Finding Calm in the Chaos

A client said to me recently “I feel like my emotions run my whole life. I never feel steady anymore.”

And I knew exactly what she meant, because it’s the story I hear from so many women who come to me.

Women who are holding too much.
Women whose nervous systems are tired from years of being in survival mode.
Women who never got the chance to learn what regulation actually feels like.

Not the Instagram version.
Not the cold-water-therapy version (designed around male physiology! read my thoughts on this here)
But the real kind, the quiet, slow, rebuilding-your-safety-from-the-inside kind.

She came to me not to be “fixed,” not to become a different person, but simply because she was exhausted from holding everything together.
She wanted to stop spiralling.
To stop snapping.
To stop shutting down.
To feel like herself again.

And in one session, she said something that stayed with me:

“I didn’t even realise how long I’d been living in fight-or-flight until I felt my body soften for the first time.”

That’s the thing about chronic overwhelm, it becomes normal.
You don’t always notice you’re drowning until your feet touch the ground again.

And here’s the part many women never get told:

Your nervous system isn’t misbehaving.
It’s protecting you.
It’s overworking because it hasn’t had another way.

When you’ve spent years being told to “just calm down,” “stop overreacting,” or “get on with it,” your system learns to survive, not to settle.

And advice like cold plunges, rigid routines, or high-intensity resets?
They were never created with women’s bodies in mind, especially not women living with trauma, masking, hormonal shifts, or neurodivergence.
For many women, those methods don’t soothe the system, they shock it.

Regulation doesn’t have to look dramatic.
Sometimes it looks like:

Slow breathing until your shoulders drop for the first time in days.
Letting yourself pause instead of push.
Feeling your feet on the ground and realising you’re here, not back in the past.
Letting warmth, not ice, bring your body back home.

One of the biggest myths is that you need to control your emotions.
You don’t.
You just need to learn how to move with them rather than drown in them.

And that’s what emotional regulation really is:
Not perfection.
Not stoicism.
Not never feeling overwhelmed again.

But knowing how to find your way back to yourself.

If you’re reading this and recognising that you have been in survival mode for months/years, the reality is it has probably been even longer than that.

And you don’t have to navigate it alone.

If you want support in learning how to regulate your emotions, soften your nervous system, and feel safe inside yourself again, I offer one-to-one therapy, gentle, grounded, collaborative.

Not to turn you into someone else.

But to help you come home to you.

You deserve to feel steady.
You deserve to feel safe.
You deserve calm that actually lasts.

If you’re ready, reach out.
We’ll take it one gentle step at a time.