I know I am not supposed to say this....

I know I am not supposed to say this. But as a somatic coach, I do not like doing somatic releases on myself, even though I do it daily.

Why? Because I never know when I might start crying.

It is hard to admit that I still cry—because I was raised to view crying as a weakness, as if it means something is wrong with me. And as a coach, my life should be perfect, right?

Writing this is hard. Because it is showing you that I am not perfect. That I have not got all my ducks in a row. That there are still deep wounds being healed and parts of me I have yet to uncover.

But this is exactly the point.

For years, I was told that my anxiety was the problem. That my reactions were unreasonable. That I was too rigid, too demanding, too sensitive. I was told—directly—that I was the only one who had a problem with the way things were. That what I was responding to was simply normal. That any woman who understood her place in that world would close an eye and accept it.

So I did what most high-functioning women learn to do.

I performed over the signal.

I told myself I was managing. I functioned when I should have stopped. I presented certainty while my nervous system ran on permanent alert. And when my anxiety became so debilitating that I would break down simply because I could not reach someone I knew was at a long lunch—I believed what I had been told. That the problem was mine. That I had caused it. That I was the only one.

By the time I was told in 2018 that he didn't love me anymore, the first thing I did was blame myself.

Not because the evidence supported that conclusion. But because I had spent years being trained to reach it.

Here is what I understand now that I did not understand then.

My body was not lying to me. It was never lying to me.

Every moment of dread. Every physical response to an environment that was genuinely unpredictable. Every alarm that fired before anything had been said out loud. That was not an anxiety disorder. That was accurate data—gathered in real time, stored in a nervous system that was doing its job correctly.

The body keeps the score. This is not a metaphor. It is documented, researched, clinically demonstrated. The nervous system holds what the mind has been trained to dismiss. Every override. Every silenced signal. Every truth performed. The body stores it accurately, in full—waiting.

Over the last seven years since I started my practice, I have spoken often of the term "Finding the Gold" — a concept I learned from the renowned psychologist Dr. Tara Brach, from whom I learned to work with trauma. Finding the Gold means uncovering the layers we have used to armour ourselves — to look acceptable, to meet social norms, to perform as expected of us. It means taking down all the armour to find what is truly valuable inside us. What we should not be afraid to uncover.

Part of that process involves releasing what we have used to armor ourselves. The performance of who we are—the job title, the house, the marriage, the car, the handbag, even what size we are physically. We have attached all of this to identity. And when it is stripped away — in divorce, in transition, in the collapse of the life we built — what is left?

This is not work that happens once and is complete. It runs through every stage of genuine reinvention—because we evolve, and what we needed to carry at one stage of life is not always what we need at the next.

This is the Deconstruction phase of The Art of Becoming. Where we take apart and remove what no longer serves.

That stripping and accepting happen in tandem. Through somatic practice, the tension held so deeply within our minds and fascia begins to release. And often, tears come with it.

I do not like that part.

Because I fear being carried away. Because I spent 2018 so undone by what had unraveled that I do not want to find myself there again.

But over the years I have learned to allow. To allow the tears to fall. To allow my armor to come down—as I am doing even as I write this.

Because here is what I know now.

We do not need armor to be accepted. We do not need to meet the ideal to be okay.

With practice, we learn to pull ourselves back—a little at a time—to manage the release so it does not spiral. The tears are not the destination. They are the doorway. What comes through them is not weakness.

It is information. Accurate, unperformed, finally accessible information about what we actually know, what we actually feel, and what we have actually been carrying.

The information was never missing.

You just needed to feel safe enough to receive it.

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