Esalen at 26, Jumping Jacks at 43: A Story About Speaking Up

Driven Women & Perfectionism • November 16, 2025

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Decompensation is what happens when your usual ways of managing stress and trauma stop working, and your emotional or mental health begins to unravel as a result. It is not a sign that you’re broken or beyond help, nor is it a sudden breakdown without warning—it’s more like the warning lights on a dashboard, showing that the coping strategies you once relied on have become insufficient. This matters here because when Annie arrived at Esalen, she was in that exact state: the old ways of holding things together were failing, making it both terrifying and necessary to face her relational trauma more directly. Understanding decompensation helps you recognize when the old survival tools aren’t enough anymore—and that’s actually the beginning of deeper healing, even if it feels like falling apart in the moment.

• You carry the invisible weight of relational trauma when fear and shame quietly stop you from speaking up in moments that matter, just as I experienced at Esalen when a senior leader publicly shamed me for voicing my truth.
• You need to understand that healing relational trauma doesn’t mean erasing fear but learning to hold a new, more compassionate relationship with it—recognizing when your old coping strategies are breaking down, like my early decompensation at Esalen.
• You can witness your progress in small, specific acts of courage—like the moment I spoke up during a fitness class at 43—showing that while fear still visits, the foundation beneath you has truly shifted and deepened.

I want to tell you about something that happened when I was 26, that I’m only now—at 43—really understanding. And then I want to tell you about what happened recently that made me realize: some things change profoundly, and some things still shake in our bones.

1. The Yurt at Esalen
2. When Trauma History Meets Economic Reality
3. Continue Your Healing as a Driven Woman

The Yurt at Esalen

I was living and working at Esalen Institute on the Big Sur coast. If you haven’t been there, it’s 27 acres of healing land perched between the mountains and the Pacific, where people have been coming since the 1960s to do deep transformative work. I’d arrived there in what I now understand was early decompensation—when all the strategies that kept my childhood relational trauma manageable were starting to fail. My Peace Corps service in Uzbekistan had initiated this unraveling, and I’d come to Esalen hoping to put myself back together.

In one of our regular community meetings in a yurt, I spoke up against one of the senior leaders. They were making a decision I thought was wrong for our community, and I said so.

I remember absolutely shaking. Feeling completely and utterly terrified. And yet I still did it. Looking back, I’m actually not sure how I did it, but I did it.

Then the senior leader—in front of everyone—shamed me for what I said. Not disagreed with me. Shamed me.

That particular kind of public shaming has a specific quality to it. The heat in your face, the ringing in your ears, the sense of being very far away from your own body while also acutely present. It’s a physiological response that’s hard to describe if you haven’t experienced it.

That experience impacted me a lot, and not positively.

I left the yurt and went straight to the rock wall outside the Esalen Lodge. I cried. I let my body shake and metabolize what had just happened while the Pacific crashed against the cliffs below. A fellow staff member about my age came and sat down next to me. He’d witnessed the whole exchange and came to check on me.

I remember what he said: “I don’t really understand why this is rattling you so much.”

He didn’t say it to be malicious—I want to be really clear about that. He was checking on me, making sure I was okay. He was well-meaning. But for him, he genuinely couldn’t understand why I was so negatively impacted.

When Trauma History Meets Economic Reality

What I can see now but couldn’t articulate then were the multiple variables at play, and how they compounded each other in a very specific way.

First, I was still at the very early stages of my relational trauma recovery. My nervous system had learned early that challenging authority was dangerous. In my family of origin, speaking up against power meant real consequences—withdrawal of love, emotional abandonment, being seen as the problem. So when I spoke up in that meeting, every alarm bell my childhood had installed was going off.

But here’s the crucial part: those alarm bells weren’t wrong.

When you’re economically vulnerable, every professional interaction carries different weight. I was living and working at Esalen. My employment, my housing, my meals—my survival—was tied to staying in good standing with leadership. I had no financial safety net. No family to go home to. No job prospects at that time. The administration literally had control over whether I had a roof over my head and food to eat.

So when I risked the displeasure of leadership to stand up for what I thought was right, and then received that shaming response, I wasn’t just having a trauma response. I was having a trauma response that was also an accurate assessment of real vulnerability.

My catastrophic thought was that I’d compromised my employment, maybe even lost it. That wasn’t actually true—but it wasn’t irrational either. It was my nervous system doing the math: relational trauma history (speaking up = danger) + current economic precarity (job loss = homelessness) = extreme activation.

Here’s what’s important to say: even if I had been further along in my relational trauma recovery, the fact that I didn’t have finances to lean back on—should the worst-case scenario happen and they fired me—that anxiety still would have been intense. The material vulnerability was real.

My well-meaning colleague? He had a loving family who would welcome him home if he got fired. He had some savings. He had other umbrellas to shelter under where I did not. He wasn’t as attached to preserving his employment because he had actual safety nets.

For him, professional disagreement was just disagreement. For me, it was potentially catastrophic.

That literal shaking, that terror—it had both structural and personal roots.

If you’re ready to go deeper, I work one-on-one with driven, ambitious women through relational trauma recovery therapy and trauma-informed executive coaching. And if this essay resonated, there’s more where it came from — my Substack newsletter goes deeper every week on relational trauma, nervous system healing, and the inner lives of ambitious women. Subscribe for free — I can’t wait to be of support to you.

How Voicelessness Shows Up in Driven Women

In my clinical work with ambitious women, there’s a particular pattern around speaking up that I encounter regularly — and it’s not what most people expect. These aren’t women who are shy, or conflict-averse in the ordinary sense. They’re women who can speak confidently to a boardroom, advocate fiercely for their teams, and negotiate complex deals. But in certain contexts — with a parent, a romantic partner, a group where they feel peripheral — they go completely silent. Or they speak, but afterward feel a bone-deep shame about what they said, how they said it, whether they should have said anything at all.

Elaine is a 37-year-old attending physician who had been presenting at international conferences for a decade. She described herself as “articulate and confident at work” — and then told me about a family dinner where her father made a dismissive comment about her career, and she said nothing. Just sat there, smiling, cutting her food. “I couldn’t make a sound,” she said. “It was like I forgot every word I knew.” What she was experiencing wasn’t a failure of communication skill. It was a nervous system response so old it predated language — the learned silence of a child who discovered that speaking up in her family of origin led to something worse than staying quiet.

What makes this pattern particularly insidious in driven women is the cognitive dissonance it creates. They know, intellectually, that they have the right to speak. They know what they would say if they weren’t frozen. The gap between the confident professional and the silent person at the family dinner feels shameful, confusing, evidence of some fundamental inconsistency. What it actually is, is evidence of a nervous system that learned different rules in different contexts — and hasn’t yet been taught that the old rules don’t apply anymore.

Fawning: The Adaptive Response That Keeps Driving Women Silent

Pete Walker, MFT, psychotherapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, introduced the concept of the “fawn response” as a fourth trauma adaptive strategy alongside fight, flight, and freeze. Fawning is the impulse to manage perceived threat by focusing entirely on the needs, feelings, and preferences of others — suppressing your own responses in favor of keeping the relational peace. In childhood, this can be a genuinely life-preserving adaptation. In a household where conflict is dangerous, learning to anticipate and manage others’ moods keeps you safe.

In adulthood, fawning looks like the inability to say no, the reflexive apology, the smile in the elevator when you’re actually furious, the silent endurance of things that should not be endured. For driven women, it often coexists with fierce professional advocacy — because the fawn response activates selectively, in contexts that neurologically pattern-match to the original danger. You can fight for your team in a meeting and be unable to express a preference at a family dinner in the same afternoon. This is not contradiction. It’s the nervous system being exquisitely accurate about where the historical threat lived.

The path back to voice is not simply deciding to speak up more. It involves helping the nervous system learn that speaking — in this relationship, in this moment — is actually safe. That process is slower and more relational than most self-help frameworks acknowledge. It’s also why working with a skilled trauma-informed therapist can be so transformative: you’re not just practicing new behaviors, you’re renegotiating old agreements your nervous system made with the world about what self-expression costs.

Both/And: You Can Hold Your Success and Your Pain at the Same Time

In clinical work with driven women, one of the most healing shifts happens when they stop framing their experience as either/or. Either I’m strong or I’m struggling. Either I’m grateful for what I have or I’m allowed to hurt. Either my life is objectively good or my pain is valid. The truth, almost always, is both.

Samira is a physician in her early forties — board-certified, respected by colleagues, raising two children she adores. On paper, she’s thriving. In my office, she described a sensation she called “smiling underwater.” Everything looks fine from the outside. Inside, she hasn’t taken a full breath in months. She doesn’t want to complain because she knows how privileged her life looks. But the weight is real, and the isolation of carrying it silently is making it heavier.

This is the paradox I see again and again in my practice: the women who have built the most impressive external lives are often the ones carrying the heaviest internal loads. Not because success caused their suffering, but because the same relational trauma that drove them to achieve also taught them to perform wellness rather than feel it. Both things are true: they are genuinely accomplished, and they are genuinely struggling. Healing begins when they stop forcing themselves to choose between those two realities.

The Both/And here is also about the relationship between healing and privilege. Not everyone has the same access to the resources that make recovery possible — the therapy, the time, the financial safety, the cultural permission to prioritize interior wellbeing. Acknowledging that your healing has required resources others don’t have doesn’t diminish your work. It contextualizes it honestly — and it opens a door to advocacy for the structural conditions that would make this kind of growth available to more people.

The Systemic Lens: Culture, Capitalism, and the Burden Placed on Driven Women

Driven women are systematically taught to locate the source of their suffering internally. If you’re burned out, you need better boundaries. If you’re anxious, you need more mindfulness. If your relationships are strained, you need to communicate better. This framing isn’t accidental — it serves a function. It keeps the focus on individual behavior and away from the structural conditions that make individual behavior so costly.

Consider what the typical driven woman manages in a single day: high-stakes professional work, emotional labor in relationships, mental load of household management, caregiving responsibilities, her own physical and mental health, and the performance of equanimity required to be taken seriously in all of these domains. No one designed this workload to be sustainable because no one designed it at all. It accrued — the result of decades of women entering professional spaces without the domestic and structural supports being redesigned to accommodate that shift.

In my clinical work, I’ve found that naming these systemic forces is itself therapeutic. When a driven woman realizes that her struggle isn’t evidence of personal inadequacy but a predictable response to impossible conditions, something shifts. The shame loosens. The self-blame softens. And she can begin to make choices based on what she actually needs rather than what the system tells her she should be able to handle.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

How to Heal: Finding the Voice You’ve Been Swallowing

In my work with women across many different professional and personal contexts, the pattern I encounter most often around speaking up isn’t simple conflict avoidance or shyness. It’s something more rooted and more painful: the internalized belief, often established very early, that one’s full voice — unfiltered, unmanaged, not adjusted for the room — is too much, not welcome, or genuinely dangerous to express. Whether that lesson was learned in a childhood home, a competitive school, an early workplace, or all three, the body remembers it. And the body will enforce it, reliably, in the moments that matter most — the meeting, the dinner table, the moment when something important needs to be said and instead, the throat tightens and the words don’t come.

The Esalen workshop at 26 and the jumping jacks at 43 aren’t actually separate stories. They’re the same story: about finding, across decades and in different forms, the courage to be present in your body and visible in your experience — to stop performing a curated version of yourself and to actually show up. That kind of showing up doesn’t happen through willpower. It happens through slowly, carefully, therapeutically updating the part of your nervous system that learned, very specifically, what the cost of full presence was. That updating is real, possible, and within reach.

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is one of the most direct paths I know to this kind of change, because the inhibition of voice is a somatic phenomenon before it’s a behavioral one. The freeze response that precedes silence — the tightening in the chest and throat, the sudden emptying of the mind — is the nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you safe. SE works with that pattern at the physiological level, helping the nervous system learn that voice is safe now, that expression doesn’t carry the same consequences it once did. This is slow, careful work, and it tends to produce the kind of lasting change that intellectual resolution alone doesn’t.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is another powerful approach for this work, because it helps you identify and care for the specific parts that have been enforcing silence. There’s almost always a protector part that swallows words before they can land — and it’s not doing so out of weakness or cowardice. It’s doing so because at some point, speaking freely had real consequences. IFS helps you find that part, understand its history, and offer it something new: the experience of a present-day self who can assess the actual safety of the current room, rather than defaulting to the threat assessment of a much earlier time.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is worth considering if there are specific memories — a moment of silencing that landed particularly hard, a public humiliation, a relationship in which your voice was systematically diminished — that continue to have charge when you recall them. EMDR can help your brain reprocess those specific memories so they stop predicting your present-day responses, freeing you to speak from your actual current context rather than from the imprint of older experiences.

For ambitious women who are also navigating leadership contexts — where speaking up carries professional stakes alongside the personal ones — combining this kind of therapeutic work with executive coaching can be particularly effective. Coaching can address the strategic and behavioral dimensions of voice in professional settings, while therapy addresses the deeper architecture that’s been silencing you. Both layers matter.

Your voice has always been in there. It hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just been protected, very carefully, by parts of you that were doing their best with what they knew. Therapy that takes this seriously — that will help you find and free that voice without rushing or forcing — is available. And the woman you’ve been at 26, and at 43, and right now? She deserves to be heard.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer