The unfinished chapters
The Somatics of Change, Part III - the pause is the shift
I’ve read a substack piece by Amie McNee on consuming and creating art and one phrase stick with me:
Let it change you before you move on.
After something ends, don’t immediately reach for the next thing. How has it changed you? It will have in some way or another, can you notice what it left you with? What did it give you?
When I read it, I resonated so much with the words and the questions. Because I've been writing about change and how it impacts the nervous system, oscillating between education and personal story. But what I've actually been trying to say, all along, is this:
Why can't we stop to become?
I’ve never paused…
The past weeks I noticed something. Even though I preach the pause, I had never actually paused in this one specific area of my life. The rebuilding of my professional self.
Here is the short version of what happened.
Political science degree. Travelling in Central Asia. Working as a German teacher. Retail in Berlin. Then working my way up in a political consultancy from assistant to senior manager. Then pregnancy. And then, while I was on maternity leave, my contract was terminated.
That move destabilised me deeply. Even though I wasn’t a fan of the work anymore and it was becoming clear that this chapter was closing, I was hurt by the treatment. And until now, I carry a fear of putting myself into the wrong environment, doing work I can’t fully stand behind.
But this is what I can see and name now. Back then, I couldn’t.
What happened after being let go from the consultancy that had been slowly draining my aliveness was a long, painful phase of confusion. From the outside it looked like I was simply on maternity leave, recovering. But inside there was constant vigilance. Vague anxiety about direction. Thoughts about applications and trainings running on loop. A deep unsafety when my maternity support ran out and my husband was providing for us fully.
I was still in the depths of becoming a mother. One hundred percent of my life dedicated to mothering and stabilising myself. But I couldn’t stop worrying, couldn’t surrender, couldn’t trust that something good was coming.
I didn’t let the experience change me. I just moved on.
And I took the hypervigilance with me.
No pause, no change
As a consequence of never actually grieving the closed chapter of my consultancy years, I kept running into the next thing. I started my Somatic Experiencing training fairly soon after and it has been three wonderful years, with so much growth and pain and reconnection. And while I loved the learning, I never envisioned what would come after it.
Never thought about how I would set myself up as a practitioner. Never prepared myself for being self-employed. Never considered that I would need support in building a sustainable foundation for my work.
So I started pushing through instead.
After receiving my certification, I didn’t feel much. I didn’t celebrate or mark the completion with any kind of ritual. I just ran somewhere, maybe even in circles, like a headless chicken. The hypervigilance never left. And underneath it, a quiet panic that I would never be able to sustain myself through this work.
Naturally, everything about building my practice became extremely challenging. The essence of somatic work is an organic pendulation between action and rest, growing into things in alignment with resources and circumstances. My experience became the opposite. Pushing through. High effort without matching outcomes. And a subtle but ever-present story: I can’t make it, because I’m not worthy of it.
I missed the moment of integration. And so I carried all the beliefs, the stress responses, and the unprocessed emotions forward with me.
How can I expect things to move lighter if I never let go of the heaviness?
Four years in, and I’m having an epiphany
Everything I learned about becoming a mother, the big shifts on every level, the need to pause and reconnect, to complete cycles and integrate the learnings, applies to shifting careers as well.
The way I have been handling my work until now is based on protective strategies, deeply imprinted in my nervous system. Unconscious, until we create the space for them to arise. They only become visible when three things are present: safety, resources, and circumstances that are finally aligned enough to hold the weight of seeing clearly.
If I had had these realisations right after my contract was terminated, I’m not sure I would have had the resources to not fall into a pit of desperation. The protective responses actually kept me going.
They got me here.
But they took energy. Even more so, because I was also mothering two toddlers while repairing my marriage while settling into a new culture.
Four years in, and I’m exhausted
I have to admit honestly, from the depth of my bones, that I’m exhausted. And now from the work itself, but because of the unconscious protection and working against it.
The effort that doesn’t bring the outcome I want. The pushing through to perform productivity. The impostor and the perfectionist trying to manage how I appear. The countless content pieces sitting hidden on my phone. Visible for one week and then retreating for three.
This is not how I imagined it.
But it makes sense.
It makes sense that all my protective strategies got a grip on the way I handle my work.
It makes sense because I moved on without feeling the change after each chapter.
It makes sense because it’s not a conscious choice, there’s no fault in it, no right or wrong, just organic and intelligent responses to a life I had never learned how to build.
It makes sense given where I come from. It makes sense because this is the first time in my life I’m doing something like this, by myself, for other women.
And then…?
And then my body stopped me. Completely.
A bunch of symptoms arrived, unexpected. An old thought pattern would have said: something is wrong with me. But this time I knew how to listen.
It’s simple and uncomfortable.
A pause. The pause.
Asking:
How have I changed?
What did I gain, what did I lose?
What was moved in me?
And the most uncomfortable one of all: how do I feel?
And then actually feeling it.
The fear. The panic. The unworthiness. The doubt. The anxiety. The confusion. The pain of pushing. The vulnerability of being seen. All of it, not at once, but aligned with the resources I have and the circumstances I’m in.
That makes all the difference.
The body pulls the brake and instead of overriding it, I go with it. I notice the objections and I go with it anyway. I become very quiet. I listen. I soften. I feel.
And when by the end of the day I notice a little relief, I know I’ve listened well.
The pause IS the shift
The shift happens in the pause. When we cry or collapse, and still feel held.
And no one knows what the pause will bring up. I didn’t expect my body to object the way it did. I didn’t expect to move between collapse and emotional sensitivity and still find the courage to look deeply into myself.
That’s the thing about pausing. There’s no certainty. It feels unsafe because IT IS unsafe.
BUT it’s only then we can move on. With less effort. Gathering new evidence. Seeing the world differently. Having more energy for things that are actually aligned, without the pushing through.
“Let it change you before you move on.”
It literally means this: integrate your experience. Let it move through you. And then check in with who you are now. It’s the pause that changes us profoundly.
The pause is not the opposite of moving forward.
It’s what makes moving forward possible.
With Love & Care,
Elmira