Case Study: Vanessa

From Spinning Out to Centered and In Control

Where They Started

Vanessa described their life and emotions as "whirlwinds." Scrambling to meet basic needs, unable to follow through on what they wanted. Finishing a three-year Traditional Chinese Medicine program with board exams they kept avoiding. Felt like an outsider everywhere.

"I have a lot to give," they told me, "but I don't feel like I can receive."

They'd grown up in a chaotic family system—learned young that their feelings weren't welcome and that they needed to manage other people's emotions to stay safe. They'd gotten good at shutting feelings down fast and moving on, but it didn’t seem to keep them safe. Instead, it made them a match for relationships with people that mirrored their dismissal of their emotions, and where Vanessa gave everything and received nothing—keeping them cut off from the life they actually wanted.

The Work

First session, I noticed Vanessa kept bouncing up out of their body whenever anything difficult came close. We sat with that tension for maybe ten seconds and they dropped in. "I feel present for the first time," they said.

Their pattern: feel something uncomfortable, then sprint into doing-doing-doing to escape it. Or check out entirely. They'd wound a mythology around unfelt feelings—that emotions were "self-indulgent," that they had to make themselves small to be acceptable. This mythology ran their life.

A big thread was a toxic friendship that played out all their patterns—one-sided, Vanessa giving everything, getting nothing. We reframed it: they weren't getting sober from substances. They were getting sober from this relationship. From the archetype of the one who gives but cannot receive.

The real shift came when we worked with their anger. Vanessa had learned at a young age that anger destroys. So they'd shut theirs off, and with it, their access to the archetype of NO. Without NO, they couldn't really say YES either. They couldn't hold boundaries. They couldn't get their needs met.

One session we got into their solar plexus. When they let the anger actually move through their body, something their protective power came online. They felt for the first time that anger wasn't destructive, it was the part of them that could say no and stop abandoning themselves. Once they embodied this, new people quickly started to show up in their life that were effortlessly loving and generous to Vanessa.

We also found out why they couldn't study for boards. There was old family pain wound up in the act of studying itself—a parent had used homework as control, and failing had become Vanessa's only way of embodying NO. Once we felt through those old feelings, the mythology dissolved. "I'm literally excited for boards," they told me.

Where They Ended

Six months later, Vanessa had shifted their internal relationship to some core archetypes and healed generational relationships to their parents — and their external life reflected it:

Giving/Receiving: They learned to receive. Attracted many new friendships that are mutual and generous.

YES/NO: Befriending their anger gave them access to real boundaries. This actually brought them closer to family and friends.

Victim/Agent: Not by denying what happened—by feeling their feelings about it fully and letting those feelings complete. They stopped being a match for the victim role.

Avoidance/Follow-through: From unable to open a textbook to passing board exams.

Physical shifts: Back pain, stomach pain, nightmares—cleared once the repressed emotions moved through.

Exit interview: "I feel more in control now. I know what I want. I feel able to say no. I'm not victim to my past or the things happening now."

________

Vanessa's patterns—people-pleasing, dissociation, avoidance—were held in place by unfelt feelings and the mythologies wound around them. Once those feelings got felt all the way through, the mythologies lost their grip, and they began to embody new ways of being in their life. Their natural capacity for boundaries, connection, and follow-through emerged. They became a natural match for the life that no amount of doing-doing-doing seemed to get them.