will never make it to the photo album.

The moments where you chose to stay in the discomfort with your loved one instead of immediately trying to make it go away, the moments where you listen a little closer or embrace a little longer.

While I wrote the poem for my friends, the truth is that I was thinking about Darius.

I feel like I’m in the healthiest relationship of my entire life, and when I think about what has made this relationship different, so much of it has been learning how to stay with each other a little bit more, in the hard and beautiful moments… it is also the relationship I have been able to stay with myself.

Darius and I were best friends for about seven years before we became a couple. We had spent hours talking about relationships, our wants, desires and longings. We laughed and looked for each other’s guidance (I used to joke that whenever I wanted to hear the hard truth I would call Darius, usually after I had called a few friends that gave me uplifting pep talks). I loved him deeply as my friend; I admired him, trusted him, cared about his life and genuinely wanted good things for him long before I ever considered that maybe we could be those things for each other.

One day he shared with me what he wanted in his life and in his relationship and in my mind I was like…

“Oh my God. That’s what I have to give”

It was this strange realization of, “you’ve been here all along and I just saw you as my goofy best friend.”

Of course, realizing I had feelings for my best friend and actually doing something about it were two completely different things. I cared so much about our friendship that I didn’t want to ruin it, so I spent about half a year before I could admit it to myself.

In conversations with him I would find myself wondering what he smelled like, what it would be like to kiss him, then snap out immediately and remember that he was my best friend… I worked my way to admitting it to myself, to my friends then eventually him.

Meanwhile, apparently everyone else had already figured it out.

When we finally got together, the general response from the people around us was pretty much, Well, yeah… duh. We knew. We were just waiting for you dummies to catch up.

And once we did catch up, it was pretty seamless. A few stitches here and there, a few conversations about what we wanted to create together, a few fights to make sure we got all the things in and voila! A great fucking match.

And then we had to re-learn each other.

At the beginning one of the biggest things I came to understand was that Darius and I respond very differently to conflict. I can spend hours dissecting and talking about my feelings, I cry and feel A LOT and process emotions fairly quickly. I want to talk about what happened, make meaning, share how it made us feel and what we are going to do about it… and ideally, it would happen shortly after the conflict.

Darius needs space.

When he is overwhelmed or hurt, he needs time to ride whatever emotional wave he is on, to feel himself again and eventually come back into relationship. In the beginning, that was incredibly difficult for me because I didn’t experience his space as simply space. I felt uneasy, I couldn’t sleep, I would replay everything in my mind and torture myself with endless possibilities and scenarios; underneath all of it was this fear that maybe he was going to leave.

I couldn’t tolerate the space between us because I didn’t trust what would happen inside of it.

Over the years, that changed. My body has learned safety, I see that my partner needing space didn’t mean that he was leaving, and that I didn’t need him to come back immediately in order for me to be okay. I could communicate what I needed and then allow whatever space was needed. I can even say that I have enjoyed the space from time to time… it gave me time to come back to myself, to feel into my commitment, my love and take care of myself instead of torturing myself with stories and possibilities. (Honest moment here: I want to admit that this is not a complete makeover, I still fall into old patterns from time to time)

Stay with yourself.

That phrase, stay with yourself, came up over and over again during my years studying Core Energetics, it can sound a little abstract until you actually have to do it.

For me, it begins by learning to notice your experience before immediately deciding what it means. We are so quick to make meaning or attach a story to something happening inside of us. We label it, interpret it and then turn it into an identity. I’m anxious, angry, too sensitive and not okay.

Somatic work asks us to slow that process down and get curious about what is actually happening in real time.

Instead of I am anxious, I notice I have a feeling of tighness in my chest, my stomach feels unsettled and my breathing feels really shallow.

Instead of I am angry, maybe I notice heat in my face, tension in my jaw, my legs feeling disconnected from my body.

It sounds like such a small distinction, but I am and I feel are very different places to live from.

When I can notice what I’m feeling without immediately becoming the feeling, a little bit of space begins to open between me and my experience. I can become curious about what my body is communicating rather than immediately defending against it, acting from it or getting lost in the story my mind has created around it.

And we have a lot of ways of not staying.

Sometimes we fight, freeze or shut down. Sometimes we override ourselves and say yes when everything inside us is saying no because we fear losing connection with the other. Other times we reach for our phones, another episode, a drink or even a next purchase to distance ourselves from what we are feeling, losing connection with ourselves.

I want to be clear, I am not judging those things, the goal is not to never do those things, sometimes distraction is exactly what we need. The question is whether we can begin to notice when we are using something because being with ourselves feels too uncomfortable.

Because staying is uncomfortable.

At least at first.

You feel something you would normally run from, instead of making yourself feel better, you stay with it a moment. You get curious, maybe notice a little tension, breathe a little into that tension, or simply acknowledge it.

When you have paused a few times like this something interesting begins to happen over time… you remember.

You have felt this before, you know what it feels like and most importantly, you survived it, over and over. It did not take over. You continue this journey of curiosity and moment by moment your capacity begins to expand.

For me, that is what changed in those moments with Darius. I didn’t learn how to stop being affected by conflict, and I definitely didn’t become some perfectly regulated person who calmly smiles while her husband is pissed at her. I learned that I could feel the discomfort without immediately needing him to remove it for me.

We can be in conflict and dinner will still be made, the garbage will be taken out. We will raise our kids, communicate what needs to happen and continue to participate in the day to day moments. We can have different experiences and trust that neither of us has to abandon ourselves in order to remain in relationship with the other. If we stay a little longer we can hold the experience, feel the feelings, and come back more regulated and integrated when it is time for repair.

I am grateful that I had the experience in this somatic work to lean those lessons in staying and somewhere along the way, I realized that discomfort wasn’t the only thing I needed to learn how to stay with.

I say that I spend the first five years in therapy learning to stay with my pain and trauma and then going to therapy to learn how to stay with my joy, my rest and the things that are actually good for me.

Because pleasure requires capacity too.

It sounds strange, why would we need to learn how to tolerate something good?

Because our bodies learn from experience, and sometimes the good things aren’t as familiar as we think they should be. Maybe we once learned that rest came with guilt, love came with conditions. Maybe happiness was followed by disappointment so we learned somewhere along the way that if something feels too good, we better prepare ourselves because it could be taken away.

If you’re anything like me, you’re simply really used to doing.

Doing the next thing, skipping the rest to take care of the next person, finishing one thing while planing the next step. Rest was a privilege not a right. I have done (and still doing) work around this in my life to rewrite that script.

I have learned to live and love the ridiculously ordinary moment, to stay a little longer in them. At the moment our life is pretty full, raising a teenager who needs rides, tells endless stories and even though she is individuating, still wants to spend time with us (what a blessing). And we have a baby going through a committed velcro phase, who entertains us and teaches us patience every day, who I love with all my heart even when he is keeping me up all night.

On top of that there are clients, meals, phone calls, appointments, family gatherings, grocery runs, time to exercise and people needing things… just life doing what life does.

Every once in a while Darius and I find ourselves sitting together after breakfast, both having a coffee at the same time. Sometimes mine is even still warm, which is such a rare occurrence that we actually acknowledge it.

Are we both having coffee together right now?

Is your coffee still warm?

What?

And we just sit there and chit-chat. We aren’t talking about the schedule or who needs to be where or what we have to get done next. We’re curious about each other, asking questions, talking about the simplest things in life, and I find myself wishing I could get another fifteen minutes before the baby cries, the teenager comes in with a story, one of us gets a call, or life’s demands come knocking again.

There is nothing to work through in those moments, nowhere to be, nothing to do.

Just a good moment with the man of my dreams… a place I want to stay a little longer.

In therapy and personal development we are building the capacity to tolerate difficult things, but I wonder how often we consider our capacity for the other side of being alive. How much joy can you let yourself feel before you start waiting for something to go wrong? How much love can you actually receive? How long can you rest before you feel like you should be doing something productive?

Maybe the optimist know something we are missing, maybe instead of calling them naive we can learn from them.

Maybe being present with joy is a practice too.

When I picture Darius and me years from now, I don’t have some grand romantic image of what that looks like… I just see two old people cracking up together.

I hope we keep sharing our dreams, keep dancing, keep laughing, keep cuddling while laughing at the ridiculous questions he asks me. I hope that if I’m going to piss my pants as an old woman, it’s after one of our laugh attacks.

Mostly, I hope we continue to enjoy each other’s company, a little longer.

Maybe that is what I was really trying to offer my friends when I wrote this poem. Yes, there is something about commitment in staying, about learning to tolerate when another person is angry with you without rescuing, leaving or shaming, about learning to remain in relationship with yourself even when connection with someone else feels uncertain.

But there is also something about staying long enough to receive the love when it comes.

To notice the warm coffee, the laugh, the cuddle… to let yourself have the good thing without immediately wondering when it will end.

A lifetime is obviously made of years, but we don’t actually experience our relationships in years. We experience them in conversations, arguments, mornings, touches, questions, dinners, inside jokes, cups of coffee and all of these tiny moments when we have the opportunity to be present to ourselves and to the person in front of us.

So this is the poem I wrote for my friends as they began their marriage… but it came from what I have learned about love, about my body, and about staying through my own.

And in so many ways, I wrote it for Darius, thank you my love for staying with me when it was hard for me to stay with myself.

🪞 A Somatic Practice For You

This week, see if you can notice two moments: one where something feels uncomfortable, and one where something feels really good.

Before interpreting it, fixing it, distracting yourself or moving on to the next thing, notice what is actually happening in your body.

Where do you feel it?

What sensations are there?

What do you notice yourself wanting to do?

See if you can shift from I am to I feel.

And then, whether you’re sitting with discomfort, pleasure, love, rest or joy, ask yourself the same question:

Can I stay with this for just a little longer?

I mean, she knew I said inappropriate things, but to be sitting with my two best friends of over 30 years, she really got to know her mom.

Mostly over a few games of Taboo.

If you’ve never played, Taboo is a game where you have a word that you’re trying to get someone to guess and then a list of five taboo words that you’re not allowed to say. So, in a way, you have to know your audience. The way you explain something to one friend is different from how you explain it to the next because you just know how they’re going to get it.

And when you’ve been friends as long as we have, pretty much anything goes.

Ariel is 16 now, so we deemed her old enough to handle at least 95% of the things that would come out of our mouths.

And she did.

There were hilarious and inappropriate comments, inside jokes, things moms talk about once the babies go to sleep, and just the ridiculousness that happens when you’ve known people for this long.

Kathy has known me since I was six and Jen since I was nine. Kathy’s wife, Gabriella, has been in my life for 17 years now.

So these are people who have seen almost every version of me.

Before Darius, there were these best friends. Before we were mothers, we were children together. Then teenagers learning the world side by side. They’ve seen the relationships, the breakups, the exciting first dates, all the different versions of who I’ve been since I was a little girl.

And now we’re at a cottage together raising our kids together which is kind of wild.

We all have young children now, except for Ariel. There are two four-year-old girls, a five-month-old baby, and Teyo had just turned one.

In the mornings, whoever was up first would just kind of start keeping an eye on the kids. They would make their way into the living room and start playing, someone would make coffee, and then as each person got up we would all just take turns watching each other’s kids, playing with them, taking them outside, holding the babies while someone else cooked. We became a little village.

There was no big conversation about it. We just helped each other out.

If someone was putting their kid to sleep and was going to be late for dinner, someone else made dinner. We cooked for each other, planned our days and meals together, packed everything up for the beach.

And honestly, it’s really nice to travel with moms because moms have all the things.

I had gone into the week thinking four nights was going to be too long because I love my house and my routine; I knew I was going to miss Darius, my space, my things, my comforts. And I did miss all of that.

But I also made a home where we went… a hilarious and cozy home.

And something happened that I didn’t expect.

My body relaxed, I didn’t really know how much I needed something like this but I found my mind and body just taking it nice and slow.

And yes, it did have something to do about being in nature and looking out my window onto a glorious lake.

But I think most of it was being taken care of by other moms. I’m not the only one cooking anymore. I’m not the only one watching the baby most of the day. We’re taking care of our kids, but we’re also taking care of each other.

There is a whole other level of acceptance with friends like this, there is no pretending, no trying to impress, just being.

Even packing for the cottage, I wasn’t thinking much about my clothes. I chose comfort and only wore a bra when absolutely necessary. I mean, we’ve gone from perky boobs to post-breastfeeding boobs together. What exactly are we hiding at this point?

And maybe that’s part of why my body could relax so much. There was nothing I needed to prove and nothing I needed to protect.

Presence matters more than presentation.

What I appreciate the most from these friendships is that we’ve always been so different. The three of us had different upbringings and have always had very unique characters. Somehow we found this commonality in our humour and in how much we cared about each other, and that has been enough to carry us through a lot of different versions of ourselves.

Now we’re different as mothers too.

There are things about the way they parent that I admire and there are things that I judge, and I’m sure they have their list for me too but everybody stays in their lane.

And we disagree all the time.

These aren’t friendships where we’re guarding everything we say and keeping things PG. We can go at it. I think I used to understand safety as the absence of conflict. If everything is okay between us, then I can relax. But the older I get, the more I think relational safety has less to do with never having friction and more to do with what happens when the friction comes.

Can I disagree with you and still belong here? Can you think I’m wrong and still love me? Can we parent differently without needing to convince each other that our way is better?

Thirty-two years of friendship has given us a lot of evidence that the answer is yes. Obviously things can get a little more sensitive when your kids are involved, and we’ve learned to walk with a little more caution around how we say certain things because mama bear is a whole other beast.

But even in conflict there is something about our humour that always brings us back. We can disagree and ten minutes later we’re making fun of each other again.

I have friends now who I’m incredibly close with and care about deeply, but there’s something about these two women that will always have a special place in my life.

They know all the versions of me and have accepted all of those versions, over the years we have chosen each other again and again.

And.. we also make fun of those versions. I’m the hippie self-help one who lights palo santo and wants to talk about feelings and emotional awareness. One of them is a hairdresser, the other is a comedian and flight attendant, and somehow these three very different little girls grew into three very different women who still really like being together.

Maybe that’s why four nights didn’t feel long.

I went away thinking I was going to really miss home and want to come back.

Instead, I relaxed. I laughed. I was taken care of. I watched our kids grow up together. I watched my daughter get to know parts of me that existed long before she did.

And I got to be with people who have known me since before I knew who I was going to become. And the best part is that now our kids will get that opportunity to do the same.

A Reflection for You

This week, pay attention to how your body responds to the different people in your life.

Notice what happens when you walk into work and sit beside certain coworkers. When your partner walks through the door. When a friend’s name comes up on your phone. When you’re sitting around a table with family.

Does your body soften? Do you notice yourself taking a deeper breath? Do you feel like you can take up space, speak freely, be quiet, disagree, be yourself?

Or do you notice yourself tightening, becoming more alert, choosing your words carefully, or feeling like you need to present a certain version of yourself?

You don’t have to do anything with the information or decide what it means right away. Just notice.

What is your body communicating about the people you spend your time with?

Who helps you relax into yourself?

And where might you still feel like you have to become someone else in order to belong?

I was about to graduate from a four-year Core Energetics program with four other women, women I had spent years sitting beside in classrooms, driving ridiculous amounts of hours with, crying with, fighting with, growing with, and being exposed in ways that most people probably never experience with their classmates.

Core Energetics is not exactly a place where you get to hide.

We talked about our vulnerabilities, our bodies, sexuality, attraction, jealousy, comparison, the things we saw in each other and the things we saw in ourselves. We brought forward impulses and thoughts that we might normally keep tucked away because they aren’t necessarily the things you say out loud in polite company.

And somewhere inside all of that, especially when conversations about beauty, sexuality or attraction came up, there was this little voice inside of me that believed I wouldn’t be chosen.

I know that voice.

She isn’t necessarily the 39-year-old version of me. She’s much younger, probably somewhere around grade three, four or five, when I went through a period of being severely bullied and made fun of for the way I looked and the way I presented myself.

I actually remember being pretty confident and happy with myself before that, but somewhere along the way I learned this story: I wasn’t going to be the one who was chosen. There was always going to be a friend who was prettier, someone who was more special, someone else who would be picked first.

Apparently that little girl still occasionally comes dress shopping with me.

Because as graduation got closer, I knew I was going to be standing at the front of that room beside four beautiful women. Some of us had children, some didn’t. One or two of them may even have had abs, I had abs once (see proof below)

Ok back to the story…

It was our last hurrah after four years of being completely vulnerable with each other. We were going to stand in front of everyone, give our speeches, take pictures, celebrate what we had accomplished, and for probably the first time walk into this room where we had shed so many tears actually wearing makeup.

I wanted to feel beautiful.

I wanted to shine. I wanted to feel special. I wanted to stand up there and feel pretty and confident and proud of myself. That was what I wanted…

Instead, when I went dress shopping I was suddenly trying to figure out how to hide.

How do I hide my arms?

How do I hide the belly that hasn’t fully gone back after having a baby at 39?

How do I stand so this part doesn’t show?

How do I hold my head so my chin looks a little thinner?

I wasn’t looking for the dress that made me feel the most beautiful. I was looking for the dress that could hide me the best.

And it was fucking miserable.

Eventually, after trying things on and feeling increasingly worse about myself, I went home, defeated and dressless. I went through my closet once more and pulled out a dress I had bought for a party years earlier.

I put it on.

The zipper may or may not have fully zipped up, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that it was the only one that I felt comfortable in.

I remember walking upstairs in it and Darius looking at me and saying, “Wow, baby. You look so beautiful.”

Darius is my biggest cheerleader, but he’s also ridiculously honest. This is a man I can come home to with ten dresses, put on a full fashion show, and trust that he will tell me which ones look great and which ones do not suit my skin tone, accentuate my good features and flat out say, “I don't like it.” So when he tells me I look good, I believe him.

And in that moment, I needed it.

I needed him to reflect something back to me that I was having a hard time seeing for myself, (thank you for lending me your eyes my love).

I wore the dress. I graduated. I felt beautiful.

But I don’t think the little girl who believed she wouldn’t be chosen had gone anywhere. She still walks with me from time to time.

A few months later, I had another wedding to shop for, and funny enough, one of those four women I graduated with was the one getting married.

My body hadn’t drastically changed.

I hadn’t lost 20 pounds or suddenly woken up with abs. I had only been consistently working out again for a couple of weeks, so whatever had changed between those two shopping trips wasn’t something you could necessarily measure on a scale.

But something had changed.

For the first time in a while, I had started moving my body more intentionally again. I was booking F45 classes, going for walks, pushing myself through workouts where sometimes I genuinely felt like I had nothing left to give.

There was one day when I was sore and I remember thinking, I’d rather be sore from working out than sore from not moving.

That thought stayed with me.

I know I’m rebuilding a body that has been through a lot. I had a baby in my late 30s. My body changed. My life changed. There was a long period where comfort was the priority, where my clothes needed to be practical and easy and able to survive a small child wiping whatever happened to be on his face directly onto my shirt.

There is also a part of me that wants to be stronger.

Sometimes when I’m in the middle of a class and I feel like I am about to die, I think about how I want to show up for Teyo, for Ariel… for myself when I’m 90, and somehow I find another little surge of energy.

I want to build that body.

But somewhere in these last few weeks, I realized that I don’t want to wait for that body before I start enjoying this one.

Around the same time, I watched The Devil Wears Prada 2, because all girls need a fun girl movie once in a while, and the entire movie is basically one giant fashion show. Fun blazers, accessories, colour, people putting things together in ways I would never think to put them together.

And I started thinking about my own closet.

There are so many things in there that I don’t touch.

Before becoming a mom again, I always thought of myself as someone who was a little funky and fun with clothes, and somewhere in the postpartum period I had started reaching for the same things, dressing with the same intention, choosing comfort over and over again.

So one day before going grocery shopping, I decided I was going to wear something I wouldn’t normally wear.

Nothing dramatic happened.

I wore the same shorts I already love. I went to the belt section of my closet and pulled out a few colourful things. I took this little cheetah-print ribbon that is technically supposed to be a thin belt and tied it around my head, added a little red belt for a pop of colour and headed out.

Same body.

Mostly the same clothes.

I just put a bow on it.

And I felt different.

I felt a little funky again. A little more like myself. I had adorned myself instead of trying to manage myself, and there was something about making that ridiculously small choice that shifted how I carried myself.

When I came out, Darius looked at me and said something along the lines of, “Whatever this is, I love it.”

So I kept doing it.

A belt here. An accessory there. Something in my hair. Clothes that had been sitting in my closet waiting for some imaginary future version of me to remember they existed.

And then it was time to go dress shopping again.

This time I walked into the store with Ariel and Teyo and went straight up to the women working there.

“Hi can you help me? I want something comfortable and flowy. I’m a little rounder over here so something so let’s make it something that fits well, I want to accentuate the booty so we can go tighter over there. I don’t like those stiff dresses, I like solid colours and I need to be able to dance…. like, really dance”

There was no pretending that I suddenly loved every part of my body.

I didn’t.

There are still things I’m working through. There are things I want to change, strength I want to rebuild, and days when I’m sure that little girl who believes she won’t be chosen will have plenty to say.

But this time the question wasn’t, How do I hide this body?

It was, How do I want to feel in it?

I wanted to dance with my husband. I wanted to watch the sunset over the lake. I wanted to move and feel comfortable and look beautiful while I was doing it. I wanted a dress that worked with the body I was actually bringing to the wedding, instead of spending the afternoon wishing I had brought a different one.

And I found a pretty fucking great dress… It has that greek goddess vibe to it that may have been inspired by an Odyssey conversation I had with my teenager that day.

It’s my colour. It’s flowy. I have the perfect jewelry for it. I came home and modeled it for Darius (along with another six dresses that I may or may not be keeping because they’re cute).

And standing there doing my little fashion show, I realized that something about this felt completely different.

I wasn’t waiting to become beautiful.

I was celebrating myself now.

A few years ago, I came across a Pathwork teaching called The Idealized Self-Image, and as I thought about these two very different experiences of shopping for a dress, I found myself coming back to it.

The teaching explores the ways we create an image of who we think we should be, and then suffer when the very real, very human person we actually are doesn’t quite measure up.

What struck me most when I went back and read the lecture was the distinction it makes between genuinely wanting to grow and the demands of the idealized self.

Because I do want to change.

I want to get stronger. I want to build muscle. I want to feel capable and energetic in my body.

There is a body I am working toward.

But there is also a body I am living in.

And I think somewhere along the way I had started confusing the desire to grow with the belief that I needed to already be there.

The Pathwork lecture describes the idealized self as something that doesn’t want to wait. It wants us to meet its demands right now. The real self, on the other hand, can recognize where we are imperfect, where we are still growing, where we may want something to be different, without making our current reality a problem that needs to be hidden.

That distinction landed differently for me this time.

Because I don’t think acceptance means that I have to love everything exactly as it is.

I can accept that my body changed after having a baby at 39 and still want to get stronger.

I can accept that I’m rounder in places than I used to be and still have preferences about what I want to wear.

I can stand in front of a mirror and think, yeah, I don’t really want to accentuate that today, while also thinking, but look at these fucking eyelashes.

I can want change without withholding myself from myself until I get there.

Maybe that was the difference between those two dressing rooms.

In May, I was dressing an image of who I thought I should be. I was standing beside the body I actually had and comparing her to another one in my mind, one that was thinner, more beautiful, more special, more likely to be chosen.

And when I couldn’t find her in the mirror, I tried to hide the evidence.

This time, I walked into the store with the body I actually had.

Here she is.

This is where she’s rounder. This is what she likes. These are the parts she wants to show off. She wants something flowy. She wants to feel beautiful. She wants to dance with her husband until her feet hurt.

Dress her.

There is something incredibly freeing about no longer requiring yourself to arrive somewhere before you are allowed to participate in your own life.

And I want to be careful here because I don’t have some triumphant ending where I tell you that I have conquered body image and now lovingly gaze at every inch of myself in the mirror.

I don’t.

This shit ebbs and flows.

There will probably be another dressing room, another photograph, another moment when that little girl who remembers not being chosen starts comparing herself to everyone around her again.

But right now, I’m here.

And I don’t want to wait to feel beautiful.

I don’t want to wait until I’m at the right weight or in the right shape or wearing the right size. I don’t want to wait to be in the right body.

I’m in my fucking body now.

So I’m gonna put a bow on it.

Maybe yours isn’t a cheetah-print ribbon that was technically supposed to be a belt.

Maybe putting a bow on it means wearing the bathing suit instead of waiting for another summer. Maybe it means getting into the photograph instead of volunteering to take it. Maybe it means pulling something out of your closet that you’ve been saving for when you lose the weight, or buying clothes that actually fit the body you have instead of punishing yourself every morning with the ones that don’t.

Maybe it has nothing to do with clothes.

Maybe there is simply some part of your life you have been postponing until you become the version of yourself you believe should be living it.

You can still work toward her.

You can grow, change, build strength, make different choices, and want things for yourself that you don’t have yet.

But you don’t have to abandon the person who is here while you do it.

A Reflection for You

Take a moment to think about an area of your life where you have been waiting to become a different version of yourself.

Who do you believe you need to become before you let yourself fully participate?

And what are you withholding until you get there?

If this brings you to your body, maybe the practice this week isn’t to stand in front of the mirror and convince yourself that you love everything you see. Instead, go to your closet and notice how you choose what to put on.

Are you asking, What can I hide?

Or could you experiment, just for a day, with asking something different?

How do I want to feel?

Pick something from there.

Add the earrings. Wear the colour. Tie the ridiculous little ribbon around your head.

You don’t have to wait for some future version of yourself to show up before you start dressing the one who’s already here.

Put a bow on her.

My guess is that most of us would immediately start collecting evidence when asked that question. We’d think about the gym membership we stopped using, the project we keep saying we’ll start next month, the bedtime we promised ourselves we’d stick to, or the habit we’ve tried to build more times than we’d like to admit.

We rarely stop to weigh those against all the places where our will quietly shows up.. the child we’ve raised, the career we’ve built, the difficult conversation we finally had, the parent we’ve cared for, the degree we finished, the business we started, or the countless commitments we’ve honoured simply because they mattered. Instead, we measure ourselves by the places where we’ve struggled to follow through and quietly conclude that we probably just need more discipline.

I know that’s where my mind went. The other day my therapist study group spent an afternoon talking about will, we shared our own experiences, and reflected on some questions and readings. One question has stayed with me ever since.

Where in yourself or your life do you feel you have less control than you would like?

At first, I answered the question the way I answer most reflective questions. My mind immediately went to the places where I thought I could be doing better.

I exercise less consistently than I’d like.

There are videos I would like to record.

There are things I know would support my long-term health and business that somehow keep getting pushed to tomorrow.

My immediate conclusion was, You just need to try harder.

It’s such a familiar voice that I almost didn’t question it. If I’m not doing the thing I want to do, then surely the answer must be more discipline, commitment and more willpower.

Except the more I sat with the question, the less that explanation made sense.

Because if I’m honest, I have a pretty strong will.

I’ve built multiple businesses, raised Ariel as a single mom for many years before Darius and I met, I recently completed a four years of Core Energetics training, welcomed another baby into our family, and somehow managed to keep building a practice that feels deeply meaningful to me.

When something truly matters to me, I can move mountains.

So why do I still feel stuck in certain areas of my life?

That became the more interesting question.

And somewhere in the middle of reflecting on it, I realized I’d been asking the wrong thing all along.

Instead of wondering whether I had enough will, I started wondering whether I actually understood my will.

A few months ago, I wrote about the relationship between reason, emotion, and will. Reason helps us understand, emotion allows us to experience and will gives us the capacity to act.

They’re not meant to operate independently.

Maybe the places where I feel stuck aren’t asking for more will but rather a better relationship between all three.

Reason helps us understand reality. It allows us to think, to plan and discern things and essentially make sense of our experience.

Emotion allows us to experience our bodies and interactions. It tells us what matters to us, what hurts, what brings us joy and what we’re longing for.

Will is what allows us to move, it takes what we know and feel and translates it into action.

When these three functions are working together, our actions tend to feel aligned. We understand where we’re going, we feel connected to why it matters, and our will has a clear direction to move toward.

But somewhere along the way, many of us began treating will as though it existed in isolation… we gave it all the power.

We ask will to override our emotions, to compensate for poor planning and ask it to drag us toward goals we’ve never taken the time to meaningfully connect with.

Then, when it struggles under the weight of jobs that were never meant to belong to it, we decide our will must be weak or that we don’t have enough discipline.

Then I read something interesting, “The Act Of Will” by Roberto Assagioli, MD (Chapter 2). There was something about Assagioli’s writing that challenged me.

He doesn’t describe a healthy will as simply being stronger. In fact, one of the qualities he writes about is what he calls Skillful Will, and I found myself wondering if this is the piece so many of us miss.

Because strength without wisdom can become force.

We can push harder, become more rigid, criticize ourselves more aggressively, and still find ourselves exhausted, frustrated, or stuck.

That landed differently for me than I expected.

For years I’ve looked at my relationship with exercise and assumed I had a discipline problem. Every time I wasn’t consistent, the conversation in my head sounded almost identical.

You just need more willpower.

Except that isn’t actually what helps me, what helps me is knowing myself.

I know I’m far more likely to exercise if I book the class a few days in advance because accountability makes a difference. If I leave the decision until six o’clock tomorrow morning, I’ll be negotiating with a tired version of myself instead of the one who genuinely wants to take care of her body… tired Lil usually wins.

My will isn’t waking up motivated, it’s making the decision while reason is clear. In this case reason isn’t replacing my will, it’s supporting it.

Instead of asking my will to carry everything on its own, I’m allowing reason to do the job it was designed to do, creating the conditions that make wise action much more likely.

My body has been asking for more movement for months. I love how I feel after I’ve exercised: more grounded, more energized, more patient, stronger for the people I love. I sleep better and I feel more like myself… That’s emotional information.

It reminds me that this isn’t really about going to the gym. It’s about the kind of relationship I want to have with myself. It’s about taking care of the body that carries me through my life, my work, my motherhood, and the people I care about.

Will simply becomes the part that translates all of that into action.

Tomorrow I have a class at 7:30am, so this evening I set myself up to go to sleep early, have my meals prepped to come home and get ready for my day.

I’m not planning to negotiate with myself when the alarm goes off, I will for sure dread the first 20 minutes of it but the decision has already been made.

My reason made a plan while my mind was clear, my emotions reminded me why that plan matters. Tomorrow morning, my will simply has to get me out the door.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder how often we make life harder by asking one part of ourselves to carry work that was always meant to be shared.

Maybe that’s why so many of us feel exhausted. We’re trying to force ourselves toward a life that reason hasn’t supported, emotion hasn’t connected us to, and our bodies may not even be saying yes to. So I repeat this line again…

A healthy will isn’t measured by how hard you push, it’s measured by how wisely you direct your energy.

Perhaps developing our will has less to do with becoming stronger and more to do with becoming more integrated; learning to think clearly, feel honestly, listen to the body, and allow each part of ourselves to contribute what it was designed to offer.

When reason, emotion, and will begin working together, our actions stop feeling like a constant act of self-discipline and start feeling like an expression of who we really are.

Reflection for You

Is there an area of your life where you’ve been telling yourself that you simply need more discipline? Before assuming anything about your will pause and ask yourself a few questions.

• What does my reason already know about this situation?

• Are my emotions trying to tell me about why this matters?

• What is one small action I could take that would support my future self instead of relying on motivation in the moment?

• Can I make this decision from a grounded, present, place and set myself up for success?

I wish it meant I could put an out-of-office reply on my life, crawl into bed, and come back when I felt like myself again.

But that’s not how life works.

This weekend we celebrated my son’s first birthday. We had almost fifty people at our house. It was beautiful, loud, joyful, and completely worth it.

The night before his party, he came down with a fever and a cough, so he slept with me. If you’ve ever slept beside a sick one-year-old, you know it isn’t really sleep. It’s listening, waking, checking their temperature all while they practice their karate moves on your ribs.

The day after the party, my period arrived, the perfect combination of after-party clean up energy I needed.

By Monday, I could feel it.

Not sadness. Not depression. Just… low.

Low energy. Low motivation. Low capacity.

My body has been asking me to slow down all week.

Not in some dramatic, life-altering way. I’m still getting up, cooking, seeing clients, answering emails, preparing for my workshops, doing the things that need to get done. From the outside, everything probably looks pretty normal.

But inside, I know something has shifted.

I remember saying that to Darius earlier this week. “I don’t feel very resourced.” It wasn’t a complaint or a cry for help. It was simply the most honest way I could describe where I was and to explain why Im walking around with that face all day.

And the thing is, life doesn’t stop simply because my capacity changes.

I think that’s the part we don’t talk about enough.

There’s a version of embodiment that sounds beautiful in theory. Listen to your body. Honour your needs. Rest when you’re tired.

But children still wake up needing breakfast. Commitments we care about still exist. Work we genuinely love still asks something of us.

Sometimes the question isn’t whether we can stop.

Sometimes the question is whether we can stop abandoning ourselves while we keep going.

As I’ve been sitting with this over the last few days, I’ve noticed that my body isn’t actually the difficult part.

My body is remarkably clear.

It’s the rest of me that starts negotiating.

Just push through.

You’ll feel better once you get started.

Do one more thing.

Finish this first.

Those thoughts arrive so quickly that they almost feel like my own voice. But when I slow down enough to look at them, I don’t think they began with me.

I grew up in a house where there was always something to do. Saturday mornings weren’t for resting. They were for cleaning, organizing, getting ahead of the next thing. My mom rarely stopped. Somewhere along the way, my nervous system learned that movement felt safer than stillness, that productivity wasn’t simply something we did, it became part of how we belonged.

Children adapt brilliantly.

For a long time, I thought I was just someone who liked to stay busy.

Now I wonder if “busy” was simply the most familiar way I knew how to feel okay.

I’ve seen this pattern before. In my twenties I owned a jewelry business, every Christmas and Mother’s Day looked the same. I would stay up late making pieces, answering clients, marketing, packing orders, convincing myself that I just had to get through one more day. By the time it was over, my hands were sore, my body stiff, my mind just mush, and I couldn’t understand why I had ended up so depleted again.

Today the pattern looks different.

Not because I’ve completely outgrown it, but because I notice it sooner.

That’s what therapy has given me.

Not a life where I never overextend myself.

Not a body that never gets tired.

Not a version of myself that always gets it right.

It has given me the ability to recognize when my capacity has changed without immediately believing something is wrong with me.

I’m still learning what comes next.

Because if I’m completely honest, there is still a part of me that feels disappointed when I slow down. A part that quietly wonders whether my value comes from what I produce, whether resting means I’m falling behind, whether people will see me differently if I stop.

I don’t believe those things in the way I once did.

But I still notice the echoes.

Maybe that’s what compassion looks like.

Not waiting until the pattern disappears before we’re kind to ourselves.

Not earning rest by reaching burnout first.

Simply recognizing that there is a part of us that learned to keep going because, at one point in our lives, it genuinely felt like the safest thing to do.

Tomorrow I’ll be teaching a class called The Body’s Yes and No.

The timing makes me smile because my own body has been saying no all week.

No to the pace I’ve become so accustomed to that it sometimes feels like who I am.

Maybe listening to the body isn’t about waiting for a day when life becomes less demanding.

Maybe healing isn’t arriving at a place where your body never says no.

Maybe it’s becoming the kind of person who no longer argues with it every time it does.

So this week, instead of asking yourself what your body is saying no to, I wonder if there’s another question worth asking.

What do you want to begin saying yes to?

Maybe it’s yes to asking for help before you’re completely depleted.

Maybe it’s yes to disappointing the part of you that believes your worth is measured by how much you can carry.

Maybe it’s yes to moving more slowly, even when your life keeps moving.

Maybe it’s yes to trusting that your capacity will change, and that there is nothing wrong with you when it does.

Whatever your answer is, notice what happens in your body as you say it.

Not what your mind thinks about it.

Not whether it sounds productive or reasonable.

Just notice.

Does your breath deepen?

Does your jaw soften?

Do your shoulders drop, even slightly?

Or does another part immediately tighten and begin telling you why you can’t?

That tightening isn’t failure.

It’s information.

And maybe that’s where the work begins.

🪞 A Somatic Practice For You

Find somewhere you can be uninterrupted for five minutes.

Close your eyes or soften your gaze.

Take a slow breath and simply notice your body without trying to change anything.

Then ask yourself two questions.

What is my body saying no to right now?

Wait for an answer that comes as a sensation before it comes as a thought.

Then ask,

What am I longing to say yes to?

Don’t worry about whether it’s practical.

Don’t rush to solve it.

Just let the answer arrive.

Sometimes the most important thing isn’t acting on your body’s wisdom immediately.

Sometimes it’s simply allowing yourself to hear it.

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I imagined there would come a day when I had done enough work that difficult conversations would no longer shake me, grief would move through me gracefully, and conflict would feel like something I could navigate with perfect clarity. I thought that was what emotionally healthy people did. They stayed calm and always knew what to say.

8 years of therapy, I still get pissed.

Just the other day, Darius and I found ourselves in the middle of a disagreement. It wasn’t explosive. It wasn’t one of those movie-worthy arguments where people are yelling and slamming doors. It was much quieter than that, an uncomfortable conversation between two people that love each other.

Halfway through the conversation I noticed something familiar, my chest felt tight, my breathing had become shallow, and I could feel myself preparing my next response before he had even finished his sentence. I had stopped listening.

Ten years ago I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

I would’ve justified why I was upset, maybe convinced myself that if I could just explain my point a little better, he would finally understand. And if that didn’t work, I would have been contemplating the silent treatment or a tantrum halfway through the conversation.

This time I simply said, “I don’t think I can hear you right now. I’m feeling really activated and I’d rather come back to this when I’m a bit more resourced.”

The conversation stopped.

The argument wasn’t magically resolved because I had become enlightened overnight. I was still angry. I still disagreed with him. The difference was that I had enough awareness to recognize that in that moment, I didn’t have the capacity to stay connected to myself while trying to stay connected to someone else. And when you are with the people you love, the goal is to stay connected.

That distinction has changed the way I understand almost everything.

One of my favourite quotes by Gabor Maté is, “It’s not about feeling better. It’s about getting better at feeling.”

The first time I heard that, something in me relaxed because it challenged an idea I didn’t even realize I had been carrying. Somewhere along the way I had confused growth with the absence of discomfort. I thought the work was supposed to eliminate difficult emotions, when in reality it was asking me to build the capacity to experience them without abandoning myself in the process.

I think this is where somatic psychotherapy offers something incredibly important.

So much of our culture teaches us to begin with the story.

Why am I feeling this?

Who caused this?

What does this mean?

Before we even notice what’s happening in our bodies, we’ve already built an explanation around it. We interpret. We analyze. We defend. We blame. We justify. Sometimes we even create an entire identity around an emotion before we’ve actually allowed ourselves to feel it.

The body works differently.

The body doesn’t begin with a story.

It begins with sensation.

A tightening in the throat, a heat moving through the chest, sometimes a knot in the stomach or a jaw that suddenly won’t unclench.

Those sensations are often the purest information we have because they haven’t yet been organized into a narrative. They haven’t been filtered through old beliefs, childhood experiences, social conditioning, or all the ways we’ve learned to make sense of ourselves. They’re simply telling us, “Something is happening.”

When we slow down enough to notice sensation before interpretation, we begin to experience life from the bottom up rather than the top down. We move from direct experience into meaning instead of starting with meaning and assuming it must be true.

That sounds simple, but it’s a radical shift.

One of the primary goals of somatic psychotherapy is helping people strengthen their interoception, their ability to accurately sense what is happening inside their own bodies. It sounds technical, but it has very practical implications because without that awareness we override ourselves constantly.

We stay in conversations that our bodies have already left or say yes when every muscle is saying no. We ignore exhaustion until it becomes burnout or ignore sadness until it becomes depression.

We convince ourselves we’re “fine” while our nervous system is working overtime trying to keep us protected.

But here’s the thing…

Noticing sensation isn’t the end goal.

Staying with it is.

Capacity

When I talk about capacity, I’m talking about our ability to remain present with sensations, emotions, impulses, uncertainty, and relationship without immediately needing to escape them.

Our clients don’t struggle because they have emotions.

They struggle because the emotions exceed what their nervous system knows how to hold.

Honestly… so do the rest of us.

When our experience becomes bigger than our capacity to hold it, the nervous system does exactly what it was designed to do. It protects us.

Sometimes protection looks like intellectualizing everything because thinking feels safer than feeling or it looks like shutting down until we can’t feel much of anything.

Sometimes we become reactive, controlling, overly accommodating, or we simply disappear from ourselves altogether.

None of those responses make us broken.

They make us human.

At one point in our lives those strategies probably helped us survive something that felt impossible to hold. The problem is that many of us continue using those same strategies long after the original danger has passed.

What I’ve noticed in my own life is that building capacity hasn’t made me less emotional.

If anything, I feel more now than I used to.

The difference is that I don’t panic quite as quickly when emotions show up. I don’t immediately assume they need to be fixed, explained away, or acted upon. Sometimes they simply need to be witnessed long enough for something underneath them to reveal itself.

And sometimes… they don’t.

Sometimes anger is just anger.

Grief is just grief.

Sometimes fear is simply reminding me that I’m stepping into unfamiliar territory.

Not every sensation needs to become a breakthrough. Sometimes it just needs a little room to breathe.

What surprised me most was realizing that capacity isn’t only about learning to tolerate pain.

I’ve had to build capacity for love, for receiving help for resting without earning it, for allowing people to care for me, for being celebrated without minimizing myself.

For pleasure.

Those experiences activate people too. Maybe not everyone, but certainly me.

Our nervous systems don’t necessarily distinguish between painful intensity and joyful intensity. Both ask the same question.

Can you stay?

Can you stay when you’re no longer hiding behind productivity, perfectionism, or taking care of everyone else?

Can you stay when someone loves you, the real you?

Those questions have challenged me just as much as learning to stay with anger ever did.

Please don’t mistake any of this as me telling you I’ve figured it out because I haven’t.

There are still days when I become reactive. Days when I don’t notice until after I’ve already said the thing. Days when my defenses move much faster than my awareness. The difference now is that I don’t make myself bad for it.

Instead, another kind of capacity begins: the capacity to repair and be able to apologize. To become curious instead of ashamed and to hold the part of me that’s still learning.

Maybe that’s what integration actually looks like.

Maybe that’s why this work matters so much to me.

Because every time I increase my capacity, even just a little, I become more available for my relationships, for my work, for my children, and for myself.

Not because life becomes easier.

Because I become more capable of staying with life as it unfolds.

An invitation

As you finish reading this, take a moment to ask yourself one simple question.

Where in my life am I reaching the edge of my capacity?

Maybe it’s in your relationship. Maybe it’s parenting, grief, work, receiving help, or simply slowing down long enough to hear what your body has been trying to tell you.

You don’t have to figure it out alone. If this work resonates with you and you’d like someone to walk alongside you as you begin building that capacity, we can explore what working together can look like.

Click here for more info.

🪞 A Somatic Practice For You

The next time you notice yourself becoming emotionally activated, resist the urge to ask, Why do I feel this way?

Instead, pause for a moment and ask yourself three different questions.

• What am I noticing in my body right now?

• Can I stay with this sensation for one more breath without needing to change it?

• Do I have the capacity to continue this conversation, this decision, or this moment… or would it be kinder to myself to pause and come back when I’m more resourced?

You don’t need to have the answers immediately.

For today, simply practice staying long enough to listen.

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Insight Timer Live Online August 27 → CLICK HERE

Most of us spend our days thinking.

Planning.
Analyzing.
Problem-solving.
Trying to figure ourselves out.

And while insight is valuable, there comes a point where more thinking doesn’t create more change.

The body knows things the mind hasn’t caught up to yet.

Somatic Lab is a beginner-friendly space where we explore that together.

Not through performance.
Not through pressure.
Not through having the “right” answer.

Through experience.

Every Lab is an opportunity to slow down, become curious, and reconnect with yourself in a grounded and supportive environment.

Whether this is your first experience with somatic work or you’ve been on this path for years, you’re welcome here.

Is this for you?

You might want to join Somatic Lab if you…

• Spend a lot of time in your head and want to feel more connected to your body.

• Are curious about somatic work but aren’t sure where to begin.

• Want practical tools for navigating stress, emotions, and everyday life.

• Enjoy learning through experience rather than just information.

• Are looking for a welcoming community where you can explore at your own pace.

No previous experience is necessary.

You don’t need to be flexible.
You don’t need to know anything about somatics.
You don’t need to share anything you don’t want to.

Just come as you are.

What to Expect

Each Somatic Lab explores a different theme through a blend of simple, guided practices.

Together we may explore:

• Gentle movement

• Grounding

• Breath

• Awareness

• partner exercises

• Journaling and reflection

• Optional group sharing

Everything is an invitation.

You’ll never be asked to do anything that doesn’t feel right for you.

Why it’s called a Lab

A laboratory is a place for exploration.

Not perfection.

Not performance.

Curiosity is more important than getting it right.

Rather than trying to fix yourself, we’ll explore what happens when you simply begin paying attention to your body’s experience.

Sometimes the smallest shift in awareness changes everything.

What You’ll Leave With

Every experience is different, but people often leave with…

• A greater sense of presence

• More connection to themselves

• Practical tools they can use at home

• A quieter mind

• A deeper understanding of their patterns

• The feeling that they’re not alone

Is This Therapy?

No.

Somatic Lab is an educational and experiential group.

While many people find the experience meaningful and therapeutic, it is not group psychotherapy.

If you’re currently looking for deeper therapeutic support or individualized care, 1:1 sessions may be a better place to begin. You’re welcome to reach out if you’re unsure which option is right for you.

Join a Somatic Lab

Whether you prefer to explore from home or experience the work in person, there are two ways to join us.

🌿 Somatic Lab Live (Online)

Join Lilian each week on Insight Timer for a free, live exploration of the body. These beginner-friendly sessions offer an opportunity to slow down, reconnect with yourself, and explore a new theme through simple somatic practices, movement, breath, and reflection.

Weekly on Insight Timer
→ Join Live Click Here

Your Facilitator

Lilian Motta

Lilian Motta is a Holistic Somatic Therapist, Certified Core Energetics Practitioner, Fascial Stretch Therapist, and Reiki Master with over 15 years of experience facilitating workshops, retreats, and embodied learning experiences in Canada and internationally.

Her work is grounded in the belief that the body holds profound wisdom. Drawing from somatic psychotherapy, nervous system awareness, movement, and body-based practices, Lilian helps people reconnect with themselves, understand their patterns, and cultivate greater authenticity, aliveness, and connection.

In addition to co-facilitating the in-person Somatic Labs, Lilian hosts Somatic Lab Live each week on Insight Timer, offering free online experiences for people around the world who are curious about exploring the wisdom of the body.

After four years of driving to Massachusetts, packing bags, leaving my family, reading the books, sitting in classrooms, being cracked open, put back together, and then cracked open all over again, I was fucking done.

I was tired in the way only deep transformation can make you tired. Deeply grateful, of course, for everything those four years had given me but I was ready to be home. To stop living between school weekends, assignments, emotional breakthroughs, and the constant feeling that another layer of my psyche was patiently waiting around the corner to humble me all over again.

So when I walked into the final class of my four-year Core Energetics training, I thought I knew exactly what I was there to learn. The class was called Closing and Termination, and I assumed we would spend the afternoon talking about how to help clients navigate the end of a therapeutic relationship. It felt like the perfect way to finish. What better way to close than by learning how to help someone else close well?

By that point, I should have known better.

Nothing in that school ever stayed theoretical for very long.

The class concluded with a simple exercise. We paired up, and one person would play the therapist while the other brought in something from their own life that was coming to an end. The invitation was to explore a real experience of closure, allowing ourselves to become aware of what was happening beneath the surface instead of simply talking about it.

I chose the most obvious thing I could think of.

School, I was graduating that evening.

I started talking about how ready I was to finish. I spoke about the endless drives, about being away from my family, about the emotional intensity of the training, and about how excited I was to finally go home.

Everything I was saying was true.

Or at least I thought it was.

Then, somewhere in the middle of speaking, my body interrupted me.

One of the things I love most about this work is also one of the things that continually humbles me. The body doesn’t care how convincing your story is. Your mind can have everything beautifully organized and completely justified, but your body has no interest in protecting the narrative you’ve carefully constructed. It waits patiently until you’re quiet enough to hear it, and then it gently whispers, That’s not the whole truth.

So I stayed.

Instead of moving on, instead of explaining my way through the exercise, I stayed with what I was feeling.

At first it was just sadness.

Not overwhelming sadness. Not the kind that knocks you over. Just a quiet ache that seemed completely out of place. Why was I crying? I had spent weeks telling everyone how ready I was to graduate. I wanted this. I had worked incredibly hard for it.

So why did my body feel like something was ending that it wasn’t ready to lose?

As I stayed with that question, another feeling slowly emerged underneath the sadness.

Fear?

Nooo what do I have to fear? It took me a minute to get there because I didn’t want to admit it. I was excited remember! I was ready, bags packed, adios amigos!

But then it landed.

I was afraid people were going to forget me.

There it was.

Not profound.

Not the kind of insight I imagined would emerge during my final class.

Just painfully, beautifully human… and a little young.

Then it came out, I was afraid that once I left, life would continue without me. The younger students would keep growing, the next years would continue their journey, new relationships would form, and I would become someone people occasionally remembered rather than someone who was still part of the living field of the school.

The surprising part wasn’t that I felt that way, it was realizing how long I had been protecting myself from feeling it.

Somewhere during the last few months, I had already started saying goodbye.

Outwardly, nothing had changed. I still showed up. I still laughed, shared, participated, cried, and connected with everyone around me. If someone had asked me how I was doing, I would have said I was excited to graduate.

But internally, I had quietly started packing my emotional bags.

Without realizing it, I had begun distancing myself from the place long before it actually asked me to leave. I had convinced myself that I was completely ready because it felt safer than admitting how much I loved being there. It was easier to focus on how tired I was than to acknowledge how deeply this place had become part of me.

I had left before I left.

The moment those words surfaced, everything suddenly made sense.

I wasn’t trying to leave because I no longer cared.

Looking back now, I don’t think this is unique to me.

I think many of us leave before we leave. We’ve all done something like this right?

We begin criticizing the relationship before it ends. We emotionally check out of the job before handing in our resignation. We tell ourselves we’re ready for our children to grow up before we’ve actually allowed ourselves to grieve the passing of that season. We become consumed by what’s next because standing fully inside what’s ending feels almost unbearable.

It looks like detachment.

But often it’s grief arriving early.

I wasn’t detached from the school because it no longer mattered.

I was detached because it mattered so much.

Once I stopped resisting that truth, the grief finally had somewhere to go.

I realized I wasn’t simply leaving a training program. I was leaving a community that had witnessed almost every version of me over the last four years. These were people who had seen me at my strongest and my most defended, people who had celebrated my breakthroughs and challenged my blind spots, people who had held me accountable while also believing in me when I couldn’t always believe in myself.

I was also grieving something I hadn’t expected at all.

I was grieving the students that would remain.

Somewhere along the way I had become invested in their journey. I watched them wrestle with the same questions I had wrestled with years earlier. I quietly cheered for them. I learned from them. I admired them. I loved watching them grow. Suddenly I realized I wouldn’t get to witness what came next for them, and that loss caught me completely off guard.

Then there was the place itself.

The classrooms.

The forests where I had walked after difficult processes.

The dining hall conversations that somehow became just as meaningful as the lectures.

The familiar rhythm of arriving each module and knowing that, for one weekend, I would be surrounded by people who understood this strange and beautiful language of embodiment.

I wasn’t simply leaving a building.

I was leaving a season of my life.

And I would never come back to it in the same way again.

As I stayed with those feelings throughout the weekend, another insight quietly emerged. It wasn’t simply that I was afraid people would forget me. Underneath that fear was something even more difficult to admit.

I hadn’t fully learned to see myself.

That realization landed with a different kind of weight because it had nothing to do with anyone else. It would have been easier if my pain had come from being overlooked or unappreciated by the people around me. Instead, what I discovered was that I was still waiting for other people to confirm something I hadn’t yet fully accepted within myself.

I had spent years looking for evidence that I mattered, while quietly overlooking all the ways I already had.

It’s much easier to believe that other people don’t see us than it is to acknowledge the places where we refuse to see ourselves. It’s easier to think, they don’t get me, than to ask the more uncomfortable question: Where am I still withholding my own recognition? Somewhere inside me, there was still a part that believed my value needed to be reflected back by someone else before it could feel real.

That exercise showed me something I don’t think I could have learned any other way.

I had made my leaving invisible because I believed my presence had been invisible.

But it hadn’t.

Over four years, I had become part of the fabric of that community in ways I hadn’t allowed myself to recognize. My questions had mattered. My perspective had mattered. My willingness to challenge, to laugh, to cry, to stay curious, to hold space for others, and even my particular way of oscillating between confidence and vulnerability had all shaped the experience we shared together.

Not because I was the most important person in the room.

Because every person changes the field they’re part of.

That’s one of the most beautiful things about group work. We often underestimate the impact we have simply by showing up honestly. We assume people won’t notice if we’re there or if we’re gone, yet every nervous system contributes something unique to the collective experience. Our presence affects the room. Our absence affects it too. We don’t have to be the loudest voice or the wisest teacher for our existence to matter.

Perhaps that’s one of the responsibilities of becoming a practitioner.

Not believing we’re extraordinary.

Simply accepting that our presence has impact.

That realization softened something in me.

The sadness was still there, but it no longer felt frightening. It wasn’t dramatic or overwhelming. It felt clean. Honest. It felt like grief finally had permission to be what it had been trying to become all along.

Because I loved that school.

I loved the land where we gathered every few months. I loved the forests I escaped into after difficult processes. I loved the classrooms where my understanding of myself had slowly expanded. I loved the teachers who challenged me, frustrated me, believed in me, and refused to let me hide from myself. I loved the classmates who became mirrors, companions, and sometimes family. I even loved the moments that made me question why I had ever signed up in the first place.

I loved who I became there.

And I was leaving.

Both of those things were true at the same time.

Maybe that’s the thing about meaningful endings.

We expect them to arrive wrapped in one clear emotion, as though our hearts should somehow know whether to celebrate or grieve. But real endings are rarely that simple. They ask us to hold relief and sadness together. Gratitude and fear. Excitement and resistance. The part of us that is ready to move forward, and the part that wants just one more moment before everything changes.

Our minds tend to prefer certainty. They like clean endings and uncomplicated stories.

The body has a much greater capacity.

For years I had prayed to grow. I wanted to become a better therapist, a more grounded human being, someone capable of holding deeper truths with greater compassion. Somewhere along the way, I had unconsciously decided that growth would feel like confidence. I imagined arriving at graduation feeling certain, complete, and ready.

Instead, growth arrived disguised as grief.

The answer to my prayer wasn’t the certificate waiting for me at graduation.

It was the sadness that finally allowed me to understand what I had spent four years building.

It showed me where I was still defended. It revealed the places where I had been pretending not to care because caring felt too vulnerable. More importantly, it showed me that I was still asking other people to confirm a value I had not yet fully claimed for myself.

That weekend didn’t simply prepare me to end therapeutic relationships.

It prepared me to end an identity.

I just didn’t realize it yet.

That evening was graduation.

The grief hadn’t disappeared, but it had moved through me enough that I no longer felt like I was bracing against the ending. Instead of trying to outrun it, I found myself completely present. The room looked beautiful. Everyone had dressed up. There was laughter, nervous excitement, and the kind of tenderness that only seems to appear when a group of people knows they are standing together at the edge of something they will never experience again.

One by one, we were called to the front.

Jana and Angela, the directors of the school, had created such a thoughtful ceremony. Jana introduced each of us by speaking about where we had come from, sharing pieces of our story and reflecting back some of the growth she had witnessed over the years. Then we each had the opportunity to stand in front of our peers and offer our own graduation speech.

By the evening of graduation, I wasn’t trying to hold anything back anymore. I stood in front of the room and shared my words with a fullness that I don’t think would have been possible twenty-four hours earlier. There is something profoundly different about speaking after you’ve stopped resisting what you’re feeling. The words don’t become more polished.

They become more true.

After all five of us had spoken, Angela stood to close the ceremony. She shared a story about transformation and the nature of this work, I don’t remember every detail of the story she told, but I remember exactly how I felt while listening to her. I was warm. Open. Present. It felt as though I had finally stopped trying to race toward the finish line and had allowed myself to simply be there for the ending.

Then she turned toward the five of us sitting together at the front of the room.

She congratulated us, smiled, and said, “And now… we are colleagues.”

I remember looking at her with complete confusion.

My eyebrows scrunched together. My whole face probably said exactly what my mind was thinking.

What are you talking about?

Me?

No… that can’t be right.

I was in disbelief.

Some part of me simply couldn’t understand what she meant.

For years, Jana and Angela had been my teachers. Jana had been part of my life long before I ever enrolled in the training. She had been my therapist, my mentor, and one of the people who first introduced me to this work in a way that changed the direction of my life. Angela had challenged me, encouraged me, reflected things back to me that I couldn’t yet see, and held the structure of my becoming with remarkable steadiness.

These women stood in front of me.

They carried the wisdom.

They asked the questions.

They held the room.

That was how my nervous system understood the relationship.

And now Angela was telling me that somehow we stood beside one another.

It felt impossible.

Looking back, I don’t think what shocked me was the word colleague itself.

It was everything that word quietly implied.

If we were colleagues, then I was no longer only a student.

If I was no longer only a student, then there was no longer a classroom waiting for me to return to whenever I doubted myself. There was no next module that would magically make me feel ready. No final teaching that would answer every remaining question. The identity I had carried for four years had quietly reached its end, and I hadn’t realized how much safety I had found inside it.

Being a student is a beautiful place to live.

As a student, you’re expected to ask questions. You’re expected to make mistakes. You’re expected to not know. Every uncertainty has somewhere to go because there is always another teacher, another supervisor, another lesson waiting just ahead.

There is something deeply comforting about that.

Looking back, I can see that being a student wasn’t only an identity I cherished.

It was also a place I could hide.

As long as I was still learning, I could postpone the moment of fully standing behind what I already knew. I could keep refining, keep preparing, keep collecting another insight, another technique, another training. There was always one more reason to wait before fully offering my gifts.

Angela’s words gently removed that hiding place.

Not because she expected perfection from me.

Quite the opposite.

She was inviting me into a different relationship with myself.

Around that same time I found myself returning to a passage from the Pathwork that says the ego is not something we are meant to get rid of. Instead, it must become healthy and strong enough that we can eventually transcend it. That idea stayed with me because it described exactly what I had been experiencing without having the language for it.

Graduation wasn’t about finally becoming perfect.

It wasn’t even about finally becoming confident, it was about accepting that I had developed enough to begin.

There is such freedom in that distinction.

For years I imagined that one day I would arrive at a place where all my doubts disappeared, where every question had been answered and I somehow felt completely ready. Instead, graduation offered me something much more honest.

It said, You know enough to take the next step.

You will still have questions.

You will still make mistakes.

You will still need mentors, supervisors, colleagues, and people who lovingly point out the places you cannot yet see.

But you no longer get to hide behind the identity of student.

That realization felt both exhilarating and terrifying.

When I look back now, I think that’s what Angela’s words touched. They weren’t simply acknowledging that I had completed a program. They were inviting me to inhabit a version of myself that my teachers had already begun to see, even though I hadn’t quite caught up yet.

Sometimes they see a version of us that feels completely unfamiliar because we’re still looking at ourselves through an outdated identity. We continue relating to who we were, while the people around us have quietly begun responding to who we are becoming.

I think that’s why her words stayed with me long after graduation.

They weren’t asking me to become someone different.

They were asking me to slowly believe what had already become true.

That kind of transition doesn’t happen in a single ceremony.

It takes time for the body to catch up.

It takes time for an identity to settle, not because it isn’t true, but because our nervous systems rarely change as quickly as our lives do. We can intellectually understand that we’ve crossed a threshold while still reaching for the familiar comfort of who we’ve always been. The mind adapts quickly. The body asks for repetition.

That’s where I find myself now.

I’ve been working with clients for the last two years, but something has shifted. The work itself hasn’t changed all that much. I’m still sitting with people as they untangle old stories, reconnect with their bodies, and slowly discover that healing rarely comes from thinking harder. It comes from feeling more honestly. What has changed is the place I’m standing from.

I’m no longer doing this as a student learning her craft.

I’m doing it as a practitioner who has devoted years to this work and is ready to live it more fully.

That doesn’t mean I have everything figured out. It means I’ve stopped waiting for the day I will. This work has never been about perfection. It has always been about presence. It has always been about having the courage to stay in the room, to remain curious, to keep listening, and to trust that every client, every group, every conversation deepens the work a little more.

This kind of work asks for practice.

It asks for repetition.

It asks us to return to ourselves over and over again, noticing where we’ve disconnected, where we’ve become defended, where we’ve left before we’ve truly left, and choosing, each time, to come back. There isn’t a finish line where we suddenly become fully embodied practitioners. We become them by practicing. By showing up. By allowing the work to keep shaping us as we offer it to others.

That’s the season I’m stepping into.

I’m saying yes to seeing more clients. I’m saying yes to writing more consistently. I’m saying yes to the Somatic Labs, to the twelve-week therapeutic group that’s beginning to take shape, and to creating more spaces where people can experience this work instead of simply reading about it.

Because this work isn’t meant to stay in books.

It’s meant to be lived.

If this story stirred something in you, if you’re standing at the edge of an ending, stepping into a new season, or simply curious about what your own body has been trying to tell you, I’d love to explore it together. You can join me at an upcoming Somatic Lab, work with me one-on-one, or continue following along here as I keep sharing what I’m learning from the body, from my clients, and from this beautifully imperfect process of becoming.

It turns out graduation wasn’t the end of the journey.

It was the moment I stopped preparing to do the work and fully stepped into it.

🪞 A Somatic Practice For You

Think about a place, a relationship, or a season of your life that is coming to an end.

Before asking yourself what comes next, pause and ask a different question:

Have I actually let myself be here until the end?

Notice what happens in your body as you ask it.

Is there sadness you’ve been outrunning? Relief you’ve been ashamed to admit? Gratitude you’ve forgotten to express?

Stay with whatever arises for just a few breaths.

You don’t need to fix it.

You don’t need to move on.

Just stay.

Sometimes that’s where the real goodbye begins.

And sometimes, it’s where the next version of you quietly begins too.

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Sometimes it whispers through tension in your shoulders, a knot in your stomach, or a jaw that never seems to relax.

Other times it speaks more loudly through anxiety, burnout, chronic stress, relationship struggles, or reactions that seem to happen before you’ve even had time to think.

Most of us were never taught how to listen.

Instead, we learned to push through, stay busy, analyze our feelings, or convince ourselves we were “fine.”

But the body remembers.

It holds our experiences, our patterns, our protections, and our incredible capacity to heal.

My work is about helping you slow down long enough to begin listening.

Not because your body is broken.

Because it’s been trying to help you all along.

This work may be for you if…

• You often feel overwhelmed, anxious, or emotionally exhausted.

• You notice yourself repeating the same patterns in relationships.

• You find yourself reacting in ways you don’t understand.

• You’ve done personal growth or talk therapy and feel there’s another layer waiting to be explored.

• You feel disconnected from your body, your emotions, or yourself.

• You long to feel more grounded, alive, and authentic.

You don’t need to have the right words.

You don’t need previous experience with somatic work.

You only need curiosity and a willingness to explore.

What Happens in a Session?

Every session is different because every person is different.

We begin with what’s present for you.

From there, we might explore sensations in the body, breath, movement, grounding, emotional expression, beliefs, relationship patterns, or the ways your nervous system has learned to protect you.

Sometimes we sit quietly.

Sometimes we laugh.

Sometimes we cry.

Sometimes we move.

There is no script to follow and nothing you need to perform.

The pace is guided by your body, your readiness, and what feels supportive in the moment.

My Approach

My work is informed by over 15 years of experience working with the body through Fascial Stretch Therapy, Core Energetics, Reiki, movement, and nervous system-based approaches. Rather than following a single method, I integrate the practices that best support you, creating sessions that are responsive to your unique needs and the wisdom of your body.

I believe lasting change doesn’t happen by thinking differently alone.

It happens when the body begins to feel something different.

When we learn to recognize our protective patterns without judging them, we create space for something new.

More choice.

More connection.

More freedom to respond instead of react.

This isn’t about fixing yourself.

It’s about becoming more fully yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to move during the session?

Not necessarily. Some sessions include movement or body-based exercises, while others are primarily conversational. We follow what feels supportive for you.

Can we work online?

Yes. I work with clients both in person and online.

I’ve never done somatic therapy before. Is that okay?

Absolutely. Many people begin with no previous experience. I’ll guide you every step of the way.

How long are sessions?

Sessions are approximately 60 minutes.

What if I’m nervous?

That’s completely normal. Beginning something new can feel vulnerable. We’ll move at a pace that feels safe and respectful of your nervous system.

Ready to Begin?

Whether you’re feeling stuck, navigating a transition, healing old wounds, or simply wanting a deeper relationship with yourself, I’d be honoured to walk alongside you.

Let’s see if we’re a good fit, the first step is a conversation where we’ll talk about what brings you here, answer any questions you have, and explore whether this is the right time to start.

Book your complimentary consultation > CLICK HERE

I knew how to sit with myself, how to journal, how to reflect and make sense of what I was feeling. I could take a situation, turn it over in my mind, and come to a conclusion that felt grounded, even insightful. And to be clear, that kind of inner work matters. It builds awareness. It creates space. It helps you understand your patterns in a way that feels organized and manageable.

But there’s a limit to what can happen when you’re the only one in the room.

Because something very different begins to unfold when another human being is sitting in front of you, not as your therapist, not as someone guiding or interpreting, but simply as someone who is there to see you.

Last weekend, I hosted my first somatic workshop, a small group of women who came together with curiosity and a willingness to explore themselves a little more deeply.

One of the moments that stayed with me wasn’t dramatic or loud. It didn’t look like a breakthrough from the outside. It was subtle, almost ordinary, which is why it mattered.

Someone shared that they felt quite comfortable being seen. It was a belief they had about themselves, something that felt true based on their past experiences. And in many ways, it probably was true in the contexts they were used to.

But then we shifted into an exercise where another person sat in front of them and simply reflected back what they saw. No fixing, no interpreting, no advice. Just presence, attention, and honest reflection.

And something changed.

You could see it in the body before any words were spoken. The breath tightened, the abdomen held more charge, there was a subtle contraction that hadn’t been there before. The same person, holding the same belief, suddenly having a completely different experience.

That moment says more than any insight we can come to on our own.

Because it’s one thing to think you’re comfortable being seen, and it’s another thing entirely to have your body respond when someone is actually there, looking at you, reflecting you, witnessing you in real time.

There’s a difference between knowing and experiencing

This is where group work begins to reveal its depth.

In one-on-one sessions, the space is centered around you, and that is incredibly valuable. There is room to slow down, to explore your inner world, to be met with attention and care in a way that is focused and intentional. It allows for a kind of depth that is necessary for understanding yourself.

But in a group, something else enters the field.

You are no longer just relating to yourself… you are relating through others, and that changes everything.

The patterns you’ve been thinking about start to show up in real time, without you needing to search for them. The way you hold back, the way you soften, the way you try to get it right, or disappear, or manage how you’re perceived—it all begins to emerge naturally, because the environment invites it.

And it’s not forced.

It simply becomes visible.

There’s another layer to this that I don’t think can be replicated alone, no matter how self-aware you are.

At one point in the workshop, we shifted from individual reflection into more shared experiences, inviting the group to speak, to listen, to witness each other. What stood out to me was how quickly the room began to soften when people realized they weren’t the only ones feeling what they were feeling.

Someone would share something personal, something that felt vulnerable or specific to them, and you could see it land in someone else’s body across the room. A nod, a shift in posture, a quiet recognition.

Different stories, same emotional landscape.

And in those moments, there is a kind of relief that doesn’t come from insight, but from connection.

That realization of, “It’s not just me,” doesn’t just live in the mind, it moves through the body, easing something that may have been held for a long time.

I’ve been facilitating groups for close to 20 years now, through different formats, through play, women’s groups, movement and meditation and there has always been something powerful about bringing people together in a shared space.

Group dynamics have a way of surfacing things that don’t appear when we’re alone.

But bringing this into somatic work has added a layer that I didn’t fully grasp until I saw it happening in front of me.

Because now, we’re not just talking about experiences or reflecting on patterns, we’re watching how they live in the body, how they move, how they tighten or release depending on what’s happening in the room.

We’re witnessing the nervous system respond in real time.

And when that happens in a space where people feel safe enough to stay with themselves, instead of immediately pulling away or shutting down, something begins to reorganize.

Not because someone told them what to do.

But because they experienced something different.

This is not just something I have observed. It has been studied for decades.

Irvin D. Yalom, one of the leading voices in group psychotherapy, identified core therapeutic factors that consistently emerge in group settings. When you look at them, they point to something simple and powerful. We do not just heal by understanding ourselves. We heal in connection with others.

There is the moment of universality, when someone realizes they are not the only one who feels this way. There is mirroring, where parts of you are reflected back without your usual defenses. There is interpersonal learning, where you begin to see how you relate in real time, how you hold back, reach, protect, or perform (there are actually 11 therapeutic factors identified in his work, these are just a few mentioned).

What struck me most in that room was how naturally this happened. No forcing, no over-guiding. Just people being present with each other, and something deeper starting to move.

I don’t see group work as a replacement for one-on-one sessions. If anything, I see them as deeply complementary.

One offers the space to understand yourself more clearly, to build awareness and connection internally.

The other shows you how that version of yourself actually exists in relationship, with others, with attention, with being seen.

And if many of our patterns were formed in relationship, it makes sense that they would need to be experienced in relationship in order to shift.

This kind of work asks for a different level of participation.

Not just reflection, but presence.

Not just understanding, but willingness.

Willingness to stay when something in you wants to pull away, to notice what happens when the focus isn’t only on your internal world, but on how you exist within a shared space.

An Invitation

This isn’t for everyone, and it’s not meant to be.

But if something in you is tired of trying to figure everything out on your own, if you’ve done the journaling, the thinking, the processing, and you’re curious about what might happen when your body and other peoplebbecome part of that exploration, then this might be something to step into.

I’m hosting another small group Monday April 27th in Toronto.

It’s not about pushing or forcing anything to happen. It’s an introduction, an opportunity to experience what shifts when you’re not alone in the process, when there is space to be witnessed, to notice, and to explore without needing to perform or get it right.

There are a few spots left, and I’m keeping it intentionally small.

If you feel a pull toward this, trust that.

Here is the link with all of the info: CLICK HERE

🪞 A Somatic Practice for You

The next time you’re out, maybe walking down the street, at a café, in a grocery store…let this be a quiet experiment.

As you move through space and cross paths with strangers, begin to notice what happens in your body.

Not what you think about them.

Not the story.

Just the body.

Do you subtly tighten when someone walks too close?

Does your breath change when you pass by someone’s gaze?

Do you speed up, soften, brace, or pull your energy in?

Pay attention to the distance between you and others.

What happens when someone is near you versus far away?

When someone looks at you versus when no one is paying attention?

There’s nothing to change here.

You’re not trying to fix anything or make it different.

Just notice.

Because this is where your patterns live—not in isolation, but in the space between you and other people.

And the more you begin to observe that space, the more you start to understand how you actually move through the world.

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It’s become one of those phrases that sounds good but no one really knows what it means.

Has anyone ever explained how it actually works?

Actually explained in a way you can track and can see happening in real time in your own body?

I was sitting in one of my Core Energetics modules, already feeling like I understood this. I’ve worked with the body for years. I understand energy, emotion, belief. I’ve seen how thoughts affect hormones, how stress shows up physically, how the body holds experience.

None of that was new.

But the way it was laid out… was different.

It wasn’t just “everything is connected.”

It was how something becomes something else.

How a moment becomes a pattern.

How a pattern becomes a personality.

How the body quite literally organizes itself around your history.

That’s the part that stayed with me.

Because I have been doing this work for years, I can understand the psyche, the body, the patterns I have adopted for my behaviours but this was the full picture.

So let me walk you through it in a way that actually makes sense.

Instead of thinking about mind, body, and soul as three separate things trying to talk to each other, it’s more accurate to see this as one living system expressing itself at different layers.

You can think of it as moving from something subtle to something dense.

And when you look at it this way, the real question becomes much more practical.

How does something as subtle as a belief turn into tight shoulders, shallow breath, chronic tension, or even illness?

How does something you “know” in your mind end up living in your body?

There are a few ways this happens, and once you see them, it becomes very hard to unsee. Let me share with you what I learned:

The first is what we could call the biochemical bridge.

There’s a whole field for this called psychoneuroendocrinoimmunology, which is a long word for something actually quite simple: your thoughts, emotions, nervous system, hormones, and immune system are constantly talking to each other.

So when you perceive something, your brain doesn’t just sit there and observe it. The limbic system quickly scans for whether it’s safe or not, and if it registers any kind of threat, it sends signals through the hypothalamus to the pituitary, and then to the adrenal glands. Hormones like cortisol are released, your heart rate changes, your breathing shifts, your muscles begin to contract, and even your immune system adjusts.

You’re not consciously deciding any of this.

You’re experiencing the result of it.

This is your autonomic nervous system doing its job, moving between activation and regulation depending on what it believes is happening.

So if somewhere in your system there is a belief like “I’m not safe,” that doesn’t just stay as a thought. It becomes a physiological state. It shows up as shallow breathing, tension in the body, chronic stress chemistry, and a system that is always slightly on edge.

Over time, what you feel emotionally becomes what your body lives in chemically.

The psyche organizes the nervous system, the nervous system organizes the body, and then the body feeds information back up, reinforcing the original belief.

The second layer is electrical.

Because your body is not only chemical, it is also electrical.

Your cells communicate through charge. Your fascia, which is the connective tissue running through your entire body, conducts subtle currents and organizes how tension and movement are distributed. There is an energetic field that actually precedes structure and helps organize it.

This is where things start to become visible.

If a certain emotional response is activated over and over again, the body doesn’t just feel it, it starts to shape around it.

Muscles contract in the same way repeatedly. Fascia adapts. Posture shifts. Areas of the body become more rigid, more held, less available.

Energy that isn’t allowed to move freely begins to feel dense.

So if someone lives with an internal image like “I have to hold it together,” that doesn’t just exist mentally. You will often see it in the body. A rigid spine, a tight jaw, restricted breath, a certain way of standing and moving.

At that point, the pattern is no longer just psychological.

It has become structural.

The third layer is the most subtle, but in many ways the most important.

Consciousness itself.

Before there is chemistry or electrical signalling, there is intention, identification, and image.

There is the way you see yourself and the meaning you give to your experience.

There is the quiet statement running in the background like “I am not safe,” or “I have to be strong,” or “I can’t let this show.”

In this model, information begins as something very subtle, almost like a vibration, and then gradually condenses into something physical.

Which brings us back to the sequence that ties all of this together.

At the most practical level, this is what is happening all the time:

Sensation is the raw data. It’s the first signal that something is happening in the body, before you have words for it.

Body mapping is the nervous system organizing that sensation, linking it to memory, and deciding whether it’s safe or not.

Feeling is when that sensation has been given meaning, when it becomes something like fear, anger, excitement, or sadness.

And then, over time, repeated experiences of that process become identity.

Not because you decided it consciously, but because the system kept repeating the same loop.

When this sequence is allowed to move, when sensation is felt, when feeling is tolerated, and when awareness is present, the system stays flexible.

But when the feeling gets interrupted, judged, pushed away, or replaced with an image of who you think you should be, the process gets cut off.

And what doesn’t move… stays.

It fixes.

It solidifies.

It becomes part of how you experience yourself.

[I’m using spirit and consciousness interchangeably here. I know for some of you those mean different things, but within this framework they’re pointing to the same thing… the organizing intelligence behind our experience. The way we create identity is linked to consciousness in my opinion, I have had many spiritual experiences that have shown me parts of myself and my evolution so these concepts are very linked for me]

If this is making sense and you feel some encouragement to make some changes in your life, I really need you to read the next part.

This is where I see most people, myself included, getting it wrong.

We rush.

We try to understand our feelings as quickly as possible so we can move on from them.

We go straight to meaning, to insight, to explanation, to “what does this say about me,” without actually staying with what is happening in the body.

I’ve done this over and over again.

There’s a part of me that says, “I already understand this, I’ve done the work, why is this still happening?”

And underneath that is an impatience, a push to get somewhere faster than my body is ready to go.

But the body doesn’t work like that.

It doesn’t respond to pressure or timelines or how much you intellectually understand something.

It responds to whether something has actually been felt, processed, and integrated.

And that takes a different kind of approach.

Less force.

More patience.

More willingness to stay with something without immediately trying to change it.

So lately, what I’ve been practicing, and what I’m offering here, is a shift.

Instead of asking, “How do I fix this?”

I’m asking, “What is actually happening right now?”

Instead of jumping to the story, I’m trying to stay with the sensation just a little bit longer.

Instead of assuming I already know, I’m getting curious about what my body is doing in real time.

And more than anything, I’m learning that understanding one part of the system is not enough.

You can understand the mind, you can have deep emotional awareness, you can have powerful spiritual experiences, and still feel stuck in the same patterns if those parts are not actually integrated.

Because this is not about knowing more.

It’s about allowing the process to complete.

And that requires something most of us don’t naturally give ourselves.

Patience.

Support.

And a willingness to slow down enough to actually feel what’s there.

If you’ve been reading this and thinking, “this is me,” and at the same time noticing that understanding hasn’t actually changed the pattern yet… this is where the work begins.

Not alone, not just in your head, but in real time, with support.

This kind of work asks for curiosity, but it also asks for a willingness to slow down, to stay, and to meet what’s actually happening in your body instead of moving past it.

If you’re ready to start looking at this more closely, with guidance, I’m opening a few spots for one-on-one work.

I practice Core Energetics in North York and over Zoom. If this resonates, send me a message and I will share a calendar link for a free call. Big hugs.

🪞 A Somatic Practice For You

Take a moment and bring your attention into your body.

Not to change anything, just to notice.

See if you can find one area where there is some kind of sensation.

It might be subtle.

A tightness, a warmth, a pressure, a restlessness.

Instead of naming it as an emotion right away, stay with the sensation itself.

Where is it?

What does it actually feel like?

And then notice what your mind wants to do.

Does it try to explain it? Fix it? Move past it?

Gently bring your attention back to the body.

Let the sensation exist without turning it into a story about who you are.

Even for a few breaths.

That’s where this whole process begins to shift.

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After six posts, I hope you can feel that idea differently now. Not as a theory… but as something you can recognize in your own body.

We often label ourselves with many characteristics, maybe yours is avoidant, too emotional, too intense, too controlling, too nice, too rigid. Maybe you have thought of yourself as someone who shuts down, or someone who always overthinks, or someone who keeps it together so well that nobody would ever guess how much is happening underneath.

And maybe, if you are being really honest, you have also felt frustrated by yourself.

Frustrated that certain reactions keep showing up no matter how much work you have done. Frustrated that insight does not always translate into change. Frustrated that you can understand your patterns intellectually and still find yourself right back inside them when something hits a vulnerable place.

You tell yourself that next time you will speak differently. Next time you will not shut down, or overgive, or get controlling, or disappear, or hold everything in so tightly that even you cannot find yourself inside your own body.

And then something happens.

A look, a tone, a disappointment, a conflict, a moment of not feeling safe, and suddenly your body is already there before “you” are. It reacts, it organizes, it protects. It reaches for something old and familiar, not because you are failing, but because some part of your system still believes that what once kept you safe might still be necessary now.

That is what this whole series has been about.

Not personality as identity, but protection as pattern.

What We Have Really Been Looking At

Across these posts, we explored five different ways the body learns to organize itself when connection, safety, and expression do not feel simple.

We looked at the Leaving Pattern, where the system pulls up and away when being fully here feels overwhelming.

We looked at the Merging Pattern, where attention moves toward the other because connection feels more reliable than self-reference.

We looked at the Enduring Pattern, where energy gets pressed down and held in when asserting the self feels unsafe or costly.

We looked at the Aggressive Pattern, where strength rises up and pushes outward because power begins to feel like the only thing that can protect life.

And we looked at the Rigid Pattern, where the body learns to organize around correctness, composure, control, and performance when love starts to feel entangled with doing things right.

Each of these patterns looks different. Each one has its own language, its own organizing strategy, its own relational and energetic logic. But underneath them all is the same essential truth: the body was trying to help.

It was trying to preserve connection. Trying to reduce overwhelm. Trying to survive an environment it did not have the power to control.

And that matters, because the moment we really understand that these patterns are not signs of brokenness but signs of adaptation, something starts to soften. The conversation changes. We stop asking, “What is wrong with me?” and begin asking a much more compassionate, and much more useful, question:

What happened in me that made this make sense?

That question changes everything. It opens the door to curiosity where shame used to live, and in my experience, healing needs that doorway.

You Are Probably Not Just One Pattern

This feels important to say clearly as we bring the series to a close.

You are not one neat little category. You are not a diagnosis. You are not a fixed type with one tidy explanation for everything you do.

Most people will recognize themselves in more than one pattern, because life is layered and protection is layered too.

You might leave in conflict, merge in love, get aggressive when someone crosses a line, endure when you feel trapped, and become rigid when you are trying not to fail. You might recognize one pattern as your deepest home base, then notice three others standing right beside it depending on the situation, the relationship, or the kind of pressure your body is under.

That does not mean the framework is flawed. It means you are human.

Usually one or two patterns feel more central, more immediate, more familiar in the body. They come online faster. They feel more automatic. They shape your baseline way of organizing experience. But very few people live entirely inside one pattern all the time.

And honestly, this is why I think this work matters so much. Because the goal is not to box yourself in with a smarter label. The goal is to recognize yourself more clearly, more quickly, and with a little more grace.

Not so you can say, “Ah yes, this is who I am and now I know my type.”

But so you can say, “Oh… here I am again. Here is the pattern. Here is the place my body goes when something feels hard.”

That moment of recognition is not small.

That is where choice begins.

The Real Work Is Not Labeling, It Is Noticing

If there is one thing I hope lives on after this series, it is this: awareness changes everything.

Not awareness as theory, and not the kind that stays up in the head sounding smart. I mean awareness in the body. Awareness you can actually feel.

The moment you notice your jaw clench before you argue.

The moment you feel yourself floating away in the middle of a hard conversation.

The moment you realize you are tracking someone else’s emotional state instead of noticing your own.

The moment you feel the pressure in your chest to get it right, stay composed, be good.

The moment you recognize that the strength rising in you is not only power, but protection.

These moments matter because once you can feel the pattern, you are no longer entirely inside it. There is suddenly a little more room. A little more breath. A little more adult self available.

Maybe not enough to do everything differently all at once, but enough to pause. Enough to become curious. Enough to stop assuming that the first reaction is the only option.

And sometimes that pause, that tiny space between activation and action, is the beginning of a completely different way of living.

Not because it is dramatic, but because it is honest.

Compassion Has To Be Part of the Healing

I do not think shame makes the body relax. I do not think we heal by turning our insight into another weapon and using it against ourselves.

These patterns soften through understanding, through repetition, through support, through building enough safety in the nervous system that the old strategy no longer has to run the whole show.

And yes, every one of these patterns has a cost. That is part of why we are doing this work at all. But every pattern also carries intelligence, and often beautiful gifts.

The Leaving Pattern brings sensitivity, imagination, subtle perception, spiritual attunement.

The Merging Pattern brings warmth, contact, empathy, relational depth, and a real capacity to nourish.

The Enduring Pattern brings patience, steadiness, dignity, and the ability to hold space without collapsing.

The Aggressive Pattern brings vitality, focus, leadership, movement, courage, and the power to act.

The Rigid Pattern brings structure, discipline, refinement, beauty, and the ability to create order out of complexity.

The goal is not to get rid of these gifts. The goal is not to erase the parts of you that learned how to survive. The goal is to loosen the protection around them so they can breathe.

So that sensitivity does not always become disappearance and love does not become self-abandonment.

So that steadiness does not become stagnation and power does not become armour.

So that discipline does not become performance.

This is the work of integration, and it is very different from self-improvement.

It is not about becoming someone better, about becoming more fully yourself.

What Integration Actually Looks Like

I think sometimes people imagine healing as some big, cinematic transformation, but most of the time integration looks much quieter than that.

It looks like catching yourself sooner, like staying in the room a little longer before you leave.

It looks like saying, “I need a second,” instead of shutting down completely and noticing when you are overgiving and asking yourself what you actually need before reaching for the other person again.

It looks like feeling anger rise in your body without needing to become cruel, controlling, or righteous and softening the part of you that believes everything has to be done correctly before it can be offered at all.

It looks like trusting that your feelings, your impulses, your longings are not automatically dangerous just because they were once difficult to hold.

It looks like living from more than defense.

And no, this is not usually a one-time insight. It is not one therapy session, one ceremony, one good cry, one brilliant journal entry and suddenly you are free. It is practice. It is relationship. It is remembering and forgetting and remembering again. It is breath, sensation, support, truth-telling, repair, grief, and starting over more than once.

It is slow.

It is messy.

It is deeply human.

And I think it is worth everything.

Why I Wanted To Write This Series

I wanted to write this series because I know what it is like to have insight and still feel hijacked.

I know what it is like to understand your wounds conceptually, maybe even beautifully, and still watch your body do something faster than your wiser self can interrupt. I know what it is like to want more choice than you actually have in the moment. I know what it is like to say, “This is not how I want to be,” and still feel the old strategy rise up like it has its own authority.

And I also know the relief of realizing that what I once thought was simply my personality was, in many places, protection.

That realization did not magically erase the patterns. It did not make me instantly more evolved or less reactive. But it gave me language, and language matters. It gave me a new kind of compassion. It helped me track what my body was doing and slowly begin to relate to it differently.

That is what I hoped this series could offer you too.

Not a perfect explanation or polished spiritual answer.

Just a clearer, kinder, more embodied way of seeing yourself.

If You Recognized Yourself Here

Take your time with this.

You do not need to figure yourself out all at once. You do not need to land on one pattern and make it your final answer. You do not need to rush into changing because now you know more.

Start by noticing: what happens in your body under pressure? What happens in closeness and in conflict?

Notice what happens when you feel unseen, corrected, controlled, disappointed, exposed, or afraid.

What tightens? what leaves? What part of you fights? endures, reaches or performs?

Just notice, let that be enough for now.

The body usually tells the truth before the mind catches up, and if you listen gently, without trying to fix yourself too quickly, it will begin to show you the way back.

Thank you for reading along, I hope you found some nuggets of information to support you out on your journey.

If you want something to help you stay connected to this process, I’ve created a downloadable workbook to accompany the entire series. It is simple, spacious, and meant to be something you return to, not something you rush through.

You can download the workbook here.

From Protection To Choice

9.54MB ∙ PDF file

Download

This same PDF has been the companion for the whole character pattern series. You can return to any section, revisit what resonated, and notice what lands differently now that you have moved through all five patterns.

Download

Think of it as a companion. Something to help you track what you notice, what resonates, and what begins to shift as you learn more about yourself and the people around you.

If this resonated, I’d love to hear what you recognized in yourself. Leave a comment, share this with someone who feels like they are invincible, or subscribe so you don’t miss the last pattern in the series.

🪞 A Somatic Practice For You

Meeting Yourself Without the Label

Stand, if that feels accessible.

Let your feet be about hip-width apart and take a moment to notice the contact between your body and the ground beneath you. Do not try to improve your posture. Do not try to become more relaxed. Just notice how you are already standing.

Where does your weight naturally go?

Into your heels?

Into the front of your feet?

Do you lean forward a little, as if life is always asking something from you?

Do you pull back?

Do you feel more up than down?

More held or more braced?

Let your knees soften slightly.

Take one slow breath in through your nose… and then let the exhale travel all the way down through your chest, belly, pelvis, legs, and into your feet.

Again.

A slow inhale.

And a longer exhale.

Now, without rushing to explain anything, gently ask yourself:

What happens in my body when I stop trying to define myself?

Pause there.

Notice sensation before meaning.

Tightness.

Warmth.

Pressure.

Softness.

Numbness.

Relief.

Maybe nothing obvious at all.

Let whatever is there be there.

Now place one hand on your chest and one hand on your lower belly. Not because this fixes anything, but because contact matters. Sometimes the body needs something very simple and very direct.

Quietly say to yourself:

My body learned to protect me.

I am learning to listen now.

I do not have to become someone else to heal.

Take another breath.

Feel your feet.

Feel your hands.

Feel the simple fact that you are here.

This is where the work begins again and again.

Not in analysis alone.

Not in labeling.

In contact.

Series: From Protection to Choice

This series explores the five personality patterns described in somatic psychology and Core Energetics. Each post looks at how the body learns to survive early experiences and how those strategies continue shaping our relationships, reactions, and sense of self.

As you read, you may recognize pieces of yourself in more than one pattern. That’s normal. These patterns are not boxes to put yourself in or labels to carry around. They are simply ways the body once learned to protect life.

Understanding them gives us language for reactions that often feel automatic and helps us begin bringing awareness, compassion, and choice back into moments that used to run on survival.

The Posts in This Series

1. Introduction: How the Body Learned to Protect You
An introduction to personality patterns and how the body develops survival strategies that later begin to feel like identity.

2. The Leaving Pattern: When the Body Decides It’s Easier to Leave
How the nervous system escapes overwhelm by disconnecting from the body and the physical world.

3. The Merging Pattern: When Connection Becomes Survival
How the body learns to stay oriented toward others for safety, sometimes losing contact with its own needs.

4. The Enduring Pattern: When Strength Becomes Resistance
How the body protects itself by holding in and containing emotion and will rather than expressing it.

5. The Aggressive Pattern: When Power Becomes Protection
How the body organizes around strength, control, and self-reliance when trust in others feels unsafe.

6. The Rigid Pattern: When Performance Replaces Connection
How the body learns to rely on control, correctness, and composure when love and approval feel conditional.

7. When Protection Feels Like Personality (Current Post)
A final reflection on how these survival patterns shape our lives and how awareness begins to restore choice.

If you’re new to the series, you can start at the beginning and move through each post in order. If you’ve been reading along, you might return to earlier pieces and notice them differently now.

Often the body understands something long before the mind catches up.

And sometimes the simple act of recognizing a pattern is the first step toward integrating it.

Sources and influences

This writing is influenced by Core Energetics theory, somatic psychology, and the book The Five Personality Patterns by Stephen Kessler, along with embodied training and clinical observation. Rather than quoting directly, I’ve integrated these ideas through lived experience and application so the work can feel human and accessible.

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They are composed, organized, responsible, and usually the one others rely on when things need to be done properly. They show up on time, follow through, they care about details. They want things to be done correctly, and more often than not, they succeed.

From the outside, this can look like confidence, discipline, or maturity.

But if you slow down and pay attention to the body beneath the performance, something else often reveals itself. The breath tends to sit a little higher in the chest, the muscles carry a quiet tension that never fully releases. Energy moves through the body, but carefully, almost as if it is being monitored and directed instead of allowed to flow freely.

Not stopped.

Just managed.

This is often how the rigid pattern lives in the body. It rarely appears dramatic or chaotic. Instead, it shows up as control, as a system that learned very early that safety comes from staying composed and keeping things organized.

(This pattern is also the fifth and final character pattern described in this methodology. Throughout this series we have explored how the body organizes itself around survival when early experiences feel overwhelming or unsafe. Each pattern reflects a different strategy the nervous system develops in order to protect connection, maintain safety, and make sense of the world.)

Like all the survival patterns we explore in Core Energetics, the rigid pattern is not a personality flaw and it is certainly not a diagnosis. It is a holding pattern in the body that formed when a child discovered that love, safety, or approval were closely tied to doing things the right way.

Over time the child learns something subtle but powerful. Their inner impulses cannot always be trusted.

A feeling arises. A desire appears. An impulse begins to move through the body.

But before that impulse has the chance to fully express itself, something checks it. The mind scans quickly, asking a quiet but constant question.

Is this correct?

Is this appropriate?

Is this going to make me look foolish or wrong?

If the answer feels uncertain, the body tightens. The breath shortens. Muscles contract just enough to contain whatever was about to move.

Slowly, a habit forms.

Instead of referencing the body for guidance, attention shifts outward toward rules, expectations, and standards. The person becomes highly skilled at sensing what is appropriate, what is expected, and what will be rewarded.

The guiding question is no longer “What do I feel?” or “What do I want?” but something slightly different.

What is the right thing to do here?

Referencing the Rules

Many of the survival patterns organize themselves around relationships.

The leaving pattern escapes upward and away from the body when connection feels overwhelming. The merging pattern scans others in order to feel safe and anchored. The aggressive pattern pushes outward and attempts to control the environment.

The rigid pattern develops another strategy.

It references the rules.

Instead of scanning the body for inner guidance or looking to others for emotional cues, the attention habitually moves toward evaluating what is correct. Life becomes a process of sorting experience through a filter of right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, acceptable and unacceptable.

This way of orienting creates a strong sense of order and stability, but it also creates a very demanding internal environment.

There is often a powerful inner critic operating in the background, constantly checking thoughts, feelings, and actions against an internal standard of perfection. Its job is to notice mistakes, correct them quickly, and restore order whenever something falls outside the rules.

From the outside, this can look impressive.

From the inside, it can feel exhausting.

Because the body rarely gets the message that it is allowed to relax.

The Gifts of This Pattern

It is important to say clearly that this pattern carries real strengths.

This ability makes them excellent problem solvers. They often thrive in fields that require precision and clarity such as design, architecture, music, writing, engineering, science, or leadership roles where order must be created from complexity.

They also tend to carry a strong sense of responsibility. They keep commitments. They respect boundaries. They follow through when others might give up.

At their healthiest, the gifts of this pattern bring beauty and excellence into the world. They love form, structure, and refinement, and they can shape those elements into something meaningful.

But the same qualities that create excellence can also become restrictive if the body never learns how to soften.

The Cost of Living This Way

When correctness becomes the organizing principle of life, something essential begins to narrow.

Life becomes a series of evaluations. Every action is measured. Every feeling is quietly checked against an internal rulebook that asks whether it is appropriate or not.

Spontaneity becomes risky. Playfulness can feel childish. Pleasure may appear unproductive or indulgent.

The body slowly learns to contain impulses before they reach the surface.

A laugh that might have erupted becomes a polite smile. A wave of anger gets converted into controlled reasoning. A spark of desire gets quietly redirected into achievement or productivity.

Over time, the person may become extremely good at performing themselves.

They know how to present competence. They know how to maintain composure. They know how to appear successful.

But beneath the performance there can be a subtle dissatisfaction.

Because admiration for performance does not always reach the deeper layers of the self.

The love lands on what the person does rather than who they are.

And the body knows the difference.

The Split Between the Heart and the Pelvis

In Core Energetics, the rigid pattern is often connected to a deeper energetic split in the body.

The separation between the heart and the pelvis.

In young children these two centers are naturally connected. Love, curiosity, excitement, and sexual vitality move through the same system. There is no separation between affection and aliveness.

But when a child’s emerging sexuality is met with shame, rejection, humiliation, or confusion, the body receives a painful message.

Certain impulses are dangerous.

Expressing them risks losing love.

The child quickly learns that bringing sexual energy toward someone they love may cause that person to withdraw, reject them, or respond in a way that feels overwhelming or confusing.

To protect the relationship, the body adapts.

The heart stays open, but the sexual energy becomes contained.

Over time this creates a split.

In adulthood this can appear in subtle but powerful ways. Someone may experience deep emotional love but struggle to feel sexual vitality in the same relationship. Or they may feel strong sexual attraction that feels disconnected from genuine intimacy.

The body learned long ago that bringing those energies together was risky.

So it keeps them separate.

The Life Task of the Rigid Pattern

Healing this pattern is not about abandoning structure or discipline. Those qualities are valuable and often deeply integrated into the person’s strengths.

The life task is something more delicate.

Learning to reference the body again.

Instead of automatically scanning for the correct response, the person slowly begins to listen inward. They allow themselves to feel sensations and impulses without immediately correcting them.

They begin to trust that their own feelings contain useful information.

They learn that pleasure and play are not signs of weakness but expressions of vitality.

They allow the heart and the pelvis to reconnect so that love and sexuality can exist in the same body.

This process requires patience because the body has spent years organizing itself around control.

But as sensation begins to flow again, something unexpected happens.

The person discovers that their impulses are not chaotic or dangerous.

They are alive.

Integration

The rigid pattern once helped the body survive.

It created safety through structure. It protected the heart from humiliation and the body from impulses that once felt dangerous.

There is intelligence in that adaptation.

But life becomes richer when the structure softens and the body learns that control is no longer the only path to safety.

When discipline is allowed to meet pleasure and when order is balanced with spontaneity.

When love and desire are allowed to belong to the same heart.

This is not something that happens through thinking.

It happens through the body.

Through breath. Through sensation. Through slowly discovering that it is possible to stay present without tightening against yourself.

If you want something to help you stay connected to this process, I’ve created a downloadable workbook to accompany this series. It’s simple, spacious, and meant to be something you can return to, not something you rush through

You can download the workbook here.

From Protection To Choice

9.54MB ∙ PDF file

Download

This same PDF will be used for the entire character pattern series. After reading this post, you can work with the section on the Merginging Pattern, then set it aside. As new posts are released in the coming weeks, you’ll return to the same workbook and continue building your understanding, one pattern at a time.

Download

Think of it as a companion. Something to help you track what you notice, what resonates, and what begins to shift as you learn more about yourself and the people around you.

If this resonated, I’d love to hear what you recognized in yourself. Leave a comment, share this with someone who feels like they are invincible, or subscribe so you don’t miss the last pattern in the series.

🪞 A Somatic Practice For You

Stand with your feet about hip width apart and let your weight drop into the floor beneath you.

Take a moment to notice your posture. Many people who carry this pattern hold themselves very upright and correct, almost as if the body is quietly trying to maintain perfect form.

Take a slow breath in through your nose and allow the breath to travel down into your belly. As you exhale, let your knees soften slightly and feel gravity supporting you.

Now soften your eyes.

Instead of focusing sharply on individual objects in front of you, allow your gaze to widen so that you are taking in the whole space around you. Let the scene come to you rather than searching for details.

Notice what happens in your body as your attention expands.

Stay here for a few breaths.

Nothing to improve.

Nothing to correct.

Just a body standing on the earth and slowly remembering that it is safe to land.

Series: From Protection to Choice

This series explores the five personality patterns described in somatic psychology and Core Energetics. Each post looks at how the body learns to survive early experiences and how those strategies continue shaping our relationships, reactions, and sense of self.

As you read, you may recognize pieces of yourself in more than one pattern. That’s normal. These patterns are not boxes to put yourself in or labels to carry around. They are simply ways the body once learned to protect life.

Understanding them gives us language for reactions that often feel automatic and helps us begin bringing awareness, compassion, and choice back into moments that used to run on survival.

The Posts in This Series

1. Introduction: How the Body Learned to Protect You
An introduction to personality patterns and how the body develops survival strategies that later begin to feel like identity.

2. The Leaving Pattern: When the Body Decides It’s Easier to Leave
How the nervous system escapes overwhelm by disconnecting from the body and the physical world.

3. The Merging Pattern: When Connection Becomes Survival
How the body learns to stay oriented toward others for safety, sometimes losing contact with its own needs.

4. The Enduring Pattern: When Strength Becomes Resistance
How the body protects itself by holding in and containing emotion and will rather than expressing it.

5. The Aggressive Pattern: When Power Becomes Protection
How the body organizes around strength, control, and self-reliance when trust in others feels unsafe.

6. The Rigid Pattern: When Performance Replaces Connection (Current Post)
How the body learns to rely on control, correctness, and composure when love and approval feel conditional.

7. When Protection Feels Like Personality
A final reflection on how these survival patterns shape our lives and how awareness begins to restore choice.

If you’re new to the series, this is the first one. If you’ve been reading along, you might return to earlier pieces and notice them differently now.

Often the body understands something long before the mind catches up.

And sometimes the simple act of recognizing a pattern is the first step toward integrating it.

Sources and influences

This writing is influenced by Core Energetics theory, somatic psychology, and the book The Five Personality Patterns by Stephen Kessler, along with embodied training and clinical observation. Rather than quoting directly, I’ve integrated these ideas through lived experience and application so the work can feel human and accessible.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Big, tall and very strong.

There was a lot of tension in the group, an escalation that people were trying to smooth over, but I could feel it building in my body.

Before I even consciously decided to move, I was standing in front of him.

Shoulders wide. Legs braced. Eyes locked.

I remember thinking, with absolute conviction, I can take him. I’m the only one who will.

No one else was stepping in. So it had to be me.

And then, in the smallest split second, there was another voice, it was softer and quieter, it asked, Are you sure? I think you’re a little scared.

That voice would not have been audible to me seven years ago. It would have been crushed immediately under the force of will, buried under the righteousness of protection and the adrenaline of power.

But this time I heard it.

The remarkable thing is that this happened inside a safe therapy process group. Nothing “dangerous” was actually happening. And yet my body had already mobilized for survival.

That was the moment I understood that I had more awareness around it and I had the choice to step out of my defense.

I connected my legs to the ground, softened my shoulders and immediately I saw him differently, he felt it too, with unspoken words our hearts opened.

Seven years ago I would have remained closed, guarded, ready to fight but I have felt this way too much, with lots of support I have tracked how this was the way my little girl protected herself, but I have different options now.

This is the defense pattern that I have identified with the most, the Aggressive Pattern.

What Is the Aggressive Pattern?

Like all the survival patterns we have explored in this series, the Aggressive Pattern is not a personality flaw. It is a holding pattern in the body that develops when a child experiences distress so intense that they feel fundamentally alone in it.

In the Leaving Pattern, the energy moves away, up and out of the body, fighting to survive.

In the Merging Pattern, the energy reaches outward, attaching to someone else for safety.

In the Enduring Pattern, the energy holds in, bracing, containing, tolerating.

The Aggressive Pattern does something different.

It holds up.

When no one comes to help, when love does not protect, when authority either collapses or crushes, the child turns inward and makes a decision that may never be spoken out loud: I will handle this myself.

Instead of fleeing, they fight.

Instead of reaching, they harden.

Instead of enduring, they rise.

They gather their will, inflate their strength, split off their fear, and survive by sheer force of internal power. Over time, this becomes the organizing principle of the psyche. Love feels unreliable. Dependence feels dangerous. Only strength feels safe.

Can you recognize someone like this in your life?

Or maybe you are quietly thinking, oh… that might be me.

What It Feels Like Inside

The Aggressive Pattern is belly-centered, which means there is real power here. Real charge. Real vitality.

But when the pattern is running unconsciously, that energy moves up and out.

Shoulders widen. The chest lifts. The jaw sets. The eyes sharpen. Time begins to feel urgent, like something must be done now. There is very little tolerance for hesitation.

You might not even look angry. You might look decisive and commanding, even impressive.

Inside, however, there is often a constant scan happening:

Can I trust you?

Are you strong enough?

If you’re not, I will take over.

And underneath that, buried much deeper than most people realize, is frozen terror. A very young part that once believed, I am alone and I will not survive unless I become invincible.

That is not dramatic storytelling. That is how the nervous system encodes overwhelming experience when there is no loving force large enough to contain it.

When I read that the wound of this pattern is a wound to trust, trust that someone bigger and stronger can hold you safely, it felt like a relief. It explained why I often feel compelled to test authority while secretly craving it. Why I want someone strong enough to contain me, yet immediately challenge anyone who tries.

Have you ever done that? Wanted protection… and then rejected it the moment it appeared?

The Gifts: Masters of Energy

We have to speak clearly about the gifts, because they are real and they are powerful.

Aggressive pattern people are masters of energy. They know how to gather charge, focus it, channel it, and make things happen. They can hold a high level of intensity without collapsing. They are often entrepreneurial, bold, creative, and decisive. They see opportunities and take them. They show up for life.

There is a warrior archetype here, courageous, resourceful, able to fight for what they believe in. They have strong will, strong focus, and often a remarkable ability to detect truth. When you grow up scanning for deception, you develop an exquisite sensitivity to what feels real and what does not.

There is also vitality, athleticism, sexuality, high stimulation, a love of challenge. These are often the people who push limits, explore new territories, and generate movement in stagnant systems.

I recognize all of this in myself.

When someone in a room feels unsafe, I move.

When something is unjust, I feel the charge immediately.

When no one steps up, I do.

It feels alive. It feels powerful. It even feels good.

So why change it?

Because when the pattern runs without awareness, power replaces connection.

And I want connection.

Holding Up: The Body Strategy

Each survival pattern has a physical stance.

The Leaving Pattern floats away.

The Merging Pattern leans into someone else.

The Enduring Pattern contracts inward.

The Aggressive Pattern lifts.

Energy is pulled upward and pushed forward, inflating the self and, sometimes unconsciously, deflating others. It can look like confidence, but it is often a strategy to appear bigger and more intimidating so that no one dares threaten you.

In that group moment, my shoulders felt enormous, my legs were braced like I was preparing for impact, and my entire system was revving to fight. I believed I was protecting someone, and in many ways I was.

If I am strong enough, no one can hurt me.

If I dominate first, I cannot be dominated.

If I need nothing, I cannot be abandoned.

The cost of holding up is that the ground disappears. You may look powerful, but you are rarely relaxed. You are rarely soft. And you are almost never truly supported.

How the Pattern Recreates the Wound

This is the painful irony.

When you pretend you have no needs, people stop looking for them.

When you dominate and control, people pull away.

When you challenge authority relentlessly, people either collapse or deceive you.

And then the old belief is confirmed.

See? No one stays.

See? No one can hold me.

The aggressive strategy can unintentionally recreate abandonment and betrayal over and over again, not because the person is cruel, but because the pattern leaves very little room for mutual dependence.

And when the need finally breaks through, when it becomes too big to handle alone, it often feels enormous, overwhelming, almost desperate. Others may not know how to meet it, because they have never been allowed to practice.

Does that sound familiar?

Healing the Aggressive Pattern

Healing does not mean becoming less powerful.

It means integrating love and power.

The developmental need that was missed is this: to feel held, contained, and protected by something that is both loving and stronger than you are. Something that does not collapse under your charge. Something that does not crush you either.

Over time, this might be experienced through therapy, community, spiritual practice, or even through learning to feel the support of the earth itself. The deeper shift is internal: learning to feel strength and vulnerability at the same time.

To say, I am powerful… and I need help.

To let grief, fear, shame, and hurt surface beneath anger.

To recognize that aggression is often fuelled by emotions that were never allowed to move.

For me, this work has been about hearing that quieter voice and not immediately overriding it. About admitting, even to myself, that I am not invincible. That sometimes I step forward not only to protect others, but to protect the frightened part of me that still believes she is alone.

This is ongoing. I am working on it.

If you want something to help you stay connected to this process, I’ve created a downloadable workbook to accompany this series. It’s simple, spacious, and meant to be something you can return to, not something you rush through

You can download the workbook here.

From Protection To Choice

9.54MB ∙ PDF file

Download

This same PDF will be used for the entire character pattern series. After reading this post, you can work with the section on the Merginging Pattern, then set it aside. As new posts are released in the coming weeks, you’ll return to the same workbook and continue building your understanding, one pattern at a time.

Download

Think of it as a companion. Something to help you track what you notice, what resonates, and what begins to shift as you learn more about yourself and the people around you.

If this resonated, I’d love to hear what you recognized in yourself. Leave a comment, share this with someone who feels like they are invincible, or subscribe so you don’t miss the last pattern in the series.

🪞 A Somatic Practice For You

Stand with your feet about hip width apart. Before you change anything, just notice how you are already standing. Do your shoulders subtly widen or lift when you imagine confrontation? Does your chest rise? Do your eyes sharpen? Does your body lean slightly forward as if preparing to move?

Let your knees soften, not dramatically, just enough to unlock them. Feel the actual weight of your body begin to drop into your legs. Notice that gravity is already doing most of the work. You do not have to hold yourself up quite so much.

Bring your attention to your feet. Feel the contact with the floor. If you tend to push your energy up and forward, as if projecting power into the room, experiment with letting that energy travel down instead. Imagine it draining from your shoulders, through your belly, into your thighs, calves, and soles of your feet.

Let the ground be something real. Not symbolic. Not spiritual. Just solid.

Take a slow inhale and then allow the exhale to fall all the way down into your belly and legs. As you exhale, feel your weight increase slightly, as if you are landing more fully inside your own body.

You might say quietly to yourself:

I can be strong and supported.

I do not have to do this alone.

Pause there for a few breaths. Notice what changes. Notice what resists. Notice if there is relief in not having to hold everything up.

Staying is a physical act. Let your body practice it.

Series: From Protection to Choice

This series explores the five personality patterns described in somatic psychology and Core Energetics. Each post looks at how the body learns to survive early experiences and how those strategies continue shaping our relationships, reactions, and sense of self.

As you read, you may recognize pieces of yourself in more than one pattern. That’s normal. These patterns are not boxes to put yourself in or labels to carry around. They are simply ways the body once learned to protect life.

Understanding them gives us language for reactions that often feel automatic and helps us begin bringing awareness, compassion, and choice back into moments that used to run on survival.

The Posts in This Series

1. Introduction: How the Body Learned to Protect You
An introduction to personality patterns and how the body develops survival strategies that later begin to feel like identity.

2. The Leaving Pattern: When the Body Decides It’s Easier to Leave
How the nervous system escapes overwhelm by disconnecting from the body and the physical world.

3. The Merging Pattern: When Connection Becomes Survival
How the body learns to stay oriented toward others for safety, sometimes losing contact with its own needs.

4. The Enduring Pattern: When Strength Becomes Resistance
How the body protects itself by holding in and containing emotion and will rather than expressing it.

5. The Aggressive Pattern: When Power Becomes Protection (Current Post)
How the body organizes around strength, control, and self-reliance when trust in others feels unsafe.

6. The Rigid Pattern: When Performance Replaces Connection
How the body learns to rely on control, correctness, and composure when love and approval feel conditional.

7. When Protection Feels Like Personality
A final reflection on how these survival patterns shape our lives and how awareness begins to restore choice.

If you’re new to the series, this is the first one. If you’ve been reading along, you might return to earlier pieces and notice them differently now.

Often the body understands something long before the mind catches up.

And sometimes the simple act of recognizing a pattern is the first step toward integrating it.

Sources and influences

This writing is influenced by Core Energetics theory, somatic psychology, and the book The Five Personality Patterns by Stephen Kessler, along with embodied training and clinical observation. Rather than quoting directly, I’ve integrated these ideas through lived experience and application so the work can feel human and accessible.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

As the seasons change, the wind hits it, storms pass over but the mountain does not react.

It does not chase the sun or argue with the rain, nor does not bend when the weather turns harsh.

It stays.

People build around mountains, they orient by them and trust that they will still be there tomorrow.

That mountain had room to grow, to expand, to rise into its own shape. Its stillness came from fullness. From having space to become what it already was.

And then imagine something different.

Imagine that the mountain did not have space to grow, everything it built was under pressure. That its edges were pushed in, its movement restricted, its expansion limited.

What if it had not risen freely, following its own internal pressure and rhythm, but had been shaped by a force outside itself?

Would it still feel vast and powerful? Would it still rise unapologetically into the sky?

Or would its solidity carry a different energy?

Not expansion, but containment.

Not fullness, but compression.

If shaping itself once brought correction, and asserting its form once brought force, then what we now call strength might have developed as resistance.

Some people carry this mountain quality. They seem steady, grounded, unshakeable. But sometimes that steadiness formed because growing outward, claiming space, or expressing will was not welcomed.

In Core Energetics, this way of surviving has a name.

The Enduring Pattern.

What Is the Enduring Pattern?

Like all survival patterns, the Enduring Pattern is a holding pattern in the body.

When I say holding, I mean something literal. The muscles organize themselves in a way that reduces movement. The breath becomes more contained. The body settles downward, not in relaxation, but in compression. Energy that might otherwise move outward through expression or upward through inspiration is redirected down into the legs and pelvis, as if the system is trying to root itself into the ground and disappear at the same time.

If the Leaving Pattern sends energy up and away from the body, and the Merging Pattern sends energy outward toward the other person, this pattern sends energy down.

Down into gravity and into stillness.

This is how the system survives.

By stopping internal movement and action, the body becomes able to tolerate almost anything. It braces instead of reacting. It tightens instead of expressing. It resists instead of expanding.

Outwardly, this can look like compliance. The person may appear agreeable, calm, and cooperative, someone who seems grounded and solid in their presence. They do not overreact or erupt under pressure; instead, they come across as steady, contained, and reliable, the kind of person who can tolerate intensity without visibly shifting.

But inwardly, there is refusal.

There is energy in the system, but it feels compressed. There is will, but it does not move easily. Stephen Kessler describes it as driving with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake; the impulse to move forward is present, but something equally strong presses down and prevents it.

The result is not collapse.

It is endurance.

And over time, endurance becomes the primary way the body knows how to survive.

What It Feels Like Inside

When this pattern is active, the body often feels heavy.

Not sleepy or collapsed but heavy in a dense, grounded way. Movement can feel effortful. Initiating something, even something you want, may feel like pushing through resistance that isn’t entirely visible but is very real in the body.

There can be a sense of weight in the lower half of the body, the legs planted, the pelvis contained, the breath not fully dropping. Energy doesn’t disappear; it settles downward and stays there. Over time, that settling becomes holding.

Expressing desire may feel risky, not because the mind thinks it is wrong, but because the body registers exposure. Taking up space can create subtle tension. Moving forward can feel like stepping into something uncertain.

Under pressure, the system doesn’t flare up. It compresses. Anger, especially, tends to get packed down rather than expressed. It doesn’t vanish. It becomes dense, layered, sediment under stone.

Have you ever met someone who feels impenetrable? Or maybe you’ve felt that way yourself, steady on the outside, but inside there’s pressure that never quite moves.

Outwardly there may be calm but inwardly there is resistance.

The mountain does not erupt.

It holds.

And when holding becomes the primary way of surviving, it can begin to feel like identity.

Where It Begins

This pattern often takes root during the stage of early autonomy, around the age when a child begins to discover that they are separate.

Around two years old, something powerful emerges in the body.

No.

Not as rebellion, but as differentiation. As the beginning of self. The child wants to try, to push away, to say “I do it,” to feel their own will moving through their small body. This stage is not defiance for its own sake; it is the developmental task of becoming.

But when the environment is intrusive, overly controlling, shaming, or organized around the parent’s unmet needs, that emerging will is not experienced as welcome. It is experienced as threat. Instead of adapting to the child’s rhythm, the child is required to adapt to the parent’s. Instead of being recognized as a separate being, they are treated as an extension, something to manage, correct, shape.

Expression is interrupted. Space is entered without permission. Love may become conditional on compliance, sometimes subtly through guilt and shame, sometimes more overtly through force.

For a small nervous system, this creates an impossible bind. To keep connection, the child must soften their will. To keep their will, they risk losing connection. And because connection is survival, the body makes a choice.

If asserting myself brings intrusion, I will not assert.

If moving outward brings force, I will hold.

The solution is not dramatic. It is quiet and profound. The child begins to negate parts of themselves, to pull energy inward and downward, to resist from the inside while appearing cooperative on the outside.

What later looks like stubbornness or immovability often began as a deeply intelligent response to pressure. Not weakness. Not deficiency. Intelligence under constraint.

The Gifts of The Enduring Pattern

When this pattern lives in its gifts, it is extraordinary, and it deserves to be named as such.

People organized this way often have a natural sense of boundary; they know where they begin and where others end without having to make a show of it. They do not intrude, they do not dominate, and they rarely take up more space than is theirs. There is a grounded strength in them, a quiet stamina that does not need applause. Like a mountain that has actually had room to grow, their steadiness comes from solidity rather than defense.

They can sit in intensity without escalating it. When others are reactive, they often remain patient, rooted, and clear. In families, offices, and communities, they are frequently the stabilizing force, the one who does not panic, the one who can carry weight without collapsing. There is dignity here. There is diplomacy. There is often an intuitive connection to the earth, to practicality, to what is real and enduring.

At their best, they know who they are. They fill their own space with their own energy without pushing against anyone else. The strength is not manufactured; it is embodied.

The Cost

The cost is that all of that holding, when it becomes rigid, eventually turns inward.

Resistance becomes automatic. What once protected the self from intrusion can begin to block the self from movement. “You can’t make me” slowly morphs into “even I can’t make me.” Initiative stalls. Desire collapses before it fully forms. You see something you want and instead of reaching, the system tightens: you have it, I want it, I can’t get it.

Self-sabotage is not dramatic here; it is quiet and efficient. Success can feel dangerous because visibility once meant correction or invasion. Better to stay under the radar. Better to endure than to risk exposure.

Emotions become dampened, especially anger. Many people organized this way grew up seeing anger expressed as domination, humiliation, or abuse, so the body concludes that if anger is allowed up and out, it will destroy everything. So it is pressed down instead. Contained. Compacted.

But endurance without movement eventually becomes stagnation. The system holds, and holds, and holds, until holding feels like identity.

If you read this and recognize yourself, or someone you love who feels impenetrable, slow to move, hard to reach when it comes to their own desire, there is nothing wrong here. There is protection. And protection once made sense.

Healing the Enduring Pattern

Healing is not about breaking the mountain or shaming the resistance. It is about restoring movement where movement was once unsafe.

Energy that has been pulled down and locked in the body slowly needs to come back up. The personality wheel begins to turn from pulling in and down toward allowing energy to rise and move outward again.

Anger work becomes essential, not as explosion, but as life force. Learning that anger can be expressed responsibly. That it can protect without humiliating. That it does not automatically turn you into the one who hurt you. This often requires guidance and safety, because the fear of anger is real and embodied.

The body needs to move. To feel its legs not just as weight-bearing, but as directional. To occupy its own energetic field so fully that intrusion is no longer the default expectation. There is grief here too, grief for the autonomy that was not supported, for the moments when will had to be swallowed, for the self that learned to survive by going still.

This work cannot be forced. You do not drag someone out of the cave they built to survive. You earn trust slowly, through consistency, through respect, through patience.

As movement returns, the mountain does not disappear.

It becomes alive.

If you want something to help you stay connected to this process, I’ve created a downloadable workbook to accompany this series. It’s spacious and meant to be returned to, not rushed through.

You can download the workbook here.

From Protection To Choice

9.54MB ∙ PDF file

Download

This same PDF will be used for the entire character pattern series. After reading this post, you can work with the section on the Merginging Pattern, then set it aside. As new posts are released in the coming weeks, you’ll return to the same workbook and continue building your understanding, one pattern at a time.

Download

Think of it as a companion. Something to help you track what you notice, what resonates, and what begins to shift as you learn more about yourself and the people around you.

If this resonated, I’d love to hear what you recognized in yourself. Leave a comment, share this with someone who feels like a mountain, or subscribe so you don’t miss the next pattern in the series.

🪞 A Somatic Practice for You

This practice is about gently inviting movement back into a body that has learned to hold.

Begin by standing.

Let your feet be about hip-width apart and simply notice how you are standing right now. Are you leaning back? Forward? Collapsed into one hip? There is no need to correct anything yet. Just observe.

Now bring your attention down into your legs.

The enduring pattern often sends energy down into the ground and leaves it there, creating steadiness but also stagnation. We are not trying to lose the grounding. We are inviting circulation.

Slowly bend your knees just a little. Not a squat. Just enough to feel your legs engage.

Press your feet into the floor and gently straighten your legs again.

Do this a few times.

Bend. Press. Rise.

Let the movement be deliberate. Feel the strength in your thighs. Feel the push of your feet against the ground. Notice that the ground meets you back.

Now begin to shift your weight from one foot to the other.

Let your hips move slightly with you. Allow your arms to swing naturally if they want to. The goal is not performance. It is flow.

If it feels accessible, take a slow step forward.

Notice what happens in your body as you step. Is there hesitation? Tightness? Or ease?

Step back.

Then step to the side.

Take up a little more space than you normally would. Let your arms widen slightly as you move. Feel the air around you. Notice that you are allowed to occupy it.

You might quietly say to yourself, I am allowed to move. I am allowed to take space.

If anger feels accessible in a healthy way, try pressing your hands forward in front of you as if you are creating space. Not aggressively, just clearly. Feel the strength in your arms and chest. Then release.

Let your breath deepen as you move.

The point is not intensity. It is direction.

Movement reminds the nervous system that you are not trapped. That energy can travel up and out. That will can exist without punishment.

After a few minutes, come back to standing still.

Notice if the stillness feels different now.

Series: From Protection to Choice

This series explores the five personality patterns described in somatic psychology and Core Energetics. Each post looks at how the body learns to survive early experiences and how those strategies continue shaping our relationships, reactions, and sense of self.

As you read, you may recognize pieces of yourself in more than one pattern. That’s normal. These patterns are not boxes to put yourself in or labels to carry around. They are simply ways the body once learned to protect life.

Understanding them gives us language for reactions that often feel automatic and helps us begin bringing awareness, compassion, and choice back into moments that used to run on survival.

The Posts in This Series

1. Introduction: How the Body Learned to Protect You
An introduction to personality patterns and how the body develops survival strategies that later begin to feel like identity.

2. The Leaving Pattern: When the Body Decides It’s Easier to Leave
How the nervous system escapes overwhelm by disconnecting from the body and the physical world.

3. The Merging Pattern: When Connection Becomes Survival
How the body learns to stay oriented toward others for safety, sometimes losing contact with its own needs.

4. The Enduring Pattern: When Strength Becomes Resistance (Current Post)
How the body protects itself by holding in and containing emotion and will rather than expressing it.

5. The Aggressive Pattern: When Power Becomes Protection
How the body organizes around strength, control, and self-reliance when trust in others feels unsafe.

6. The Rigid Pattern: When Performance Replaces Connection
How the body learns to rely on control, correctness, and composure when love and approval feel conditional.

7. When Protection Feels Like Personality
A final reflection on how these survival patterns shape our lives and how awareness begins to restore choice.

If you’re new to the series, this is the first one. If you’ve been reading along, you might return to earlier pieces and notice them differently now.

Often the body understands something long before the mind catches up.

And sometimes the simple act of recognizing a pattern is the first step toward integrating it.

Sources and influences

This writing is influenced by Core Energetics theory, somatic psychology, and the book The Five Personality Patterns by Stephen Kessler, along with embodied training and clinical observation. Rather than quoting directly, I’ve integrated these ideas through lived experience and application so the work can feel human and accessible.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Nothing went wrong.

No conflict. No drama.

You were present, engaged, connected. Maybe even enjoying it.

And still, when it ended, something in your body felt off. A heaviness. A quiet depletion. Like your system had been doing more work than you realized in the moment.

This can happen when connection itself become the organizing force.

In the leaving pattern, the body protects by pulling away. Attention leaves the body as a defense.

In the Merging Pattern, the body does the opposite.

It stays connected.

Safety is found through proximity, attunement, and emotional contact. Attention naturally moves outward, tracking how the other feels, how the relationship is holding, whether things are still okay between us.

The body does not withdraw. It leans in.

This outward orientation can feel warm, even regulating. There is often real care here. Presence. Heart. A genuine desire to stay connected.

And because there is no obvious rupture, it can be difficult to notice what is happening underneath.

There is no clear boundary crossed.

No dramatic collapse.

No moment that signals stop.

Just a steady investment of attention into the other.

Because this way of relating develops early, it rarely feels like a choice. It feels like being attentive. Being loving. Being a good human.

This is what makes the Merging Pattern confusing, both from the outside and from within.

Connection is real. Care is genuine. Love is present.

And still, something is slowly being lost.

Not because anyone is doing something wrong.

But because the body learned, long ago, that staying connected mattered more than staying with itself.

What Is the Merging Pattern?

In Core Energetics, the merging pattern is understood as a holding pattern in the body, formed early in life, at a time when connection was essential for survival.

At this stage of development, a baby has few internal resources. Nourishment, warmth, soothing, and emotional contact must come from the outside. The nervous system depends on another body to regulate.

When receiving is consistent and can be taken in fully, the body relaxes. It feels satisfied. The system settles, and development naturally moves forward. The baby nurses, receives, feels full, and when ready, pushes away. Separation happens from a place of completion.

When receiving is inconsistent, incomplete, or difficult to metabolize, the body does not settle in the same way.

The need remains, but it is never fully satisfied.

For an infant, the pain of an unmet need can only be tolerated for so long. The system first protests, crying and reaching outward in an attempt to restore contact. When that fails, energy drops. The body moves into despair. The need is still present, but the effort to pursue it diminishes.

Over time, something more adaptive happens.

The body learns to stay oriented toward the source of connection, while disconnecting from the intensity of its own unmet need. Attention shifts away from the core of the body and toward the other.

This is not a conscious decision. It is a survival strategy.

Instead of experiencing the self as a stable internal reference point, the body learns to reference relationship. Safety becomes organized around maintaining connection rather than resting into it.

The belief that drives this pattern is simple and early: needs are met through others.

This is not a failure.

It is an adaptation.

And like all adaptations, it carries both gifts and costs.

What It Feels Like Inside (And Around)

From the outside, someone with a merging pattern often appears deeply relational. Heart-centered. Easy to connect with. Emotionally present.

What matters most is not being right, winning, or holding power. What matters is the bond.

Inside the body, attention remains engaged rather than pulling away. It moves outward and stays there, oriented toward the other person and the relational space between them. Regulation happens through proximity, emotional attunement, and contact.

At baseline, the nervous system feels most stable when connection is intact.

This pattern carries real gifts.

There is a genuine capacity to radiate love energy. The heart is open and responsive. Pleasure is felt easily and fully, through touch, emotional exchange, and relational rhythm.

Empathy is strong. Emotional signals from others are sensed quickly and accurately. Giving comes naturally and can be deeply nurturing and genuinely healing, because it arises from real contact rather than effort or strategy.

At its healthiest, this pattern supports both selfhood and intimacy. There is an ability to act from choice and confidence, while remaining open to deep connection without losing a sense of self. Relationship becomes a place where insight and maturity develop.

The difficulty arises when attention becomes fixed outward.

When connection becomes the primary reference point, internal signals grow quieter. Hunger, fatigue, frustration, and limit are not clearly registered. Not because they are denied, but because attention is not oriented there.

The nervous system stays alert, tracking tone, mood, and responsiveness in the other.

Connection can feel filling in the moment. Alive. Regulating.

The cost appears later.

A sense of depletion.

A heaviness in the body.

A feeling of having given more than was noticed at the time.

From the inside, this pattern does not feel manipulative or intentional. It feels loving. Attentive. Sincere.

The issue is not the capacity for connection.

The issue is when connection replaces self-referencing, and the body no longer has a stable internal place to return to.

Learning Through Relationship

Because the merging pattern forms in relationship, it is also learned and reinforced through relationship.

Connection becomes the primary reference point. The body learns to read the environment closely, tracking emotional cues, shifts in tone, and subtle changes in availability. Safety is organized around staying attuned.

Over time, this shapes how intimacy is navigated in adult life.

There is often a strong pull toward closeness. Toward being needed. Toward maintaining harmony in the relational field. Disconnection, even small or temporary, can register as destabilizing in the nervous system.

When tension arises, attention moves outward rather than inward. Instead of checking what is needed internally, the body scans the other. How are they feeling. Are we still okay. What can be done to restore connection.

This can look like accommodating, soothing, explaining, or giving. Sometimes it looks like taking responsibility for emotional states that do not belong to the self.

None of this is calculated. It is reflexive.

Because the body learned early that connection meant survival, relationship remains the place where regulation is sought. The system relaxes when closeness is restored, even if internal needs remain unmet.

This is also why this pattern often becomes most visible in intimate partnerships and caregiving roles.

These relationships matter deeply. They carry emotional weight. They activate the original learning that staying connected is essential. That losing connection is dangerous. That needs are safest when handled through the other.

The challenge is not loving too much.

The challenge is that relationship becomes the place where the self disappears.

This requires something unfamiliar to the pattern.

Not more closeness.

But more presence inside the body.

Merging and Compensated Merging

Not everyone who carries the merging pattern appears overtly dependent or visibly needy.

In many cases, the pattern adapts again.

Instead of staying in conscious contact with need, the body learns to compensate by becoming the giver.

This is compensated merging.

Here, the outward orientation remains, but it is paired with a presentation of strength. The internal experience shifts from I need you to I can give to you. Vulnerability is replaced by usefulness. Asking is replaced by doing.

Care becomes the strategy.

From the outside, this can look like generosity, competence, and emotional maturity. These individuals are often reliable, capable, and deeply attuned. They hold families together. They anticipate needs. They carry emotional and practical weight with little complaint. Know someone like this?

Internally, the reference point is still external.

Attention remains focused on others’ needs, emotional states, and expectations. Self-care is postponed. Limits are flexible. The body overrides its own signals in order to stay connected and needed.

This form of the pattern is especially reinforced in roles where over-giving is praised. In mothers who carry everything. In caregivers expected to be endlessly available. In women whose value is measured by how much they can hold without asking.

Martyrdom can be mistaken for devotion.

Exhaustion can be framed as love.

Because strength is part of the compensation, this pattern can be harder to recognize. The person may not feel dependent. They may feel responsible.

The cost appears in cycles.

Over-giving leads to depletion. Depletion leads to collapse. Collapse may show up as resentment, withdrawal, or emotional overwhelm. Once some energy returns, the system compensates again by giving more, doing more, holding more.

The body moves between expansion and collapse, without a stable internal center to regulate from.

As with pure merging, this is not manipulation.

It is an attempt to stay connected without risking the pain of unmet need.

Healing does not require caring less or giving less.

It requires learning to reference the self before reaching for the other.

To notice need without immediately turning it into action.

To allow connection to exist without earning it.

Healing the Merging Pattern

Healing the merging pattern does not mean disconnecting from others.

It means learning how to stay connected without abandoning the self.

Because this pattern developed at a time when the body did not yet have the capacity to meet its own needs, healing begins by slowly restoring that capacity. Not all at once. Not through force. Through repeated, embodied experience.

The core task is learning to self-reference.

This means bringing attention back into the body, especially into the center. Noticing sensation. Weight. Breath. Orientation. Learning to feel from the inside before scanning the outside.

For this pattern, that shift can feel unfamiliar or even unsettling at first. Turning attention inward may initially bring up emptiness, longing, or discomfort. This is not a sign that something is wrong. It is often the first time the body is being asked to stay with itself instead of reaching outward.

Healing involves tolerating that moment.

Not fixing it.

Not filling it through action.

Not immediately translating need into giving.

Just staying.

Over time, the body begins to learn that connection does not disappear when attention returns inward. Relationship can still exist while the self remains present.

This is where choice becomes possible.

Instead of automatically orienting toward the other, the system learns to pause. To notice what is needed internally. To feel hunger before feeding. Fatigue before pushing. Limit before collapse.

Supportive relationship is often essential in this process. Not relationships that encourage more giving, but ones that gently direct attention back to the self. Ones that do not rush to fill need, but allow the body to experience itself as capable and resourced.

As self-referencing strengthens, the body develops a clearer sense of boundary. Me. Not me. Where connection ends and self begins.

This is not about becoming less loving.

It is about allowing love to flow from fullness rather than depletion.

Over time, the nervous system learns that it is possible to be connected and intact at the same time. That need can be felt without panic. That support can be received without collapse. That connection does not require self-erasure.

Healing the merging pattern is not a dramatic transformation.

It is a quiet, repeated practice of staying.

If you want something to help you stay connected to this process, I’ve created a downloadable workbook to accompany this series. It’s simple, spacious, and meant to be something you can return to, not something you rush through.

You can download the workbook here.

From Protection To Choice

9.54MB ∙ PDF file

Download

This same PDF will be used for the entire character pattern series. After reading this post, you can work with the section on the Merginging Pattern, then set it aside. As new posts are released in the coming weeks, you’ll return to the same workbook and continue building your understanding, one pattern at a time.

Download

Think of it as a companion. Something to help you track what you notice, what resonates, and what begins to shift as you learn more about yourself and the people around you.

No pressure.

No catching up.

Just something to walk alongside you as you go.

🪞 A Somatic Practice for You

This practice is not about changing anything.

It is about learning how to reference yourself.

Begin by standing, if that feels accessible. Let your feet rest on the ground. There is no need to adjust your posture. Let the body arrive as it is.

Notice the contact between your feet and the floor. The weight of your body moving downward. Gravity doing its work without effort.

You do not need to hold yourself up.

The ground is already doing that.

Let your breath move naturally. There is no need to deepen it or control it. Simply notice where the breath is most present today.

Now bring your attention gently toward the center of your body. Somewhere inside that feels like you. There is no correct place. It may feel solid, vague, quiet, or unfamiliar.

If your attention moves outward, toward thoughts of others or the environment, notice that without judgment. Then slowly invite it back.

Back to your feet.

Back to your breath.

Back to the center of your body.

You are not withdrawing from the world.

You are learning how to stay while also being here.

Notice what it is like to feel supported by the ground. Held without effort. Supported without having to earn it.

Let that support register in the body.

Stay for a few moments longer than feels necessary. This is often where the work happens.

When you are ready, let your attention widen again. Bring the room back into view while keeping some awareness inside.

This is the practice.

Not fixing.

Not doing.

Staying.

Over time, this simple act of returning to yourself becomes a place to land.

Series: From Protection to Choice

This series explores the five personality patterns described in somatic psychology and Core Energetics. Each post looks at how the body learns to survive early experiences and how those strategies continue shaping our relationships, reactions, and sense of self.

As you read, you may recognize pieces of yourself in more than one pattern. That’s normal. These patterns are not boxes to put yourself in or labels to carry around. They are simply ways the body once learned to protect life.

Understanding them gives us language for reactions that often feel automatic and helps us begin bringing awareness, compassion, and choice back into moments that used to run on survival.

The Posts in This Series

1. Introduction: How the Body Learned to Protect You
An introduction to personality patterns and how the body develops survival strategies that later begin to feel like identity.

2. The Leaving Pattern: When the Body Decides It’s Easier to Leave
How the nervous system escapes overwhelm by disconnecting from the body and the physical world.

3. The Merging Pattern: When Connection Becomes Survival (Current Post)
How the body learns to stay oriented toward others for safety, sometimes losing contact with its own needs.

4. The Enduring Pattern: When Strength Becomes Resistance
How the body protects itself by holding in and containing emotion and will rather than expressing it.

5. The Aggressive Pattern: When Power Becomes Protection
How the body organizes around strength, control, and self-reliance when trust in others feels unsafe.

6. The Rigid Pattern: When Performance Replaces Connection
How the body learns to rely on control, correctness, and composure when love and approval feel conditional.

7. When Protection Feels Like Personality
A final reflection on how these survival patterns shape our lives and how awareness begins to restore choice.

If you’re new to the series, this is the first one. If you’ve been reading along, you might return to earlier pieces and notice them differently now.

Often the body understands something long before the mind catches up.

And sometimes the simple act of recognizing a pattern is the first step toward integrating it.

Sources and influences

This writing is influenced by Core Energetics theory, somatic psychology, and the book The Five Personality Patterns by Stephen Kessler, along with embodied training and clinical observation. Rather than quoting directly, I’ve integrated these ideas through lived experience and application so the work can feel human and accessible.

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Imagine this.

You’re a squirrel, high up in a tree. From there, you can see everything. The street below, the people moving, the cars rushing past, dogs barking, the noise and unpredictability of life.

Up in the tree, you’re alert but okay; you can observe, track what’s happening. You feel connected enough to the world without having to be in it.

But there’s a pull. Something inside you wants to come down and touch the ground. You long to be part of things.

You imagine it and start coming down. As you get closer, a sound startles you. Something in your body tightens, the noise feels louder and the movement too fast.

The world is suddenly too overwhelming.

Your system doesn’t register this as discomfort.

It registers it as danger.

So you stay where you are, safe and distant, not because you don’t want connection, but because staying up high feels safer than risking the ground.

If this image resonates with you, or if someone immediately came to mind as you read it, you’re already touching upon the Leaving Pattern.

What Is The Leaving Pattern?

In Core Energetics, the Leaving Pattern is one of the earliest survival strategies to form. Like all survival patterns, it exists to buffer the self from overwhelm when contact feels like too much.

This is dissociation.

It’s important to say this clearly: dissociation is not a flaw, a failure, or a lack of depth. It is an intelligent adaptation that once protected life when staying felt unbearable.

The body doesn’t shut down. It adapts.

It is a brilliant solution that once kept someone alive. This pattern forms very early, often before language or memory. The body is scanning for one essential thing.

Is it safe to be here?

To land in this body, to feel the ground, to experience the human world as something we can inhabit.

If a caregiver is grounded and present, the infant slowly learns that sensations can be tolerated, that contact is survivable, that being here is okay.

But if the caregiver is overwhelmed, unattuned, ungrounded, or living inside chaos such as illness, poverty, violence, war, or emotional absence, the infant’s nervous system receives a very different message.

Staying in my body is too much.

When this happens repeatedly, the experience is not remembered as a story. It is experienced as shock. Shock feels like shattering; the infant cannot fight, cannot flee, cannot orient.

So the psyche does the only thing it can.

It leaves.

What It Feels Like Inside

People who organize this way often grow up with a strange relationship to their bodies: They may feel as though they are floating through life rather than inhabiting it. They are more at home in thought, imagination, or subtle realms rather than in physical sensation.

The intellect often develops well, sometimes exceptionally well, but the body feels distant, unreliable, or unsafe.

The physical world can feel cold or hostile, so time and space feel slippery. People may get lost, run late, or bump into things more often than they would like to admit.

At the core of this pattern is existential terror. Not anxiety about specific things, but a deeper fear that it is not safe to physically exist.

If this is you, you may recognize the fear of falling apart under pressure or the fear of going crazy. This isn’t a dramatic thought. It’s a bodily memory.

Under stress, things fragment. Confusion rises. Functioning drops.

Leaving becomes the way out and fear becomes the default emotional state, especially around other people.

What’s happening here isn’t a lack of willingness. It’s a lack of capacity.

When emotional or relational charge rises beyond what the nervous system can hold, the system protects itself by leaving. Dissociation becomes a way to survive energy that feels uncontainable.

If you notice that being with others feels draining, overwhelming, or activating, you’re not imagining it. Your nervous system is scanning for danger.

Strong personal emotions such as anger, grief, or need often feel too risky to experience in connection, so they’re avoided. But later on when you are alone, emotions can run deep because the system finally feels safe enough to let them move.

This can be confusing for partners and loved ones. Someone may seem distant or unaffected in the moment, while internally there is a rich and intense emotional life.

Conflict, in particular, can feel dangerous. There is often no internal memory that confrontation leads to safety or repair. So when intensity rises, the impulse is immediate.

I have to get away.

Learning Through Relationship

This is not my primary defense pattern, but I know it well through relationship.

I once dated someone who organized this way, and what struck me most was how much communication happened without words. I didn’t need him to explain what was happening, I could feel it in the field immediately.

Something would shift between us, sometimes subtle, sometimes intense, and the information was already there before either of us spoke. He was extraordinarily attuned to energy, to nuance, to what was happening beneath the surface.

Where it became challenging was during conflict.

My own survival pattern is more confrontational, I identify with the Aggressive Pattern (coming up in a few weeks), so I want to engage, talk, process, move energy. His system wanted distance, quiet, space. It drove me nuts, but it taught me a lot.

Neither of us was wrong.

But without understanding our patterns, we kept missing each other.

People with the Leaving Pattern are often extraordinarily sensitive. They perceive subtle shifts in energy, mood, and atmosphere long before words are spoken.

They communicate through feeling states, impressions, and intuition. They pick up on hidden agendas and energetic contractions immediately.

This is not imagined. It’s real perception.

But sensitivity without grounding becomes overwhelming. What is a gift in one context becomes a vulnerability in another.

Spiritual Bypassing

Many people with this pattern feel genuinely at home in spiritual or energetic spaces. These realms feel familiar, meaningful, and less dangerous than the physical world.

Spiritual practices can be deeply supportive and they can also become a hiding place.

I’ve seen this often in spiritual communities. The person is ready for the next retreat, the next ceremony, another plant medicine journey; always reaching for the next experience without integration.

Plant medicines, in particular, can be profoundly fragmenting if the work of embodiment isn’t there to support them.

It’s worth asking yourself gently. Am I moving toward something, or am I running away from something that still doesn’t feel safe to feel?

Integration is where spirituality becomes real. In the body and in daily life, especially in relationships.

Insight without embodiment can still be leaving.

Healing the Leaving Pattern

Healing this pattern is not about forcing presence or demanding embodiment.

For people who organize around the Leaving Pattern, the work is not about releasing excess energy, but about learning to hold it. When the nervous system has a narrow window of tolerance for charge, even small amounts of emotional or relational intensity can feel overwhelming.

Staying in the body is not just a decision. It’s a capacity that has to be built.

The unmet developmental need is simple and profound. To feel safe, welcome, and wanted in the human world.

The task is embodiment, slowly and with support.

Learning that the body can be home, that the earth can hold you, that connection does not always mean danger.

This cannot be done alone. Relational support matters, so being met by someone grounded matters.

Staying becomes possible when safety is felt, not when it is demanded.

And this kind of safety is not something you think your way into. It’s built slowly, through practice, support, and repetition. Through learning how to notice when you’re leaving, and how to come back without force or judgment.

This kind of change takes time.

It is work that happens through choice, supported by a nervous system that slowly learns it can stay and once the body has enough support to hold what arises.

The choice to orient back to the body.

The choice to stay curious instead of disappearing.

The choice to live here, in this body, in this world, one moment at a time.

If you want something to help you stay connected to this process, I’ve created a downloadable workbook to accompany this series. It’s simple, spacious, and meant to be something you can return to, not something you rush through.

You can download the workbook here.

From Protection To Choice Workbook

9.54MB ∙ PDF file

Download

This same PDF will be used for the entire character pattern series. After reading this post, you can work with the section on the Leaving Pattern, then set it aside. As new posts are released in the coming weeks, you’ll return to the same workbook and continue building your understanding, one pattern at a time.

Download

Think of it as a companion. Something to help you track what you notice, what resonates, and what begins to shift as you learn more about yourself and the people around you.

No pressure.

No catching up.

Just something to walk alongside you as you go.

🪞 A Somatic Practice for You

Coming back into the body

If you’d like to try a practice now, keep it gentle.

Stand up and notice if you feel like you’re watching yourself from the outside. There’s no need to change it. Just notice.

Imagine yourself entering back into your body through the top of your head, as if you’re gently pulling yourself in.

Let your awareness fill your head, your face, your neck.

Then your chest, your abdomen, your pelvis.

Let it move down through your thighs, knees, calves, and into your feet.

Feel your feet on the ground.

Now imagine your awareness continuing downward, into the earth. As if your body is being held from below.

You can quietly say to yourself, I’m here. I’m safe. My body is welcome here.

Stay for a few breaths.

Staying takes practice.

Series: From Protection to Choice

This series explores the five personality patterns described in somatic psychology and Core Energetics. Each post looks at how the body learns to survive early experiences and how those strategies continue shaping our relationships, reactions, and sense of self.

As you read, you may recognize pieces of yourself in more than one pattern. That’s normal. These patterns are not boxes to put yourself in or labels to carry around. They are simply ways the body once learned to protect life.

Understanding them gives us language for reactions that often feel automatic and helps us begin bringing awareness, compassion, and choice back into moments that used to run on survival.

The Posts in This Series

1. Introduction: How the Body Learned to Protect You
An introduction to personality patterns and how the body develops survival strategies that later begin to feel like identity.

2. The Leaving Pattern: When the Body Decides It’s Easier to Leave (Current Post)
How the nervous system escapes overwhelm by disconnecting from the body and the physical world.

3. The Merging Pattern: When Connection Becomes Survival
How the body learns to stay oriented toward others for safety, sometimes losing contact with its own needs.

4. The Enduring Pattern: When Strength Becomes Resistance
How the body protects itself by holding in and containing emotion and will rather than expressing it.

5. The Aggressive Pattern: When Power Becomes Protection
How the body organizes around strength, control, and self-reliance when trust in others feels unsafe.

6. The Rigid Pattern: When Performance Replaces Connection
How the body learns to rely on control, correctness, and composure when love and approval feel conditional.

7. When Protection Feels Like Personality
A final reflection on how these survival patterns shape our lives and how awareness begins to restore choice.

If you’re new to the series, this is the first one. If you’ve been reading along, you might return to earlier pieces and notice them differently now.

Often the body understands something long before the mind catches up.

And sometimes the simple act of recognizing a pattern is the first step toward integrating it.

Sources and influences

This writing is influenced by Core Energetics theory, somatic psychology, and the book The Five Personality Patterns by Stephen Kessler, along with embodied training and clinical observation. Rather than quoting directly, I’ve integrated these ideas through lived experience and application so the work can feel human and accessible.

Then I read a book by Benjamin Hardy called Your Personality Isn’t Permanent.

It made me feel hopeful. Like maybe things could actually be different.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to not be stuck being who you are? That the parts of you that feel reactive, guarded, controlling, or overwhelmed might not be fixed traits, but learned responses.

At the time, that idea made sense to me, I liked it, I wanted it to be true.

But if I am honest, it lived mostly in my head.

I understood it as a concept, not as something I could feel or live from. And when life got hard, when I felt triggered, overwhelmed, or defensive, it did not matter how much I believed my personality was not permanent. My body still reacted the same way.

Acting from the Wound

I have a feeling this has happened to you… something triggers you and all of a sudden you react. And in the calm aftermath of the situation you analyze and wonder,
“Why did I react like that?”

Maybe you snapped at someone you love or you shut down and disappeared.
Maybe you got controlling, defensive, or overly nice and later you thought, I knew better. Why did I do that?

This is what I mean by acting from a wound or from protection.

It is not a moral failure. It is not a lack of insight.
It is the body stepping in before the adult part of us has a chance to choose.

For a long time, I wanted my adult self to be running the show. I had done inner child work. I understood where my wounds came from. But understanding was not enough.

I did not want my unhealed parts making decisions for me anymore.

I wanted choice.

What Is a Defence?

In somatic psychology, and specifically in Core Energetics, a defence is not something negative.

A defence is how the body learned to survive.

Before we had language, before we could reason or reflect, our nervous system adapted to the environment it was in. It adjusted muscle tone, breath, posture, and energy in order to stay connected and protected.

What we often call “personality” is very often protection.

Defences are not something we decide to have. They are something the body learns.

They form early, often before we have words for what we are experiencing and develop in response to environments that are overwhelming, inconsistent, intrusive, emotionally unavailable, or unpredictable. The nervous system is not asking who do I want to be. It is asking what will keep me safe enough to survive and belong.

And it answers that question through the body.

This understanding comes from the work of Wilhelm Reich, later expanded by Alexander Lowen and John Pierrakos. Their work showed that our psychological patterns are not just mental. They are muscular, postural & energetic.

The body organizes first. The story comes later.

How Defences Become Patterns

This is where things finally clicked for me.

I had studied psychology, spirituality, and shadow work for years. I could explain my patterns. I could track my thoughts. But I still felt hijacked in certain moments.

In somatic therapy, I learned to feel what was happening in my body.

I started noticing how certain people or situations would instantly charge me. My jaw would tighten. My energy would rise. My focus would narrow. Other times, my body would go numb and disconnected.

These were not thoughts. They were sensations (to learn more about sensations check out my post here).

I also began to see that I relied heavily on an aggressive or controlling strategy. Sometimes it showed up as anger. Other times it was more subtle, charming, persuasive; managing the room & controlling the energy without overt aggression.

At the core, was anxiety around control.

The moment that changed everything was realizing this was not just happening in my mind. It was happening in my body. When that defensive energy activated, I would completely lose contact with my legs. It was like my lower body disappeared.

And once I could feel that, and track what was happening I had options.

That is the difference awareness and embodiment make, that is the reason I write this today dear reader, so maybe I can help you understand something about your “personality.”

You see, once upon a time this defence worked for you.

A particular bodily response once helped you stay safe or in control, so the nervous system keeps using it. Over time, that response becomes automatic, automatic becomes familiar.

Familiar starts to feel like identity.

This is how defences turn into patterns.

A pattern is not a prison. It is a strategy that has not been updated yet.

Working with the 5 Core Defence Patterns

Core Energetics does not try to get rid of defences. We do not break them down. We do not analyze them away. We do not shame them into submission.

Instead, the work focuses on building safety in the body, increasing our capacity to feel sensation, and bringing awareness to what is already happening.

As awareness grows, choice returns.

This is how the adult self comes back online.

In Core Energetics, we describe five primary ways the body organizes protection.

You might recognize yourself in one or several of these.

When you feel threatened or overwhelmed, do you tend to
look for connection and reassurance?
hold yourself together by following rules or being “good”?
get aggressive or controlling?
dig in and refuse to budge?
or leave your body altogether?

In the posts that follow, we will explore these patterns one by one. Where they come from, how they live in the body, the gifts they carry, and how they soften when the adult self is present.

When we don’t understand our defences, they make decisions for us. They shape our relationships. They influence how we communicate, how we argue, how we withdraw, and how close we allow others to get.

I’m writing this series because I know what it feels like to live from a pattern without realizing it. To look back at your reactions and think, that’s not who I want to be.

Learning these patterns gave me something I had been searching for a long time.

Choice.

Not the kind that lives in your head, but the kind you can feel in your body when something gets activated.

When we do understand them, something powerful happens.

We catch ourselves sooner.
We feel our bodies.
We pause instead of react.

In the posts that follow, we’ll explore the five core defence patterns and what they look like in real life. Not as labels, but as intelligent strategies that once kept us safe.

You’ll learn how to recognize when a pattern is active, what gift lives underneath it, and how to bring more choice into moments that used to feel automatic.

My hope is that as you read, you start to recognize yourself with more compassion.

Not so you can change who you are, but so you can stop being run by what once had to protect you.

If you want to follow along, you can download the free companion workbook in next week’s post. It’s a simple place to track what you notice in your body as you read each post and try the practices, one pattern per week.

🪞 A Somatic Practice for You

This is a short, physical practice. If anything feels like too much, slow it down or stop.

Stand up if you can.

Place your feet about hip-width apart. Let your knees soften. Feel the weight of your body dropping down into your legs.

Take a breath in.

Now, bring your hands up in front of you, palms facing outward. As you exhale, push your hands forward and say out loud or silently, “No.”

Do this two or three times.

Push.
Exhale.
“No.”

Notice what happens.

Do you feel stronger?
More tense?
Relieved?
Awkward?
Energized?

There is no correct response.

Now let your arms drop by your sides.

***

This practice is not about getting rid of anything or figuring yourself out.

It is simply an invitation to get curious.

You are not trying to analyze a pattern or label a defence. You are just noticing what happens in your body when you move in a certain way, when you push, when you ground, when you take up space.

Let the experience be the information.

Notice the sensations that show up. Tension, relief, resistance, strength, awkwardness, or nothing at all.

There is no meaning you need to assign to it.

This is just a starting point. A way to begin observing how your body responds when you move, express, and claim space, without overthinking it.

That awareness alone is enough for now.

Series: From Protection to Choice

This series explores the five personality patterns described in somatic psychology and Core Energetics. Each post looks at how the body learns to survive early experiences and how those strategies continue shaping our relationships, reactions, and sense of self.

As you read, you may recognize pieces of yourself in more than one pattern. That’s normal. These patterns are not boxes to put yourself in or labels to carry around. They are simply ways the body once learned to protect life.

Understanding them gives us language for reactions that often feel automatic and helps us begin bringing awareness, compassion, and choice back into moments that used to run on survival.

The Posts in This Series

1. Introduction: How the Body Learned to Protect You (current post)
An introduction to personality patterns and how the body develops survival strategies that later begin to feel like identity.

2. The Leaving Pattern: When the Body Decides It’s Easier to Leave
How the nervous system escapes overwhelm by disconnecting from the body and the physical world.

3. The Merging Pattern: When Connection Becomes Survival
How the body learns to stay oriented toward others for safety, sometimes losing contact with its own needs.

4. The Enduring Pattern: When Strength Becomes Resistance
How the body protects itself by holding in and containing emotion and will rather than expressing it.

5. The Aggressive Pattern: When Power Becomes Protection
How the body organizes around strength, control, and self-reliance when trust in others feels unsafe.

6. The Rigid Pattern: When Performance Replaces Connection
How the body learns to rely on control, correctness, and composure when love and approval feel conditional.

7. When Protection Feels Like Personality
A final reflection on how these survival patterns shape our lives and how awareness begins to restore choice.

If you’re new to the series, this is the first one. If you’ve been reading along, you might return to earlier pieces and notice them differently now.

Often the body understands something long before the mind catches up.

And sometimes the simple act of recognizing a pattern is the first step toward integrating it.

Sources and influences

This writing is influenced by Core Energetics theory, somatic psychology, and the book The Five Personality Patterns by Stephen Kessler, along with embodied training and clinical observation. Rather than quoting directly, I’ve integrated these ideas through lived experience and application so the work can feel human and accessible.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I can see everything from the peak… everything.

I told myself this was depth.
That I had perspective.
That I was above it all.

Then one day I noticed it.
Something patient.
Something quiet.
Right there,
as if it had always existed.

A cave.

At first, I pretended it wasn’t calling me.
I stood near the entrance like someone
who definitely wasn’t scared.
My chest tight.
Breath shallow.
Body doing that thing it does
when the truth is inconvenient.

I peeked inside.
Immediately thought,
Absolutely not.

Dark and wet,
cold and forgotten.
Smelled like feelings.

So I went back to my walks.
My views.
My berries.

But once you see the cave,
you don’t really get a choice.

It followed me.
In my thoughts.
In my dreams.
In the way my shoulders refused to soften
as if they were holding a history
I hadn’t yet agreed to feel.

One day, like a ceremony,
I stepped inside.
Just a few steps.
Enough to feel my system light up
and my mind start bargaining.

You’re fine.
You don’t need this.
This is unnecessary.

The part of me that likes control
was working overtime.
Singing with reasons, stacking logic,
trying to keep the dark at a distance.

I left.

But the cave didn’t leave me,
curiosity whispered at every corner.

So I came back.
This time, I went further.
Past the light.
Past the version of me
that was calm and capable.
Past the mask that said I knew everything.

The cave was not empty.

There were bones, strategies, loyalties.
Things that once kept me safe
and now just kept me small.
Kept me knowing it all.

There were crystals too.
Raw and unpolished.
Veins of energy running through stone,
parts of me that had never been invited to take up space.

And water.
Some was still, some ran deep.
Running without instruction,
carving a path with a simple repeated drip.

The deeper I went,
the more alive I felt.
Not lighter.
More honest.

What I learned, slowly,
is that awareness deepens
as defenses soften.
You don’t force it.
You notice where you tense.
You stay one breath longer than you want to.

People think the cave is where you lose yourself.
It’s actually where you start feeling yourself.

So I keep returning.
Not to fix anything.
Not to become someone better.

Just to meet myself
without the armor.
Without the story.
Without the view.

Turns out, the cave isn’t dark because it’s dangerous.
It’s dark because it requires courage.
It requires the body,
your feet to feel each step,
your hands to guide you deeper.

Your intuition to know when to pause,
your heart to know when to continue.

My body did what bodies do when they cannot handle one more ounce of pain.

It shut down.

Not dramatically, it did it quietly… a perfect internal blackout.

Looking back, this breakup was a big moment that my energy field contracted. In Core Energetics, collapse is not just emotional, it is energetic. The heart closes, the breath shortens, the will retreats, and the system folds inward on itself to protect what feels too vulnerable to expose.

But at the time, I didn’t have language for that, I just knew I didn’t want to feel it, feeling empty was better than feeling pain.

I told myself I was free, that I was strong, that I was done caring. I called it, my truest expression of authenticity.

But the truth was that my “authenticity” was just survival; I was holding my 5 month old daughter in one hand and a broken identity in the other.

And somewhere inside that heartbreak, I told myself a story. I decided I no longer gave a fuck.

The Era Of Not Giving A Fuck

Once my heart closed, a new persona emerged: she was bold, unbothered, and detached. She spoke in absolutes and walked into dates saying

“Whatever you do, do not fall in love with me. I will break your heart.”

I believed this was honesty, I believed it was strength and clarity, I was authentic remember?

I’ve learned now that this the Mask of Power. It is the mask of dominance, detachment, charisma, and control. Confidence built on fear and truth hidden underneath protection.

On the surface I looked like a woman who knew her boundaries, I was charismatic, funny and blunt as fuck. I asked for what I wanted and I really believed that people owed me something, men were here to serve me.

The Mask of Power is seductive because it makes you feel untouchable. It lets you feel one step ahead of the hurt and in that my bluntness was righteous, my detachment felt wise and my coldness felt like maturity.

But what I called honesty was really the Lower Self speaking.

The Lower Self is the part of us that acts from fear, anger, resentment, ego, vengeance, pride, and woundedness. It shows up loudly when we are hurt because it believes intensity will keep us safe.

My Lower Self was running the show, and I let it.

I watched men fall for me because I was magnetic and playful, and without trying to be, I was naturally considerate and caring.
Then when shit got real, I watched myself detach like a ghost and whisper, “I told you so” as if the warning label made the wound clean.

It didn’t.
It just made me lonely.

The Musician

There was a guy, a very kind and fun loving musician, we had been going out for a few weeks and he invited me to a show. I had seen him play many times so it was nothing new. That night however, he decided to play a new song, a song he wrote for me.

The spotlight shifted on me as he introduced it, I watched the room soften and people smile at me, it was a cute moment so I put on my “aww what-a-cute-song-face” but underneath I was mortified.

My body froze.

The only thought in my head was
“Now I really have to break up with him.”

Not because he did something wrong, but because receiving love felt unbearable. When your heart is still in collapse, love feels like pressure, vulnerability feels like danger, and someone opening to you feels like exposure.

In Core Energetics we say the heart center cannot receive love while defended, the body interprets the energy as a threat, not a gift. So rather than letting it in, we cut it off.

I ended the relationship after the show.

I warned him remember? I felt justified that it was the right move, the truth is I didn’t really feel anything and in the absence of that the mind filled in the gap, “you gotta stay true to yourself… no fucks given.”

(If you haven’t caught on, this is the defense talking)

When a defense is active, the body numbs the emotional charge to prevent overwhelm. My system was still in protection mode and protection does not soften, it hardens.

Where This Shows Up Everywhere Else

Now I know I am telling this through the lens of dating and heartbreak, but let’s be honest for a moment. This defense does not only live in love.

Collapse, masks, and “not giving a fuck” sneak their way into every corner of our lives.

You might catch it with coworkers when you pretend you don’t care about being misunderstood, yet inside you are terrified of looking incompetent. Or with family when you shut down to avoid another argument because the real truth feels too risky to say out loud.

These defenses are global.

If a defense protects you in one area, your system will use it everywhere.
So your not-giving-a-fuck era might look like:

Going silent at work because speaking up feels too exposing or bulldozing your way through meeting to make sure you are not missed, disregarding what others feel.

It could be using sarcasm with family because softness feels unsafe and acting superior so you don’t have to admit you are scared of being rejected.

The defense always insists it is authenticity.
“This is just who I am.”
“This is me being real.”
“This is me setting boundaries.”

But if you slow down and listen to your body, you can usually feel the difference between authenticity and protection.

Authenticity feels warm and real, even when it is uncomfortable.
Protection feels rigid and sharp, even when it looks powerful.

So here is the question that matters most.
Where in your life do you say you don’t care, when what you actually feel is fear, overwhelm, loneliness, or unspoken need?

Where do you notice yourself collapsing instead of revealing?
Where do you bulldoze instead of inviting contact?
Where do you use detachment to avoid the risk of being seen?

Let’s get one thing straight, the defense is not wrong. It is trying to keep you safe. Once upon a time in your life you may have needed this defense, once upon a time your body may not have been able to handle this, you were little and you needed protection. But that is not you anymore.

You are an adult and there is a new distinction you must make: safety without connection becomes isolation, and isolation slowly buries your truth.

This is the real work.

When are you “not giving a fuck” because you need the courage or when are you protecting from something?

Knowing the difference is where freedom actually begins.

The Slow Undoing

I didn’t have a single awakening, there were a thousand tiny ones.

Moments when I caught myself blocking connection even when I wanted it, when I felt the tightness in my chest and knew it was not truth. Small realizations that my detachment was costing me connection, not preserving it.

“Not giving a fuck” was taking a lot out of me.

I started noticing the difference between my defense and my truth.

Defense felt cold and sharp.
Truth felt warm and terrifying.
Defense controlled the room.
Truth opened my heart and allowed things in… and it also felt terrifying.

I am still trying to dissect the terrifying part, I am learning to notice when my intuition is trying to tell me something and when I just need a little courage to keep moving (stay tuned for more insights on that).

Opening Up By Accident

I met a guy, almost 8 years ago, I hired him for a photoshoot that I gifted myself for my 30th birthday. We spoke on the phone to see if he was the right fit and after a 20 minute chat I knew we were going to get along, I ended the call with “I think we are going to be best friends” to which he replied “I think we already are”.

Our photoshoot lasted 8 hours, in my experience there wasn’t a romantic chemistry, he was dating someone and I was fresh out out a relationship.

A photoshoot turned into a comment on facebook turned into a deeper conversation and we found ourselves forming a beautiful friendship based on honesty, humor and eventually love.

I didn’t hold back, we got to know each other while sharing our stories, we opened up about parenting, art, about family and all of the triumphs and gift that came with dating (other people). I found myself often thinking I didn’t want to tell him something because he was going to be brutally honest with me.

Darius became like an honesty compass, a best friend who would surprisingly end up being my partner and the father of my kids.

Seven years of friendship meant he had already seen my light and my shadow.
He knew my stories and my fear of being hurt.
He knew the parts of me I barely admitted to myself.

When we started dating, something different happened.
He didn’t want my bluntness, he wanted my truth.

He was patient with my pauses.
Patient with my fear, patient with the parts of me that stumbled over words because the truth felt too naked to say out loud.

He didn’t ask for performance.
He asked for contact.

I had to give a fuck!

Core Energetics defines real contact as honesty that stays connected.
Honesty that considers impact.
Honesty that does not weaponize truth.

With Darius, I learned my process.
When something triggers me, my whole body charges.
My body will need to discharge some energy before I can get to the root of the pain and see what the real need is.

Instead of lashing out on a human (specially my wonderful parter) I find ways to discharge energy:
I write, full rage on the page.
I call a friend and ask for a “bitch and ditch moment” (this is code for: I have some complaining to do and the only support I need is to be heard, no need to fix anything; once I am done the bitching we ditch it and I can find my truth in the share).

I curse and complain and let my Lower Self vomit its opinions. Once I have had this moment then I ask myself
“What is my real need once the fire burns off?”
And that is the part I bring to him.

Not the blame.
Not the defense.
Not the collapse.
The truth.

This is positive aggression.
The energy that supports connection instead of destroying it.

That is what real authenticity feels like.

Real freedom is not collapse

My old version of authenticity was
“I don’t care.”
“I say whatever I want.”
“I don’t owe anyone anything.”

It was armor.
It was defense.
It was pain in a costume.

Real authenticity is the opposite.

It requires contact.
It requires presence.
It requires vulnerability.
It requires taking responsibility for your impact.
It requires staying in your body long enough to tell the truth in a way that does not sever the connection.

I learned to care again… intentionally.
In ways that nourish me, not drain me.

I no longer care about what collapses me.
I care about what brings me alive.

And that is what freedom feels like.

A Practice for You

This is for anyone who feels themselves slipping into collapse, shutting down instead of revealing, or using “not giving a fuck” as protection instead of truth.
It is for the moments when your chest tightens, your words sharpen, or your heart goes numb.

It is for the part of you that wants connection but has learned to survive by staying guarded.

This practice helps you discharge the emotional charge safely, so you can find the truth underneath the reaction.

The Discharge Ritual

Set a timer for three minutes.
Choose one way to let the energy move through your body instead of into someone else:

• Write without censoring
• Stomp or shake your legs
• Hit a pillow
• Let out a deep, primal exhale.. or if you dare a loud scream
• Speak the uncensored truth into a voice note

Let the Lower Self have its moment.
Let the fire move.
Let the charge complete.

When the timer ends, place one hand on your chest and ask:

“What is my real need underneath this reaction?”

Not the blame.
Not the story.
Not the defense.

The need.

You may need to do this a few times or in different ways, to hear this deeper voice you need practice and patience. Paying attention and giving it space is how you shift from protection to presence, from reaction to truth.

This practice is about noticing, not about drastic changes. A little more awareness goes a long way.

Photographs by Darius Bashar