The Pendulum Swing: Why Healing Feels Like Losing Yourself Before Finding Yourself

TRAUMA RECOVERY • June 2026

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

The Woman Who Said Yes to Everything — and Then Couldn’t Say Yes to Anything

Leila had been in therapy for seven months when she called me between sessions, genuinely frightened. She’d turned down a speaking invitation. She’d canceled dinner with a close friend. She’d declined a project that six months earlier she would have taken without hesitation. And that morning, she’d sat in her car in the office parking garage for twenty minutes, unable to make herself go in, and had finally driven home.

She was a 41-year-old attorney, a partner at a firm she’d spent fifteen years building toward. She was not a person who canceled things. She was not a person who sat in parking garages. She was, in her words, “the person everyone calls when they need something done.” The woman who said yes. The woman who showed up. The woman who could always be counted on.

“I think I’m having a breakdown,” she said on the phone. “I think the therapy is making me worse.”

I want to tell you what I told Leila, because if you’re anywhere in the territory of genuine healing from trauma — if the over-functioning is starting to crack, if the automatic yes is becoming harder, if you’re suddenly furious at things that never used to bother you or exhausted by commitments that used to feel energizing — you may be hearing the same terrified voice in your own head.

Leila wasn’t having a breakdown. She wasn’t getting worse. She was experiencing something I’ve named the Pendulum Swing — one of the most predictable, most misunderstood, and most necessary phases of relational trauma recovery. And understanding it changed everything for her.

What Is the Pendulum Swing?

The Pendulum Swing describes the predictable behavioral overcorrection that occurs when a driven, ambitious woman first begins to dismantle her trauma responses — the patterns of over-functioning, people-pleasing, hyper-independence, and relentless productivity that kept her safe, relationally and physiologically, in an earlier environment.

For decades, she has been pinned to one extreme of the behavioral spectrum. This extreme wasn’t a choice — it was a survival strategy. The fawn response that kept her safe from a volatile caregiver. The flight response that converted her terror into productivity. The accommodation that purchased conditional belonging. These strategies were extraordinarily effective at what they were designed to do: keep her alive, keep her loved, keep her above reproach.

When the therapeutic work begins to loosen the grip of these survival strategies — when she starts, for the first time, to question the automatic yes, to take up a little more space, to rest without guilt, to say what she actually thinks — something unexpected happens. She doesn’t land gracefully in the middle. She swings hard to the opposite extreme.

The woman who never said no suddenly wants to say no to everything. The woman who managed everyone’s emotional needs suddenly feels completely apathetic about other people’s feelings. The woman who worked 80-hour weeks suddenly wants to quit her job and lie on the floor for a month. The woman who was always available is suddenly unreachable.

This is the Pendulum Swing. And I want to be absolutely clear: this is not the person becoming selfish or lazy or mentally unwell. This is the nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do when a long-held tension is finally released — it seeks the opposite extreme before it can find the middle.

If you’re in this territory and wondering whether something is deeply wrong, the relational wound quiz can help you understand the patterns you’re moving through.

The Neurobiology of Overcorrection

The Pendulum Swing isn’t a psychological metaphor. It has a neurobiological basis that explains both why it’s inevitable and why it’s temporary.

Peter Levine, PhD, somatic experiencing developer and author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, documents a fundamental principle of somatic trauma recovery: the nervous system stores energy from incomplete survival responses, and when that energy is finally released — when the chronic activation of the fight/flight response begins to discharge — the body seeks equilibrium through movement in the opposite direction. The spring that has been compressed for decades doesn’t gently decompress; it expands with force proportional to the compression.

In Polyvagal Theory terms, Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and developer of Polyvagal Theory, describes the nervous system as moving through states — ventral vagal (safety, connection), sympathetic (mobilization), and dorsal vagal (shutdown). A woman who has spent years in chronic sympathetic activation (flight: overwork, over-functioning, relentless productivity) has accumulated an enormous deficit of the opposite experience. When her system begins to access ventral vagal safety, the compensatory pull toward rest, withdrawal, and reduced output is proportional to the depth and duration of the prior hyperactivation.

The dialectical framework from Marsha Linehan, PhD, psychologist and founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, offers another lens. Linehan’s concept of dialectical synthesis — moving between extremes in order to find a sustainable middle — applies directly to the Pendulum Swing: the overcorrection isn’t a mistake. It’s part of the dialectical process of finding integration. You have to know the opposite extreme before you can build a genuine synthesis.

Richard Schwartz, PhD, founder of Internal Family Systems therapy and author of No Bad Parts, provides another theoretical frame. Within IFS, the Pendulum Swing can be understood as the sudden relaxation of a hyper-vigilant Manager part — the protective part of the psyche that has been suppressing the Exiled Selves (the Vulnerable, the Angry, the Exhausted) through relentless over-functioning. When the Manager’s grip loosens, the Exiles don’t emerge gradually. They emerge all at once, with an intensity proportional to how long they’ve been suppressed. The sudden anger, the refusal, the withdrawal — these aren’t evidence that the Exiled Selves are pathological. They’re evidence of how long they’ve been waiting.

Published research by Schwartz and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Psychology (2013) supports this framework: IFS was found to significantly improve PTSD symptoms and the integration of traumatic material through the process of working with parts — which includes, crucially, allowing previously suppressed parts to have voice. (PMID: 23784690)

Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of Trauma and Recovery, describes the oscillation between extremes as characteristic of trauma recovery: clients move between hyperarousal and numbing, between approach and avoidance, between engagement and withdrawal. Herman’s framework positions this oscillation not as dysfunction but as part of the nervous system’s attempt to process what it has been carrying — a perspective that maps precisely onto what I observe in the Pendulum Swing phase.

How the Pendulum Swing Shows Up in Driven Women

The Pendulum Swing looks different depending on where the woman was pinned before therapy began. The specific shape of the overcorrection reflects the specific shape of the suppression.

For the chronic people-pleaser, the swing looks like a sudden, intense need to say no — to everything, without discrimination. The woman who apologized for her own presence is suddenly curt in meetings. The woman who stayed late to support her team is suddenly unwilling to answer after-hours messages. The woman who smoothed over every relational rupture is suddenly letting things sit unaddressed for weeks. From the outside, she may look rude or cold. From the inside, she often doesn’t fully understand what’s happening — only that the old way feels impossible now and she doesn’t yet have access to the middle ground.

For the chronic over-functioner, the swing looks like paralysis. The woman who managed fourteen projects simultaneously suddenly can’t prioritize one. The woman who was always three steps ahead is suddenly unable to plan anything beyond today. The woman who everyone relied on is suddenly struggling to rely on herself. This can look like depression — and it may involve depressive symptoms — but it’s categorically different from depression in its etiology and in what it requires clinically.

For the achievement-driven woman whose identity is fused with productivity, the swing looks like a profound loss of motivation. The career she spent years building feels irrelevant. The goals she worked toward feel empty. The woman who has always known exactly what she’s working toward suddenly doesn’t know why she’s doing any of it. This is the existential dimension of the Pendulum Swing — the moment when the achievement stops filling the void and the actual void becomes visible.

Leila’s story.

Back to Leila, in the parking garage. When she came into session the following week, I helped her understand what was actually happening. For fifteen years, she had managed a law practice, her family’s emotional ecosystem, her clients’ crises, and her own internal world with flawless efficiency. She had said yes to everything that mattered to anyone she cared about. She had never, to her conscious memory, simply refused something because she didn’t want to do it.

Seven months into therapy, the grip of this pattern had loosened enough that her authentic self — the one who was exhausted, who had limits, who had wants of her own — was starting to surface. And it was surfacing not gently but with the force of fifteen years of suppression. The refusals weren’t measured. The withdrawal wasn’t calibrated. The Pendulum had swung.

When I named this for Leila — when I told her that she wasn’t having a breakdown but a breakthrough, that what she was experiencing was her nervous system finally paying down a debt it had been accruing since her twenties — she was quiet for a long moment. Then she said: “You mean I’m not becoming a bad person. I’m becoming a person.”

Yes. Exactly.

The Fear That You’ve Become Someone Else

One of the most distressing aspects of the Pendulum Swing phase is the fear that the overcorrection is revealing who you “really are.” The woman who has spent years being generous, available, and accommodating finds herself suddenly irritable, withdrawn, and unwilling — and fears that she’s discovered her true nature. That beneath the helpful exterior was always an angry, selfish person who just needed permission to emerge.

This fear is almost always unfounded. But it’s worth taking seriously, because it drives some of the most damaging responses to the Pendulum Swing — including the attempt to snap back to the old extreme out of shame about the new one.

The cleaving Dickinson describes — the sense of the self splitting, of the parts not fitting together — is exactly what the Pendulum Swing can feel like from the inside. The person who has always been one thing is suddenly being another thing entirely, and neither version feels entirely true. Both feel like costumes. There’s a profound disorientation to it that is genuinely distressing and that deserves to be named as such.

What’s actually happening is that the woman is in transition between two false poles — the trauma-driven performance of the old self, and the overcorrected swing of the Pendulum. Neither of these is her actual authentic self. Her authentic self is what will emerge when the pendulum finally slows: neither the relentless yes-woman nor the person who refuses everything, but someone who has actual access to choice.

The therapeutic task during this phase is neither to push the pendulum back nor to let it swing unchecked. It’s to normalize the swing, name what’s happening, prevent the panic from causing a reversion to the old extreme, and trust the process. The center comes. It always comes.

This is what working with me individually or through the Fixing the Foundations course looks like at this particular stage of recovery: not trying to manage or minimize the Pendulum Swing, but helping you understand it clearly enough that you can move through it rather than recoiling from it.

Both/And: This Is Regression AND It’s Progress

The most useful clinical reframe for the Pendulum Swing is the Both/And: this is terrifying AND it’s a sign that something is working. These two things are simultaneously true.

What I see consistently when clients don’t have the Pendulum Swing framework available to them: they panic at the overcorrection, interpret it as evidence of failure or dysfunction, and revert to the old extreme. The pattern snaps back into place. The over-functioning resumes. The people-pleasing reconsolidates. And the woman enters another period of managed hyper-competence with a slightly more bitter undertone — she tried to change and it didn’t work.

What I see when clients understand what’s actually happening: they can stay in the swing. They can be uncomfortable with the withdrawal or the refusal or the apathy without it meaning they’re broken. They can trust the process enough to let the pendulum move through its full arc, knowing that the center — which is the actual destination — is on the other side of the overcorrection, not on the far side of a snap-back.

Dani is a 36-year-old entrepreneur who has been in trauma-informed therapy for about five months when the Pendulum Swing hits. She’s been working on her hyperindependence — the pattern of refusing help, managing everything herself, and experiencing genuine vulnerability as humiliating. For most of her life, this has looked like competence. In therapy, it’s beginning to soften.

And then something shifts. Dani stops returning calls from people she actually cares about. She cancels two investor meetings that she genuinely wants to take. She misses a deadline for the first time in her professional career and doesn’t scramble to fix it. She is convinced she’s depressed. She may also be, she says, “becoming someone I don’t recognize.”

When I introduce the Pendulum Swing framework, Dani’s response is the one I’ve seen most often: relief mixed with skepticism. “So this is actually okay?” she asks. “This weird apathy is actually okay?”

Not forever. But right now — yes. It’s your nervous system paying down somatic debt. It’s your system recalibrating from the far end of over-functioning toward a center it has never been able to access. The apathy is the pendulum mid-arc. The center comes next.

The Systemic Lens: Why the Swing Feels So Alarming

The Pendulum Swing feels so alarming, in part, because the systems around the driven woman don’t know how to hold it.

Her workplace has been structured around her over-functioning. Her family system has been organized by her over-accommodation. Her relationships have been calibrated to her always being available, always saying yes, always managing the emotional temperature. When she swings — when the yes becomes a no, when the availability becomes withdrawal, when the management becomes refusal — the systems around her send a clear signal: something is wrong. Come back.

This isn’t necessarily malicious. In many cases, the people around her genuinely love her and are genuinely worried. But the system’s anxiety about her Pendulum Swing can be profoundly destabilizing, because it amplifies her own fear that she’s becoming someone unacceptable.

The systemic lens asks: who benefits from the woman staying at the extreme end of the pendulum? Who benefits from her over-functioning, her availability, her relentless yes? The answer is usually: everyone except her. And the system’s resistance to the Pendulum Swing is, in part, the system trying to maintain its own equilibrium at her expense.

Part of the clinical work during the Pendulum Swing phase is helping a woman distinguish between feedback that’s genuinely useful — “this complete withdrawal isn’t serving your relationships” — and pressure from systems that want her to resume her role as the one who manages everything. These are different sources of feedback that require different responses. Learning to tell them apart is part of the work of moving toward the center.

The trauma-informed executive coaching I offer addresses this systemic dimension explicitly: not just helping a woman navigate her internal experience of the Pendulum Swing, but helping her understand and navigate the systemic pressures that are trying to push her back to the old extreme.

How to Move Through the Pendulum Swing Toward Center

The Pendulum Swing is a phase. The center comes. Here’s what I know about how to move through it.

Name it, don’t pathologize it. The most important thing you can do when you’re in the swing is understand what it is. Not a breakdown. Not a personality change. Not evidence that you’re becoming selfish or lazy or mentally unwell. A phase of recovery — the predictable overcorrection that happens when a long-compressed spring finally releases. Naming it accurately changes your relationship to it. You can be in it without being terrified of it.

Don’t snap back out of shame. The greatest clinical risk during the Pendulum Swing is the reversion: the shame-driven snap back to the old extreme. You feel the apathy and panic. You feel the refusal and feel guilty. You feel the withdrawal and worry that you’re hurting people. And you pull yourself back to the over-functioning, the accommodation, the relentless yes. The snap-back feels like recovery but it’s actually a return to the trauma pattern. The center is ahead, not behind.

Reduce the amplitude, don’t stop the swing. If the overcorrection is causing real harm — genuine damage to relationships you care about, significant professional consequences that can’t be undone — it’s appropriate to gently moderate the amplitude of the swing. Not by snapping back to the old extreme, but by introducing small, conscious choices that maintain some of your core values even in the overcorrection phase. The goal is to let the pendulum swing fully enough to recalibrate, while supporting the relationships and commitments that genuinely matter.

Use the swing for information. The Pendulum Swing is showing you what the extreme of over-functioning cost you — because the opposite extreme is where all those costs become visible. The person who’s been managing everyone’s emotions for fifteen years and suddenly can’t manage anyone’s emotions has discovered, through the swing, how much that management required. That’s essential information for building the middle: a life in which you give from genuine capacity rather than from suppressed survival terror.

Trust the center. Every person I’ve worked with who has moved through the Pendulum Swing has found the center. Not immediately. Not without difficulty. But the pendulum does slow. The overcorrection does moderate. What emerges is genuine — a self with actual access to choice, flexible limits, sustainable ambition, and connection that doesn’t require self-erasure. That’s the destination. And the Pendulum Swing is the path to it, not a deviation from it.

If you’re in the swing right now — if you’re frightened by what you see in yourself, convinced that something has gone wrong — I’d invite you to bring that to therapy where it can be held accurately. And I’d invite you to consider the possibility that what you’re experiencing is not the worst thing. It might be, as Leila said, the moment you’re finally becoming a person.

Related Reading

• Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992. https://www.basicbooks.com
• Levine, Peter. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1997. https://www.northatlanticbooks.com
• Schwartz, R.C. (2013). Moving From Acceptance Toward Transformation With Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS). Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(8), 805–816. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23784690/
• van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014. https://www.besselvanderkolk.com
• Schwartz, Richard C. No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Boulder: Sounds True, 2021. https://www.soundstrue.com

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Medical Disclaimer