Newsletter · Coaching and neuroscience
The Woman Who Couldn’t Be Helped
A client told me recently that she’d finally got her life “under control”.
She said it the way you’d report a win. New system for the mornings. Calendar colour-coded. Gym at six. She had, by any visible measure, got herself together.
Then she said: “So why do I feel like I’m holding my breath?”
I didn’t have a good answer for her at the time. I think I do now.
Three weeks ago I sat in a lecture theatre in Oxford listening to Dan Siegel, and he said something that rearranged a drawer in my head.
We talk constantly, these days, about trauma. Siegel made a narrower point: a great deal of what we’re calling trauma isn’t. It’s a mind that has lost the ability to integrate, to keep its own parts talking to each other.
And when that happens, he said, the mind doesn’t fail in a hundred creative ways. It fails in two directions.
It goes to chaos: flooded, reactive, everything arriving at once. Or it goes to rigidity: the same loop, the same defence, the grip tightening.
My client wasn’t flooded. She was the other one. The colour-coded calendar wasn’t the solution to the problem. It was the problem, wearing the costume of competence. She’d built a life so controlled that nothing could move in it, including her.
When I put this to her (not the neuroscience, just the shape of it) she went quiet and then said: “I thought the control was the recovery.”
Most high-functioning people do.
What struck me most about Siegel’s framing is where it puts the work. If the problem is impaired integration, then healing isn’t excavation. You’re not digging for the buried thing. You’re reconnecting what got disconnected.
He put it in a sentence that I’ve been carrying around since: trauma is an assault on essence.
Not on memory. Not on coping. On the thing underneath, who someone actually was before any of it happened.
Which means I’m not building anything new in the people I work with. I’m helping them clear what got laid over the top.
I think about a man I worked with last year who could describe his own patterns with the fluency of a textbook. Two years of coaching, excellent insight, completely stuck. What was missing wasn’t understanding. It was linkage: the part of him that knew and the part of him that lived nowhere near each other. We stopped adding insight. We started noticing what his chest did thirty seconds before he changed the subject. That’s where it moved.
But the line I haven’t been able to put down is the smallest one.
Siegel was talking about secure attachment, which he describes as four things: being seen, safe, soothed, and secure. And then, almost as an aside:
Let them soothe you.
Three words. I’d estimate 80% of the people I coach cannot do this.
They’re magnificent at soothing others. They’re the ones everyone calls at 11pm. They will let you help them think, strategise, plan, decide. They will not, under any circumstances, let you help them settle.
And it isn’t modesty or stoicism. It’s an integration failure. Somewhere along the way the wiring between needing and receiving either never got built, or got built and then buried under fifteen years of being the capable one.
My client with the colour-coded calendar is the same person who told me, in our first session, that she “didn’t want to waste my time with the emotional stuff.”
That sentence is the whole thing, isn’t it.
Here’s what I’ve changed since Oxford.
When someone tells me they’re stuck, I no longer start with what happened. I start by asking myself: is this chaos, or is this rigidity? It’s faster, and it points at what’s needed now instead of what went wrong then.
And I’ve started watching, much more carefully, for the people who can’t be soothed. The competent ones. The ones who arrive with an agenda and no visible need.
That’s usually the door.
A question I’ve been sitting with: when was the last time you let someone help you settle, rather than help you solve?
If you’re the capable one everyone leans on, and you’re tired of holding your breath, let’s talk.