When The Ice Melts
A Client’s Journey
One of my clients came to me after years of psychology and marriage counselling. She had always perceived her mother to be controlling and manipulative when growing up. She thought she had “put it out of her mind,” but lately it was weighing on her and she was worried about her own parenting.
Intimacy with her long-term partner had all but disappeared. She felt numb, without desire for touch or connection. At work, a colleague seemed to push her around, and she couldn’t speak up. And her shoulders? Tight, rigid painful. One was heading toward frozen shoulder, which is all too common in perimenopause.
Somatic repatterning
Here’s what we did that changed everything.
I can it somatic repatterning. We revisit those stuck moments in the body’s memory. She lay on the treatment table, eyes closed, while I guided her back to being with her mother. This time with my hands reading the subtle shifts in her body, we let a different experience arise, not imagined, but felt. Feeling safe, warm and without any pressure, her nervous system was able to find space. She had an experience of speaking her truth without feeling wrong or out of line. In that moment she found her voice.
Shifts in the Body and Life
I could feel the moment her body began to shift. Ber breathing softened, emotions surfaced, muscles released tension that had possibly been frozen for decades. We were literally repatterning how her nervous system responds to perceived threat.
After a few sessions, her life began to change. She asked for intimacy with her partner in ways she never imagined before. In qigong class, her shoulders opened into a whole new range of motion, allowing further self-expression. And most surprisingly, that difficult colleague invited her for coffee to explore a creative project together. Two months earlier she would have said that was all impossible.
Why the Body Matters
Embodiment and somatic experiencing are at the core of the work. Now my clients are mostly women navigating or preparing for peri or menopause, and it can be an emotional rollercoaster. What I’ve seen again and again over 25 plus years with my hands on work is: ‘The Body Keeps The Score’. Bessel van der Kolk, MD.
We’ve been pushing through pain our whole lives, especially period pain. An Australian report found 79 percent of menstruating women suffered chronic menstrual symptoms in the past five years; nearly half missed work or study. We pop painkillers and push on. We’re taught not to talk about how our cycle shapes our days. We override the signals. And when we override our body, we send subtle messages to ourselves that we don’t matter.
Then perimenopause arrives — and the body says no more.
A New Way to Heal
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” said Einstein.
When we work through the body, when we support the nervous system, create safety, and allow something new to arise, everything changes. That’s what somatic repatterning offers: not just talking about the past, but giving the body a different experience of it.
This is where we reclaim our Power. No more pushing through. Time to reconnect. To feel the discomfort just enough to trust your body is not the enemy. To unravel the patterns that once kept you safe but now keep you stuck.
It’s an honour to work at this level. To watch someone discover their body has been protecting them all along, and that it’s ready now to open into something new.
If something in this stirs you, reach out. I’m taking new clients.
Big love,
Anny ♥️
