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

TRAUMA RECOVERY • July 23, 2026

The Morning Everything Felt Too Loud

Camila is sitting in her parked car outside her office at 8:14 in the morning, hands still on the wheel, engine off, unable to make herself open the door. Two months ago she could not have located this feeling if you had asked her to. She would have told you she was fine, in the flat, efficient way she has described herself as fine for a decade. Now the sound of her own turn signal clicking off a moment ago is still ringing in her ears, too loud, too specific, and her chest has gone tight for no reason she can name.

She has been in therapy for nine weeks. For the first six, she felt, if anything, a little lighter, like she had finally set down a bag she had forgotten she was carrying. Then, without warning, the ground shifted. She started crying in the shower. She snapped at her husband over a dish left in the sink. She woke at three in the morning with her heart going hard and no memory of what she had been dreaming, only the residue of alarm.

Camila tells me she feels like she is falling apart. She uses that phrase twice, unprompted, and asks, with real fear in her voice, whether therapy is making things worse. She had a system. It worked, or at least it functioned, and now it is gone and nothing has replaced it yet except this raw, unfamiliar static.

What Camila is describing is not a setback. It is one of the most consistent, least explained parts of trauma recovery: the pendulum swing, the way a nervous system locked for years into a narrow, manageable range of feeling starts moving again once it feels safe enough, and that movement can feel, before it feels like anything else, like losing your mind.

In my work with clients, I have sat with this exact moment again and again: a woman who did the responsible thing, got support, and then found herself feeling worse than before she started. She is not broken. She is right in the middle of the part of healing nobody warned her about.

What Is the Pendulum Swing?

The pendulum swing describes something I have observed constantly in clinical work with trauma survivors: healing does not move in a straight line from bad to good. It moves, instead, through a period of oscillation, swinging between two poles, numbness and overwhelm, shutdown and flooding, before the nervous system gradually finds a steadier middle range it can actually live in.

Before recovery begins, many trauma survivors live inside a narrowed range. Feeling too much was dangerous once, so the system learned to feel less. That narrowing can look like calm from the outside. It is not calm. It is containment, and containment has a cost that compounds quietly for years.

When containment loosens, whether through therapy, a safer relationship, or enough time and safety accumulating, the range widens again. A system that has not practiced feeling a full range of sensation in years does not widen smoothly. It swings, overcorrecting first toward overwhelm, then retreating toward numbness, then swinging again, each pass a little less extreme, until the arc narrows into something workable.

Research on self-compassion and complex trauma symptoms found that survivors who reported harsher self-judgment during difficult emotional periods also reported more severe, more persistent symptoms, while a gentler internal stance was associated with symptoms that resolved more readily (research on self-compassion and complex PTSD symptom patterns). This matters during the swing itself, because how a woman narrates her own overwhelm to herself, as catastrophe versus a difficult but temporary phase, appears to shape how long that phase lasts.

It helps to understand what the pendulum swing is not. It is not a relapse. It is not evidence earlier progress was fake. Understanding how relational trauma actually takes root makes this pattern less frightening, because it reframes the swing as the nervous system’s honest attempt to reorganize, not proof the reorganizing has failed.

The Biology of Swinging Between Numb and Overwhelm

Bruce McEwen, PhD, the American neuroendocrinologist who spent his career at Rockefeller University, coined the term allostatic load to describe the cumulative wear that chronic stress places on the body through repeated cycles of activation and recovery. His research showed that a body and brain repeatedly forced to adapt to threat, without adequate recovery time, accumulates measurable physiological cost in the cardiovascular system, the immune system, and the brain regions responsible for regulating emotion. McEwen died in 2020, but the framework he built remains one of the clearest explanations for why chronic stress leaves a lasting mark long after the original threat is gone.

That accumulated load is a large part of why the pendulum swing exists at all. A nervous system carrying years of allostatic load has spent that time in a narrow, defended range, and when it finally has enough safety to widen again, it does not have practiced, moderate movement available yet. It has two settings it knows well, shutdown and alarm, and little established territory in between. The swing between them is the system testing the water before it can build a middle it trusts.

Robert Sapolsky, PhD, the American neuroendocrinologist and professor at Stanford University known for his research on the biology of stress, has described how a stress response that is useful in short bursts becomes damaging when it runs continuously without adequate recovery. His work helps explain why the swing itself is often more exhausting than either extreme alone; the body is repeatedly ramping up and standing down, and each transition carries its own physiological cost.

Sleep is one of the clearest places this shows up. A study examining sleep variability in women in their twenties and early thirties with posttraumatic stress found that inconsistent, unpredictable sleep patterns, rather than simply insufficient sleep, tracked closely with symptom severity, suggesting that the instability itself, not just the deprivation, is part of what keeps a nervous system dysregulated (research on sleep variability and posttraumatic stress in early adulthood). Many women in the thick of the pendulum swing describe exactly this: nights of deep, almost drugged sleep followed by nights of wide-awake vigilance, with no obvious pattern connecting the two.

Later-life research adds a longer view. A study on coping strategies among survivors of prolonged adversity found that the specific coping styles a person developed early tended to persist across decades, and that survivors who learned more flexible coping later in life showed meaningfully better outcomes than those locked into a single rigid strategy (research on later-life coping among survivors of prolonged adversity). Flexibility, not permanent calm, is the marker of health this research points toward, and the swing is often the uncomfortable process of building that flexibility for the first time.

How the Pendulum Swing Shows Up in Driven Women

In my clinical practice, the pendulum swing rarely announces itself as a textbook symptom. It shows up instead as confusion, often paired with real alarm, in women who pride themselves on being predictable to themselves. They know their own baselines. They have built entire careers on self-awareness and control. The swing violates both.

Lorena’s story. Lorena is a forty-one-year-old surgeon who has spent two decades being praised for staying calm inside operating rooms where other people panic. She came to see me because her marriage was quietly falling apart, and within a few sessions it became clear that Lorena had been operating, for most of her adult life, in a state of managed numbness that let her function at an extraordinary level while feeling almost nothing underneath it.

Six weeks into our work, Lorena called me on a Tuesday, something she had never done, because she had cried in a hospital stairwell after a routine consult and could not explain why. “I don’t recognize myself,” she told me, her voice tight in a way I had not heard before. “I have never cried at work in my life. Now I can’t predict what is going to set me off.” She was terrified therapy had made her worse at her job, at the exact moment she needed to be sharpest.

What was actually happening was that Lorena’s nervous system, after years of narrow, controlled numbness, had started to widen, and the widening arrived first as overwhelm because overwhelm was the only direction it initially knew how to move. She had not lost her composure. She had regained access to a range of feeling she had shut down so long ago she had forgotten it existed.

Research examining how childhood adversity relates to later body-focused coping behaviors found that adults with higher levels of early adversity were more likely to rely on behaviors that numb or redirect physical sensation, rather than process the underlying feeling directly (research on childhood adversity and body-focused coping behaviors). This tracks with what I see in driven women like Lorena, who excel at pushing through exhaustion, hunger, or pain without registering distress, a skill that reads as discipline until the numbing lifts.

This pattern also intersects heavily with people pleasing as a trauma response in driven women, since the same capacity to override internal signals in service of performance also drives the compulsive accommodation many driven women describe. The nervous system that learned to mute distress for the sake of surgery, or a board meeting, or simply not being difficult, is the same one now swinging wide open once it finally feels enough safety to move.

Why This Feels Like Losing Yourself

The identity most driven women build is, understandably, built on top of whatever emotional range felt sustainable at the time. If numbness was sustainable, competence gets constructed on a foundation of numbness. If constant vigilance was sustainable, competence gets constructed on hyperalertness. Either way, a woman comes to believe the range she has access to is simply who she is.

When the pendulum swing arrives and that range widens, it does not feel like gaining something. It feels like losing the self that was, until recently, entirely reliable. A woman who always knew exactly how she would respond in a crisis suddenly does not know. A woman who never cried at work suddenly cries at work. The felt experience is not expansion. It is the vertigo of a floor that used to be solid ground.

I think about that line often, because so many women mid-swing describe a version of the same fear: that using their strength honestly, without the old armor of managed feeling, will finally expose something unbearable. What they tend to discover instead is closer to what Lorde describes, that the fear does not have to resolve before the strength gets used. The two exist together for a while.

Part of what makes this stretch so disorienting is that it arrives at exactly the moment a woman expected relief. She did the hard thing. The reasonable expectation is that things get easier. Instead, for a while, they often get louder and less predictable, which reads as failure rather than the necessary, unwelcome middle of the process.

Research on building resilience under sustained stress found that resilience is best understood not as the absence of struggle but as the capacity to keep functioning and recovering across repeated difficult periods, including periods involving visible distress rather than composed endurance (research on building resilience under sustained stress). That contradicts the version of strength many driven women were raised to believe in, where staying composed is the whole measure of doing well. A woman crying in a stairwell and returning to work the next day may be demonstrating more resilience than the version of herself that never cried at all.

This disorientation also explains why so many women wonder, mid-swing, whether they are regressing into old patterns of anxious attachment or old habits of trauma bonding they thought they had outgrown. Often what looks like regression is old material becoming visible now that numbness is no longer hiding it, not evidence that no progress has been made.

Both/And: You Are Regressing AND You Are Healing

I want to name something directly, because it is the crux of this pattern: during the pendulum swing, you are, in a real sense, regressing. Old reactions resurface. Old fears get loud again. Behaviors you thought you had left behind reappear, sometimes with startling intensity. That part is not a distortion.

And you are also healing. Both things are true simultaneously, and most of the fear around the swing comes from believing these two facts must contradict each other, that regression disproves healing, or that real healing looks like a smooth, uninterrupted upward line. It rarely does.

The both/and here is not a tidy resolution. It is a genuine holding of two facts that feel, at three in the morning, mutually exclusive: you are more dysregulated right now than you were eight weeks ago, and you are also further along than you were eight weeks ago. The dysregulation is not happening despite the progress. It is frequently a direct consequence of it.

Research on childhood adversity and later body-focused coping adds useful texture here, showing that as survivors moved away from numbing strategies, many reported an initial spike in distress before that distress settled into more manageable, better-regulated patterns over subsequent months (further research on childhood adversity and coping behavior change). The spike was not the failure of the process. It was a fairly reliable marker that the process had actually started.

Research on self-compassion during complex trauma recovery reinforces the same both/and structure. It found that survivors who could hold self-criticism and self-kindness together, rather than insisting one replace the other, moved through symptomatic periods with less prolonged suffering than those who treated any setback as proof the whole effort had failed (further research on self-compassion and complex trauma recovery). Holding both truths appears to be part of what actually shortens the swing.

This both/and framing also softens a woman’s relationship to the layered, cumulative nature of complex trauma, because it removes the pressure for healing to be linear in order to count as real. It also clarifies why recognizable signs of healing so often include periods that do not, on the surface, look like healing at all.

The Systemic Lens: Why Steadiness Was Never Taught

It is tempting to treat the pendulum swing as a purely internal event, happening entirely inside one woman’s nervous system. That framing misses something important. Most driven women were never taught how to locate a steady middle range, and that gap is rarely a personal failing. It is frequently a systemic one, built into families, schools, and workplaces that reward exactly two states: composed performance and, occasionally, invisible collapse behind closed doors.

Daniel J. Siegel, MD, the American psychiatrist known for his work on interpersonal neurobiology, describes what he calls the window of tolerance, the zone in which a person can experience emotion and stress without tipping into either shutdown or flooding. Siegel’s work emphasizes that this window is not fixed at birth. It is shaped, widened or narrowed, by the environments a person lives inside, particularly by whether important relationships around her modeled a wide range of feeling or quietly punished anything outside a narrow band of acceptable composure.

Many driven women grew up, and now work, inside systems that never modeled a wide window of tolerance: a household that only tolerated calm children, a workplace that only rewards visible composure, a culture that treats any sign of struggle in an accomplished woman as weakness rather than ordinary human range. None of these systems taught a middle ground, because none of them had much use for one.

The systemic lens matters here because it removes the shame from the swing. A woman is not swinging wildly because she is uniquely fragile. She is attempting to build a skill her environment never modeled or rewarded, and skills that were never modeled take real, uneven practice to acquire. This is often relevant to women navigating why boundaries feel impossible after trauma, since a boundary requires exactly the steady middle range these systems never permitted.

Later-life research on prolonged adversity underscores how long this systemic gap can persist without intervention. The same study on coping strategies among survivors of sustained hardship found that those who never encountered an environment modeling a wider range of tolerable feeling tended to remain locked in rigid coping well into older age, while those who did encounter such an environment, even late, showed meaningful shifts toward flexibility (further research on later-life coping and environmental support). The window can widen at almost any age, but it generally needs a relationship or setting that permits the widening.

This systemic understanding is also why patterns like codependency in driven women so often travel alongside a narrow window of tolerance. Both are frequently the residue of systems that only had room for one acceptable emotional setting.

How to Move Through the Swing Without Getting Stuck

Moving through the pendulum swing does not mean making it stop immediately, which is rarely possible and often counterproductive. It means learning to stay oriented while it happens, so each swing gradually narrows instead of repeating itself indefinitely at the same intensity.

Step one is naming the swing while it is happening. Simply recognizing, out loud or in a journal, “this is the swing, not a collapse,” changes a woman’s relationship to the experience almost immediately. Naming does not eliminate the discomfort, but it removes the second layer of suffering that comes from believing the discomfort means something has gone wrong.

Step two is tracking the arc, not just the extremes. Most women can describe, in vivid detail, the worst moments of overwhelm or the flattest stretches of numbness. Far fewer can describe the small, in-between moments where they felt something manageable and did not fall apart. Noticing those in-between moments is often the first material a nervous system uses to build its actual middle range.

Step three is resourcing the body before and after activation, not only during it. Sleep, food, movement, and rest are not indulgences during this phase. Research on sleep variability in trauma survivors found stabilizing sleep patterns specifically, not simply getting more sleep, was associated with meaningful improvement in overall symptom severity (further research on sleep stabilization and trauma symptom severity). A body running on fragmented rest has far less capacity to hold a widening emotional range without tipping hard in one direction.

Step four is doing this inside a relationship built for it, not alone. A widening window of tolerance is built most reliably in the presence of another steady nervous system, part of why trauma-informed therapy built for driven women tends to move this process faster and with less collateral damage than white-knuckling through it solo.

Research on building resilience under sustained stress supports this relational emphasis, finding social support and connection were among the strongest predictors of a person’s capacity to recover functioning after a difficult period, more consistently than individual willpower alone (further research on resilience, social support, and recovery). The swing is not a solo project.

It also helps to understand how this pattern intersects with fearful avoidant attachment, since women with this style often experience the swing most intensely in close relationships, oscillating between wanting closeness and needing distance. Recovery from narcissistic or exploitative relationships frequently involves an especially pronounced version of this swing, because the nervous system has to unlearn hypervigilance that was, for a long time, genuinely necessary. Understanding how to rebuild self-trust after abuse and recognizing why certain relational patterns kept repeating both become clearer once a woman can see the swing for what it is. The same is true of how attachment theory explains growing apart from a partner, since a widening window often changes what closeness feels tolerable. On harder nights, some women find it grounding to sit with words that have carried other people through difficult stretches, not as a fix, but as company.

To the woman sitting in her parked car, certain the ground has shifted beneath her in a way therapy was supposed to prevent: it has not shifted because something is wrong. It has shifted because something that was frozen has started, uncomfortably, to move. That movement is not the end of the story. It is the necessary, disorienting middle of it, and it does resolve into something steadier than either extreme, given enough time and enough support to let it.

Warmly, Annie.

Related Reading

McEwen, Bruce S. The End of Stress As We Know It. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2002.

Siegel, Daniel J. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.

Sapolsky, Robert M. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2004.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984.

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