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.

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.

Jordan 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 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.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer