Episode 4
[00:00:00] What happens when I do let go and it all falls apart? How do I balance the fear of losing control or missing something or getting it wrong? For all of the situations that you're holding onto, you are being the anchor. And how do you set yourself free? And at first I can dance and do and coordinate and organise and do all that to a certain degree, but I also notice a resentment starts to creep in.
You might be feeling like you're the one who has to hold everything together. And 'cause if I don't, then what happens? You're feeling like all the responsibility comes back to you, that you're holding all this space for everyone. And you can't actually let it go because it- it's going to fall apart. The closer it gets to feeling like it might be falling apart, the harder you might be trying to hold on.
Caught up in this whirl of [00:01:00] holding it together for everyone else, for yourself, for work, for family, whatever the situation is. And you're feeling like no matter how much you rest, there's an exhaustion and a tiredness that sleep just doesn't fix. There's no resting, there's no being at peace because the next thing and the next thing and the next thing keep arising.
And you might feel responsible or over responsible. Well, there's, if you don't do it, who else will? You might be feeling alone in all of this, that there's no support or no one around you to help, and it all falls back to you. And when you say you try to trust the process or you try to let go of something, it falls apart or it fails, or when you've tried in the past, people have let you down or the situation has unravelled a bit and it feels like [00:02:00] starting back at square one again.
You might be finding that you're revisiting the same questions over and over without any clarity, without any real answers to why. Why this is happening, why it's repeating It's just a blur of doing this. If you do stop, if you do stop, then what? I know a lot of my clients who identify with ADHD symptoms feel this level of holding things together, holding themselves together, trying to hold their lives together, and that they're so busy rushing around, if they stop, they tend to fall in a heap.
When they stop or try to rest, they get sick. And so there's this rushing, and there's this doing, and there's this holding, and it just becomes so exhausting, and you don't even need to be rushing around to feel this. [00:03:00] Sometimes this can happen even when we're feeling quite composed and ordered. There's just this heaviness, this weight of all the things that we are holding onto.
And so what if you could recognize you haven't actually done anything wrong? What if you could recognize that this isn't a problem or your fault, but it is becoming an issue when it's impacting your life? This over-holding, this being the anchor for all of your people, for all of the situations that you're holding onto, you are being the anchor.
And how do you set yourself free? And it's not from doing more. It's not from, "If I just get this bit done, then I can," or, "Then I will rest." It doesn't work like that. The kind of holding that you're doing can make you sick. It can make you really unwell because the [00:04:00] holding is sometimes getting in your own way, and sometimes even in the way of the people that you love.
When you're experiencing that level of fullness, of so full I don't have any space for anything else, there's no capacity for one more thing, isn't the next problem you have to fix.
It's your alignment pattern reaching its limit. And what has worked for you in the past may no longer be working for you. When it stops working, when this holding onto things and planning and taking responsibility doesn't work anymore- How do we feel? I feel overstretched. I feel like there's a level of adrenal fatigue and oneness that just doesn't realign quickly enough for me.
It certainly doesn't realign quickly enough for me to go to sleep [00:05:00] straight away at night. I think for me personally, sleep is the indicator of when I'm holding too much. I feel this internal stress, like a furnace or a pressure cooker starting to rise. And at first, I can dance and do and coordinate and organize and do all that to a certain degree, but I also notice a resentment starts to creep in.
I start to resent the people and things that I'm holding, and that resentment reminds me that I'm not quite in balance with this. This often shows up with me putting in more effort with someone than is being met in return. Sometimes it shows up as I'm so used to fixing everything and being the rescuer, and this is the archetypal rescuer of, "It's okay.
I can fix this. I know this." This is something I do a lot. And of course, in that rescuer [00:06:00] state, when I'm holding onto things, I'm also attracting victims, people who need rescuing And people will gladly hand over their issues for you. People are more than happy for you to take up the slack, for you to hold all the ideas and things.
One thing that comes up a lot in our family is cognitive load, how much more cognitive load a mother has versus a father. I will say primary caregiver, but the majority of cases it's a mother in, in my world. It might not be in yours. I acknowledge that. But l- I'm just going to come back to the mother archetype for a moment, in that even if you are not a mother, you might be identifying as the mother, the one who has to caretake, the one who has to be responsible for.
How often does one parent not know all the things that need to be coordinated for children? [00:07:00] Like when their next dentist appointment is, or when their school shoes are about to collapse, and how many more weeks have we got out of this before they grow out of the next stage? Like, all of that load, all of those thinking, all of that holding is exhausting.
So exhausting. And I speak in general terms of it being more exhausting for women because in my experience, that's often the case, especially if you're solo parenting or part parenting. Even when there's a 50/50 custody split, one parent is usually doing more of the load. And so all of this stress and holding and figuring out, it doesn't just go away.
It doesn't just shut off at 5:00. It doesn't just shut off when you give your children over to the other parent. It constantly is going and swirling[00:08:00]
And when this is happening, our nervous system just gets used to that, right? Like adrenal fatigue, the first stage of adrenal fatigue is when we have this hypervigilance. We start to go, "Okay, there's something going on, and now I have to be super aware of all the things that have to go on." So primary school kids is a great example of that, right?
You get newsletters and coordinating, and you're doing friends and birthdays and sleepovers, and all of that is organizing, impacting your family life, your calendar, your time, buying presents, all the things that have to be coordinated for your child's social wellbeing. And now where is your wellbeing in that?
Where do you put down the tasks? Where do you come back to yourself? And most of the time you don't, and so the adrenaline just kicks in a little bit harder, right? We have more [00:09:00] chemicals in our body that start to flood because now we have more cortisol because we have to keep going. We can't stop.
There's no stopping here. We've got to keep going. So the second stage of that, um, adrenal fatigue is when we've been holding it for so long that that becomes our new normal, and we're rushing, rushing, rushing, and we're busy, busy, busy, and we're hustling, and we're getting it done, and we're trying to hold all the pieces together.
And most of the time we're super good at it. We're really successful at this. A woman's superpower is to be able to hold many, many things at once and coordinating and doing and being able to see short-sighted, wider vision. It, it is one of our greatest skills. But when we're not resting in between, when we're not coming back into ourselves, when we're not dropping those chemicals out of our body, we're sending these responses to our nervous system that say, "Hey, we've got to keep going.
We've got to keep going. The threat's not clear yet. [00:10:00] We've still got work to do. We need more chemicals, more cortisol." And this second stage of adrenal fatigue is usually the s- usually the most damaging because we can go on like that for many, many years, and it becomes our normal, and quietly it's eroding our health in the background.
The most interesting part of it is that we're walking towards the cliff when we're on this stage, and then we can just drop off the edge. There's no warning. If we've been in vi- hypervigilance and that maintenance of that hypervigilance for a really long time, we can find that all of a sudden we just crash, and this is where we get burnout.
And it wasn't the one incident that burnt us out. It was all the things we've been holding and carrying, manipulating, working, coordinating, however you see that, for such a period of time, all of this holding, not being able to put it down, that just leads to this [00:11:00] fatigue that is not satiated by sleep.
It's not satiated by a good night's rest. It means that we need to change things up. We have to do something differently. It's like when you get a really serious health diagnosis, you make changes in your life, right? This level of being the anchor for everyone around you all of the time is a health issue.
It's an energy issue. It can lead to all sorts of things. And so how do we balance? What do we put down? What happens when I do let go and it all falls apart? How do I balance the fear of losing control or missing something or getting it wrong or not being r- right for my child or, or a loved one? How do we balance all of that?
This misalignment in the pushing and the striving is not being balanced and [00:12:00] met with the alignment of self and awareness and kindness to you. The gateway to self-love and self-appreciation and being able to drop these patterns is how much compassion you can give yourself in that moment. If you were witnessing a friend do this, if you were watching your friend running ragged, burning themselves out left, right, and center, and then things started to drop away and fall apart, would you be criticizing them?
Would you be understanding? Would you then say, "Oh, wow, I see you've got so much on"? Or are you leaning into even more load for them by being disappointed in them when they miss something? How do you support other people is how you're supporting yourself. Nothing is perfect. Nobody can get it right 100% of the [00:13:00] time And some personalities lead more into trying and holding and grasping and doing it all.
And some personalities are a bit more easygoing or carefree, but that could be seen as lackadaisical or lazy or not doing their part. Everything is how we perceive it, right? There's no absolute right or wrong, but there's so much social conditioning around this. There's so much stigma to not being able to hold it all.
But when that holding anchor pattern is met with love and curiosity and space and gentleness and allowed to come back into alignment, it doesn't look like dropping the ball. It doesn't look like things falling [00:14:00] apart. It looks like and I can hold these things and I have space for me. I can be there for others and I can be there for myself.
And this takes courage and it takes skill and it takes quiet time and some stillness to process this at first
And we can't just go from A to Z in an instant. We often need help along the way. And so if this sounds like you and you're interested in having somebody meet you where you're at and show you how my Aligned method can get you out of that chaos and into a space of clarity and alignment, I invite you to come and have an Aligned Conversation with me.
It's a free conversation just to chat about where you're at, and if it feels right, what the r- next right steps might be for you, and how I could [00:15:00] possibly support you in that journey. You don't have to hold this alone
