You Were Never Actually on Trial - Somatic Coaching in Groningen, the Nervous System, and What Finally Helped

May 18
5 min read

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't show up on any medical test.

It's the exhaustion of always being on trial with yourself. Of achieving, performing, holding it together — and still, somewhere underneath, waiting to be found out. Of freezing exactly when you most want to speak up. Of knowing, intellectually, that you are enough - and still not quite feeling it in your body.

If any of that lands somewhere in you - this episode is for you. And if you've been looking for somatic coaching in Groningen or wondering what nervous system-based support actually looks like in practice - this is a good place to start.

Listen to Episode 5 here

A personal episode - but not only about me

Episode 5 is the most personal one I've recorded so far. I go into a little bit of my own story - being born two months premature in East Germany, what the doctors told my mother, and the math sessions on walks to the grocery store that followed. I share what my nervous system was actually doing in those moments. And I talk about how that pattern - the feeling of having to proof myself, the freezing, the quiet vigilance - travelled with me for decades without me fully realising it was there.

I share this not because my story is particularly special. But because some version of it is so common. The overachiever who learned early that worth comes from performance. The one who goes quiet in rooms where they should be heard. The one who holds everything together on the outside and wonders, privately, why nothing quite settles.

These patterns show up in the people I work with all the time - in somatic coaching sessions in Groningen and Eenrum, in our Ashtanga Yoga Program in Groningen, in Ayurveda consultations. They are not character flaws nor are they wrong. They are nervous system adaptations - intelligent responses to real experiences, often absorbed very early in life.

Freeze, overactivation, and why they often live in the same person

In this episode I go into the nervous system science behind these patterns - accessibly, not academically. I talk about freeze and what it actually is (not weakness - but a brilliant survival strategy), about overactivation and the nervous system that learned that staying one step ahead meant staying safe, and about why these two responses so often live in the same person.

I also touch on fawn - another response that doesn't get talked about enough. The one that looks like agreeableness but is actually the nervous system working very hard to manage a perceived threat.

And I talk about trauma - what it actually means, beyond the dramatic definitions that make most people think it doesn't apply to them. Because often it does. Just not in the way they expect.

What my yoga practice has given me - and why inquiry changes everything

I've been practicing Ashtanga yoga for twenty years. And I want to say clearly: this practice has given me an enormous amount. It changed my internal dialogue. It released layers of inner holding I didn't even know I was carrying. It cultivated something softer, more self-compassionate, more curious. It gave me interoception - the ability to actually sense what is happening inside, rather than just thinking about it. That, for me, has been one of the most quietly transformative gifts of the practice.

And I never approached it as something to fix me. There was nothing to fix. It has always been more of an ongoing process of self-discovery - showing me layers of myself I hadn't met yet, at a pace I could actually integrate.

But in the episode I also talk honestly about something that can happen with a regular practice if we don't inquire along the way. We can end up running our old patterns on autopilot - in the practice, through the practice, without ever quite meeting what's actually there. And certain inner layers (and reactions) stay not much changed.

The way we practice matters. Whether we're listening or executing. Whether we're inquiring or performing. That distinction changes everything about what practice can give us - and it's something I come back to again and again in how I teach.

An introduction to Somatic Experiencing

A significant part of this episode is an introduction to Somatic Experiencing - what it actually is, why the name can put people off or may be misleading for some people, and what happens in a session. Not the theory version. The lived version.

I talk about the key principles - titration, pendulation, working at the level of the body rather than the story - and about the quality of attunement a good SE practitioner brings to the space. And I share what shifted for me from the very first session. Not through catharsis - but something real and integrated. Something that had been held in a particular configuration for a very long time quietly reorganised.

I still go regularly, as part of both my personal process and my professional training. Sometimes I arrive without knowing what to bring in - nothing feels urgent. And I am still amazed, every time, at the doors that keep opening. Doors I didn't even know were shut.

This isn't about another thing to fix

What I want people to take from this episode - more than anything - is this:

You can't think your way out of these patterns. You can understand them perfectly and still feel the freeze when the pressure comes. What helps is working with the body. Slowly, gently, at your own pace - not through willpower, not through yet another framework to master, but through something more honest and more gradual than that.

The nervous system can learn that it is safe enough to settle. That it is safe enough to be seen. That it never actually had to prove anything in the first place.

This is also at the heart of the somatic coaching work I offer in Groningen and Eenrum - helping people reach the layers that thinking and talking alone can't always access.

Press play

This one runs 50 minutes. Grab a tea, go for a walk, listen to it while driving to work or give yourself a slow morning with it.

If you recognise yourself in any of what I've described here - the proving, the freezing, the quiet exhaustion of always being on trial with yourself - I think something in this episode will land.