The stage of healing many women avoid

If you’re supporting others through healing work whether as a therapist, coach, or guide, you’ve probably seen this moment: A client starts to feel more alive… and then suddenly, they shut down.

The truth is, this isn’t just about our clients. Hashem created our nervous systems in a way that we are always trying to get back to a state of regulation, a state of menuchas hanefesh. The path to get there follows a very specific hierarchy.

When we get so overwhelmed that we collapse into shutdown or freeze, the only way to move out of it is to first go through fight-or-flight before we can return to regulation. There’s no skipping this stage.

If we as practitioners can’t meet our own fight-or-flight energy in the messy, potent, uncomfortable form it takes, it’s nearly impossible to hold that space for someone else without rushing them through it or subtly steering them away from it.

Why Fight-or-Flight Feels So Overwhelming

What I see with a lot of women (and this includes practitioners) is that, as the system starts to come out of shutdown or freeze, a surge of sympathetic energy floods the body. This is fight-or-flight energy and is potent, powerful, and often uncomfortable.

It can bring with it intense body sensations, difficult emotions, and challenging thoughts. For many, it feels justifiably overwhelming, especially if they’ve spent years disconnected from these kinds of feelings.

If we haven’t learned how to contain ourselves and we’ve been told all our lives that our emotions are “too much,” “too sensitive,” “hysterical,” or “overly dramatic” it makes sense that we would judge ourselves when these feelings rise. In order to belong, many learned to shut down their big feelings. So when those feelings finally start to surface, it can feel like the scariest thing to face.

Even reading about this might feel confronting. You might notice your own body tensing, or your mind wanting to move on to something else. That’s part of how your system has learned to keep you safe.

How Avoidance Shows Up In Ourselves and Our Clients

Because fight-or-flight is so intense, many women, including those of us who work with others, do almost anything to avoid it. Here are three common examples:

1) Stopping therapy when big feelings arise

I’ve seen it many times: a woman begins to feel overwhelming fight-or-flight sensations and assumes something is wrong with her, or that the therapy “isn’t working.” In reality, what’s happening in her nervous system is the opposite: she’s moving out of shutdown or freeze and reclaiming access to her inner potency. But without knowing this, it’s easy to interpret the experience as danger rather than progress.

For practitioners: notice if you feel the urge to “calm things down” for a client when these sensations emerge. It might be your own avoidance showing up.

2) Inability to fully feel pleasure

Pleasure, whether from food, intimacy, receiving a compliment, or another source, requires vulnerability. It asks us to let the intense sensations of pleasure move through us without shutting down. For someone who fears that intensity, it’s easier to distract, dissociate, or retreat into freeze than to ride that wave.

3) Shutting down in conflict

During an argument, a woman may default to fawning or appeasing the other person rather than moving toward resolution that honors her own needs and desires. If she feels it’s unsafe to show anger, passion, or urgency for her needs, her nervous system may pull her back into freeze. The result is that she gives up on getting what she needed, and the same cycles repeat again and again.

While these situations look different on the outside, the nervous system pattern is the same: the moment fight-or-flight energy becomes too much for the system to hold, it automatically moves to shut it down rather than risk staying with it.

The Cost of Avoidance For You and Those You Work With

When we, as practitioners, can’t hold our own fight-or-flight stage, we’re more likely to unconsciously lead clients away from theirs. That means staying stuck in a cycle of shutdown with only fleeting moments of activation and never fully arriving in regulation. The life we, and they, deeply want remains out of reach.

Meeting the Energy First in Yourself

Meeting fight-or-flight energy instead of avoiding it is rarely pretty. It might look messy, even explosive. But when you’ve learned to move through the discomfort in yourself, you gain the capacity to hold that same space for your clients without rescuing them from it, without numbing it down, and without rushing them past it.

In a state of regulation, you can access your own menuchas hanefesh. You’re steadier, more grounded, more present. And from there, you can model for your clients what it’s like to be with intensity without collapsing or going back into freeze.

This requires letting go of the “good girl” facade: the one who survived by fawning, not rocking the boat, and keeping needs hidden. That version may feel safe, but it’s a shadow of your true self: disconnected, going through the motions, and numbing out the fullness of life.

When you’re willing to face the fight-or-flight stage in yourself, you can step into being the “good enough girl”: wife, mother, woman.

An Invitation to Practitioners

You might simply notice:

• When do I pull away from my own energy?
• What do I do to avoid feeling too much?
• How might my work with clients shift if I could meet myself in those moments?

If you’re committed to guiding others toward deeper healing, learning to hold yourself in fight-or-flight is essential. In my upcoming B’Etzem training, we’ll explore the body’s natural hierarchy for returning to regulation, starting with your own experience, so you can trust yourself in intensity, and help your clients trust themselves too.