Unstuck

For years now—especially this past year—I’ve been walking a steady path of unburdening. If you know the language of Internal Family Systems (IFS), you know that at our core, beneath all of the layers of fear and protection, there is something whole and steady—a Self. A quiet leader inside of us that was never broken, even when life was.

And yet, life happens. We adapt. We form parts.

Some of those parts are exiles—frozen in time, trapped in scenes our nervous systems couldn’t fully process. Others are protectors, working tirelessly to keep us safe: the managers, who hold everything together through control, perfectionism, planning, or pushing; the firefighters, who rush in when the pain gets too close, distracting us with urgency, chaos, or numbing.

I’ve spent years meeting these parts with curiosity and compassion. I’ve walked through darkness and found light. And in recent months, I’ve tasted something that felt like heaven on earth—ease, presence, and the kind of joy that makes you forget what it was ever like to be lost.

Which is why I didn’t see it coming.

The stuckness before the storm.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. - Carl Jung

In the weeks before a simple breathwork class, I started noticing something I used to label “ADHD” getting louder. Tasks that already felt difficult on ordinary days became nearly impossible. I’d start the laundry and never finish. I’d open my laptop and go blank. The dishes sat in the sink, unwashed for days. Everything felt like wading through molasses.

And then there was the closet—a small but persistent pile of chaos that seemed to follow me no matter how much I healed. I’d cleared so much over the years—my home, my patterns, my nervous system. But this little pocket of disarray clung on like a whisper from the past.

I didn’t know then that it was a map back to the part of me who had been waiting for me to finally come home.

During breathwork, sober and unsuspecting, I touched something ancient inside me. A part that had been frozen in absolute horror for forty years. She didn’t know it was 2025. She didn’t know I had grown up. She had been holding terror in silence, alone.

The next morning, I felt two things at once: a freedom so vast it filled every cell, and an exhaustion so heavy it flattened me.

Freeing an exile is triumphant. But it also comes with layers of grief.

I cancelled work. I crawled into my closet—the one that had always held that little pile of chaos—and I wept. Not the soft kind. The guttural, body-shaking, snot-on-the-floor kind of weeping. Over and over I whispered, “I’m so, so sorry. I’m so, so sorry, girly.”

I had never not been free.
She had just never been met.

The next day, I bought flowers and a candle. I let soft music fill the closet as I sat with her, and together we turned the moment into a ceremony of our own making.

We cleaned out the closet together—this time not to fix, not to control, but to honor. To say: We don’t need to carry this chaos anymore. We’re not stuck.

She’s still learning to trust me. Parts like this often do. But now she knows I’m here—43, steady, strong. And she can rest.

Sometimes people talk about healing like it’s a clean break—one moment, one revelation and suddenly we’re free. But that’s never been my experience. When it comes to our hearts, healing is almost always a tender unraveling. It can look like a ceremony of tears and flowers and laundry and closets.

Sometimes freedom looks like bliss. Sometimes it looks like snot and shaking in the dark. But either way—it’s real. And every time you meet a part of yourself with love, the world inside you grows a little wider, a little softer, a little more free.