When the Warrior Finally Rests
What nobody tells the woman who's been in control her whole life about what healing actually feels like.
She’d done everything right. She’d come to the sessions. She’d done the work. She’d answered the hard questions honestly. And now I was asking her to close her eyes and relax. She looked at me like I’d suggested she jump out of a window.
Here’s something I’ve learned after 27 years of working with Warrior women.
You cannot ask a Warrior to let go. Not directly. Not at the beginning.
Because letting go, releasing control, surrendering even slightly to a process she can’t fully see or manage... Feels to her nervous system exactly like the most dangerous thing she’s ever been asked to do.
And her nervous system isn’t wrong. It learned that control was safety. It learned that vigilance was survival. It learned that the moment she stopped watching, stopped managing, stopped holding everything in place... That was when things went wrong.
That belief went in before she had words for it. And it’s been running her life, and her symptoms, ever since. So asking her to simply relax... Is asking her to do the one thing her entire nervous system has been organised around not doing.
Of course she can’t. Of course it feels impossible. Of course she sits in the chair with her jaw still clenched and her hands gripping the armrests while I say the word relaxation and something in her quietly, firmly, absolutely refuses.
So I stopped asking Warriors to let go. And I started doing something completely different. I gave them the wheel.
Here’s what working with a Warrior actually looks like in my sessions.
Instead of asking her to release control I invite her to use it.
I ask her to notice her arms where they rest in the chair. Can she feel the weight of them? Can she adjust them slightly, just enough to make them a little more comfortable? Yes?
Good. She just did that. She controlled that.
Now can she notice her breathing? Not change it. Just notice it. In. Out. The rhythm of it. And now that she’s noticing it, can she, just slightly, slow it down a touch?
Can she feel her heart beating? Of course she can. And because she’s in control here, because this is her process and she’s driving it, can she let her heart settle into a slightly steadier rhythm? Ticking over. Calm. Controlled. Hers.
And something extraordinary happens.
The Warrior, who came in braced for a fight with relaxation, who fully expected her nervous system to resist every step of this process... Finds herself settling. Deeply.
Because nobody asked her to give up control.
She was given more of it. She controlled her arms. She controlled her breath. She controlled her heart rate. She steered herself into the very state her nervous system had been defending against for decades. And she got there herself.
Which is, of course, the only way a Warrior ever gets anywhere.
I want to talk about what happens next.
Because this is the part nobody prepares Warrior women for.
When the chronic symptoms start to shift...
When the IBS quietens and the back stops screaming and the migraines reduce to something manageable and then to something occasional and then to something she barely remembers... Something unexpected happens.
She doesn’t always feel relieved. Sometimes she feels...Unsettled. Strange.
Like something is missing that she can’t quite name. And what’s missing, though she might not recognise it immediately, is the vigilance.
The scanning. The bracing. The constant low level hum of alert that has been the background music of her entire life. It’s gone quiet. And quiet, for a woman whose nervous system learned that quiet meant the danger hadn’t arrived yet...
Feels deeply unfamiliar. Almost threatening.
This is the part of healing Warriors don’t talk about. The identity crisis of getting better.
Because if she’s not the woman who holds everything together, who plans for every contingency, who stays alert so nothing catches her off guard... Who is she?
If her symptoms aren’t there to remind her to stay braced...
What does she brace against? If she’s not managing and controlling and staying one step ahead of everything... What does she do with herself?
These are real questions. And they deserve a real answer.
Here’s what I’ve seen happen in Warrior women when they get far enough into the healing to start asking those questions. Something underneath the control starts to emerge.
Slowly. Carefully. Like something that’s been waiting a very long time for it to be safe enough to show itself.
Curiosity. Creativity. A sense of humour that had been buried under years of serious, necessary, exhausting vigilance.
The ability to sit in a room without scanning it. To hear an unexpected sound without the full threat response firing. To make a plan and then, occasionally, let it change without the stomach drop.
And most importantly. The ability to rest. Actually rest.
Not collapse. Not crash. Not the body forcing her down because she pushed past every signal it sent. But genuine, chosen, safe rest. The kind that feels like relief rather than surrender.
Here’s what I want Warrior women to know.
You don’t have to give up control to heal. You just have to learn to direct it differently.
Toward yourself instead of constantly outward. Toward understanding your own nervous system instead of managing everyone else’s environment. Toward building internal safety instead of external control.
The control doesn’t disappear. It finds a better use.
And the woman on the other side of that process...
Is still a Warrior.
She’s just finally fighting for herself.
If you’re a Warrior and you’ve been wondering whether healing is actually possible for someone wired the way you are...
It is.
I’ve seen it more times than I can count. And the approach I use works specifically with your nature, not against it. You’ll be in control throughout. That’s not a reassurance. That’s how the work actually works.
If you want to find out what that looks like for you specifically, my free nervous system assessment call is the place to start.
Book your spot at stan.store/resonance_holistics
Or reply to this email and tell me: does this sound like you?
Dee x