The Breaking Is Not the End, It’s the Becoming
- Brainz Magazine
- Jul 11
- 8 min read
Michelle Doublet, LCSW, CCTP-II, E-RYT, YACEP, is a trauma expert, somatic integrative psychotherapist, and somatic embodiment coach who integrates body-based healing, subtle energy medicine, nervous system attunement, and restoration to help others reclaim personal power, clarity, connection, inner wisdom, and their embodied truth.
What if the breaking wasn’t your undoing, but your awakening? We live in a culture that tells us to fix, to push through, to pull ourselves together. But what if the unraveling is here, your true becoming begins? This piece is an offering of a reminder that healing isn’t about perfection. It’s about permission.
"Holding what was once too heavy, now seen for what it truly is: gold. Healing isn’t about fixing. It’s about reclaiming the wisdom beneath the wound." – Michelle Doublet
To fall apart. To feel. To return.
Not to who you were but to who you really are.
If you’re standing at the edge of something uncertain, feeling the weight of emotional, mental, or even physical shifts you can’t quite name, this is for you.
When things fall apart, it might be the beginning
What if the current you’re resisting is trying to carry you somewhere new? Something within you is ready to break free.
Not because you’re failing, but because the version of you that got you here can’t take you where you’re meant to go.
If you’ve ever felt like life keeps falling apart just as you start to find your footing, this might speak to you. It might not just be life being messy. It might be the signal that it’s time to heal what you’ve carried for far too long.
We often hear the phrase, “When things fall apart, they’re falling together.” And while I stand by that truth with every cell in my body, I also know this:
The cracking open is not the collapse. It’s the invitation.
Sometimes what feels like destruction is actually the dismantling of what no longer serves you, the beliefs, patterns, and identities that once kept you safe, but now keep you small. Trauma tells you it’s safer to shrink. Healing reminds you it’s safe to expand. Trauma commands contraction. Healing invites expansion.
Let the unraveling reveal the truth beneath the surface.
Let it clear space for the version of you who is ready to rise.
You won’t always feel the wisdom in real time
When you’re in the thick of it, it doesn’t feel like alignment. It feels like grief. Like rage. Like confusion.
It feels like Why is this happening to me?
Like I thought I already healed this. Like, I don’t know who I am anymore. Like I want to be myself again.
And still, I’ll say it again:
Everything that happens to you happens for you. Read that again. Let it land.
When you’re in it, it feels like chaos, not clarity.
You don’t always get to feel the wisdom in real time.
When the bottom drops out, when a relationship ends, when you leave a job, when you move back in with your parents, when a version of you unravels, when you experience mental and physical symptoms or a chronic illness, you can't explain it, it doesn’t feel sacred.
It feels like failure.
The current will carry you, if you let it
You might push back.
You might try to make sense of it all.
You might grip tighter to the life or identity you thought you were supposed to hold.
But the more you resist the current, the more exhausted you become. Eventually, resistance becomes drowning.
The current will carry you if you let it.
Sacred allowance vs. spiritual bypassing
What if instead of trying to fix, force, or figure it out, you allowed yourself to drift? I’m not talking about spiritual bypassing or passive surrender.
I’m talking about sacred allowance, the kind that asks you to stay with what’s real, not to escape it.
Surrender is not giving up. It’s giving over.
It’s not a collapse or resignation. It’s a conscious choice to trust that you will be held, not necessarily by something external, but by your own presence, by your breath, by the intelligence of your body.
When you surrender in this way, you stop abandoning yourself in the name of control. You begin to build self-trust, not because you know how things will turn out, but because you’re learning to stay with yourself regardless of the outcome.
There’s power in surrender.
It allows the nervous system to soften out of hypervigilance. It makes space for clarity to rise when urgency subsides.
It opens the doorway for regulated presence, where the body begins to feel safe again, even in the unknown.
You don’t have to have all the answers.
But when your system is overwhelmed and there’s no other choice but to be with what’s arising to feel it rather than fight it, something shifts.
Resisting the pain often intensifies it, creating more emotional and physical dysregulation.
But when you learn to stay with yourself in those moments to notice, breathe, and soften into the experience, you build self-trust.
That’s when strength and softness coexist.
Even when it doesn’t make logical sense in the moment, your body begins to understand safety again.
And eventually, it all starts to make sense.
When survival shapes us, healing reconnects us to ourselves
Healing isn’t just insight, it’s integration.
You don’t think your way out of survival; you feel your way through it.
If trauma has touched your life, whether you name it or not, parts of you have learned to survive by living in extremes or by blending into your environment in ways that disconnect you from your truth. You might laugh when something feels uncomfortable, perform to avoid rejection, say yes when your body wants to say no, or minimize your own needs to maintain closeness. These are all somatic adaptations, protective nervous system responses shaped by past experiences.
You swing between hyper-independence and total collapse. Between being the fixer and the avoider.
Between pushing everyone away and fearing abandonment.
These are not flaws. They are embodied intelligence. They were your body’s way of riding the waves.
They kept you safe when the world felt unsafe. But now?
They’re asking to be seen. To be felt.
To be gently updated.
Your nervous system no longer needs to carry these survival strategies alone. Through somatic awareness, emotional regulation, and repair, you begin to reshape the way you respond, not through force, but through presence.
By staying with yourself in moments of discomfort, you expand your capacity for safety, connection, and choice one breath, one pause, one moment at a time.
The protector becomes the prophet
In trauma healing, it’s easy to become hyper-focused on what needs fixing: the anxiety, the wounds, the physical symptoms. But healing isn’t just about scanning for what’s wrong. It’s about expanding your capacity to receive what’s right. To feel joy where you used to brace for disappointment. To open a connection that you once shut down. The deeper purpose of healing is not just to manage pain, but to make space for wholeness, to trust that you are safe enough to feel good, to belong, to thrive.
Healing isn’t about erasing these parts.
It’s about sitting with them, the overachiever, the over-giver, the avoider, the escaper, the one who disappears, and meeting, understanding it in a way you never thought possible.
Because here’s the truth:
When these protectors remain unconscious when you’re unaware that you’re responding from a survival state, they can start dictating your relationships, behaviors, and choices in ways that reinforce the very pain you’re trying to avoid.
Most often, these protectors were born out of early relational wounds, moments of rupture in attachment, experiences of being unseen, misunderstood, abandoned, or not emotionally held.
They might stem from your childhood, but they could also be imprints carried from another being, ancestral lineage, or even a past lifetime.
They are intelligent responses shaped by your nervous system to help you survive what once felt unbearable.
But when you’re triggered and responding from a protector without realizing it’s a protector, you’re not relating from your present self.
You’re relating from a memory. From an echo. From a time when the world didn’t feel safe.
And that’s when the protector becomes the prophet.
Reflection: What does it mean that “The Protector Becomes the Prophet”?
In trauma healing, we often develop protector parts like the perfectionist, the pleaser, the avoider, or the one who shuts down to help us survive what once felt unbearable.
But when those protectors go unexamined, they don’t just protect us, they predict and recreate the very wounds they were trying to avoid.
This is how a self-fulfilling prophecy is born.
You fear being left, so you pull away first, and end up alone.
You fear being too much, so you silence yourself and feel unseen.
You fear rejection, so you people-please and lose your sense of self.
The protector becomes the prophet, not because it’s wrong, but because it’s still operating from an old story.
Healing invites you to recognize these patterns with compassion, not judgment. To meet these parts with presence. And to gently choose a new way forward, one rooted in your truth, discernment, not your trauma.
You’re afraid of being abandoned, so you push people away.
You’re afraid of being unseen, so you overextend yourself trying to be valuable. You’re afraid of betrayal, so you never truly let yourself be loved.
This is how the protector creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In trying to avoid the original pain, you unconsciously recreate it. You fear disconnection, and the very ways you protect yourself from it are the ones that reinforce it.
These protectors are not just behaviors, they are illusions your nervous system has held onto to protect you. But healing begins when we start to challenge these illusions with compassion and clarity. As we build somatic awareness and witness the body’s wisdom, we begin to recognize the difference between fear and truth.
Healing invites us to create from a place of grounded presence and embodied reality, not from the distortions of past pain.
Awareness interrupts the cycle.
Not through judgment, but through compassion and discernment. Not through force, but through presence.
This isn’t the end, it’s the becoming
This is the sacred invitation of healing:
To become conscious of your internal protectors.
To thank them for their service.
And to gently let them rest so you can finally live from the truth of who you are, not the trauma of who you had to be.
Life doesn’t follow a straight line.
Neither does healing.
Neither do you.
Your identity will shift. Your stories will crack open.
What you thought was permanent will fall away.
And thank God for that.
Because the truth is, the only constant in life is change.
Your job is not to predict or control it.
It’s to meet it.
To move with it.
To allow yourself to be changed by it.
That’s where the magic lives.
Not in clinging but in your willingness to let go.
To observe, set boundaries, and know who you are.
Let the breaking be your becoming.
A sacred invitation to fall apart
So here’s my invitation to you:
What if you stopped trying to solve your way out of discomfort?
And started listening to what your discomfort is trying to reveal?
What if you gave yourself permission to fall apart not as failure, but as a sacred undoing?
Because maybe you’re not meant to hold it all together.
Maybe you’re meant to be remade.
I’m not here to fix you. I’m here to remind you:
You were never broken.
This is not the end, this is the becoming. This is your beginning.
And it’s calling you to reclaim what’s always been yours.
Read more from Michelle Doublet
Michelle Doublet, Somatic Integrative Psychotherapist & Embodiment Guide
Michelle Doublet, LCSW, E-RYT, CCTP-II, YACEP, is a trauma expert, somatic integrative psychotherapist, and somatic embodiment coach devoted to helping people reconnect with their inner wisdom, personal power, and embodied truth. She is the founder of Thriving Light Wellness and the creator of SomaSoul Embodiment, The Sacred Path™, a signature approach that bridges science and soul, fusing subtle energy medicine, somatic integration, and nervous system attunement and restoration to support deep, lasting transformation. Through her groups, workshops, retreats, coaching, and psychotherapy, she holds sacred space for deep emotional healing and soul remembering, not by fixing, but by reclaiming what’s always been yours.
