For high achievers who can lead a room, but still can't ask for what they need at home

BeforeAt work she was the calm one, always the last to share, always holding it together. At home, the worry ran everything. Her mood rose and fell with everyone else’s, until her son looked at her and said, “I know you worry.” In her words, she was “in full flare mode.”

The turnShe learned to catch the old fear the moment it fired, not days later. When a meeting dragged up an old crisis and her hands started shaking, she told herself “I am safe” and stayed steady.

NowShe told her manager what she really wanted next. The VP stepped in to find her a role that fits.

BeforeShe takes care of other people for a living. Then the partner she planned her life with ended it, and it crushed her. Under stress she shrank into a small, anxious little girl. She came in feeling “very unwanted, very unlovable, very unstable.”

The turnWe went underneath the heartbreak, to the old fear of being left, and gave her body simple ways to calm itself when that fear fires.

NowFour months later she understands what she feels and how to bring herself back. She’s ready to meet her partner, for “the relationships I will have with others, especially my future children.”

BeforeShe runs her own business and kept the peace at home. When something hurt, she said she was fine and disappeared inside herself: “I pick him up, I pretend I’m happy, I bring him home, I make dinner. There’s only this vacuum of a person for a few days.” Her six-year-old could feel it. She was “so done feeling like I have to fix everything.”

The turnI gave her the exact words to use when things heat up: “I’m going to take ten minutes to calm down, and then I’ll come back and talk.” Then I held her accountable, between sessions too.

NowA month in, her partner shut her down mid-sentence. She calmed her body, came back and said, “It really hurt my feelings that you shut me down like that.” He apologized.