All Her Work

Rejection sensitive dysphoria in business means a critical email from a client doesn't just sting — it can shut you down for days. Knowing the name for it is step one.

Building around it is the actual work.

I’ve taken the summer to clean my life up. It is true, you cannot begin to build an empire while the main person you have in your corner secretly wants you to fail.

The reason I made it my mission to learn everything there is to know about nervous system architecture, abuse patterns, and inner child trauma is because these people have always found me. They are people first, and crave not living in pain. Therefore I rationalize and accept behaviours that most would never tolerate. Recognizing manipulation inside of attachment is actually difficult when your nervous system was trained to think that is safe. That is love.

It’s been almost 3 months since the decision was made for me (God works in mysterious ways) to remove someone I loved very deeply from my day to day. A decision that was a very long time coming, and truthfully, years in the making. I am ready to come back to All Her Work, slowly.

Being neurodivergent and navigating complex trauma is a personal and intimate event, one that takes quite a bit of processing. I am grateful for the team of psychologists, psychotherapists, and specialists I have on my team.

I apologize to my following for disappearing, it was what I needed to do to heal.

This fall will be focused on a variety of amazing projects and events, I urge you to follow along the next few weeks.

I imagine I am not the only feral woman here for a purpose thrown into a situation that changed their entire life. I’d love to hear your survival stories right now.

Couldn’t not repost.

And yet we live in a society that insists on doing just this.

You are seen, and valued, mamas 🩷

Grief research does not support the model of discharge. The nervous system encodes loss. Integration is the system developing the capacity to remain regulated while carrying what it is carrying. That is not resolution. It is a different kind of stability.

What if healing is more than feeling calmer, less reactive. What if healing is becoming more alive?

Sometimes healing actually looks louder. More emotional. More honest. More complicated. More discerning. Less compliant… because we’re becoming more connected.

Cacciatore et al. (2021) documented that what bereaved individuals most need is adequate witnessing — sustained, non-judgmental presence with what they are carrying — rather than techniques for processing grief toward resolution. Neimeyer (2001) described grief as meaning reconstruction — an ongoing, non-linear process without a natural completion point. Both findings converge on the same clinical position: grief does not complete. The organism's capacity to carry it while remaining regulated changes.

Cacciatore, J., et al. (2021). What is good grief support? PLoS ONE, 16(5), e0252324. Neimeyer, R. A. (2001). Meaning reconstruction in bereavement. Death Studies, 25(4), 261–292.

There is a distinction between what a person knows about their history and what their body is carrying from it. Narrative grief and somatic grief engage different neural architecture. A person can narrate a loss fluently and remain physiologically unintegrated with it. The somatic encoding is in the body's baseline organization — in the places where the system still prepares for something that will not arrive. This distinction is the foundation of somatic grief work. The body is not asked to process a story. It is supported in working with the physiological architecture that story produced.

→ This week's paid essay on Substack— Generation 2, Marie Gendron (my 3rd great grandmother)— examines what chronic gestational grief encodes across more than twenty pregnancies.

This week's breath: the 4:8 pattern. Four counts in. Eight counts out. This is the most strongly anxiolytic pattern in the BBPM framework. The longest exhale. The strongest parasympathetic pull. Most useful when the nervous system is running hot — activated, scanning, unable to settle. Inhale 2 3 4 — exhale 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. Six rounds. Return to natural breath. Notice what shifted.