A few weeks ago, I sat in a conference room full of lawyers.

A team event for my day job.

Near the end, someone asked one of the panel speakers a question I’ve heard asked a hundred times.

The panel speaker was the group general counsel of a transnational financial services company. The head of legal. The most senior lawyer in a business that operates across borders, the kind of role half the people in that room measured themselves against.

“So, how do you build resilience?”

How do you keep going at that level without falling apart? What’s the secret?

I leaned in and braced for the usual answer. Wake up early. Guard your calendar. Build better systems. Work harder, but smarter.

She paused.

“I don’t know how or why,” she said, “but I have this inherent ability to switch off.”

That was it.

That was the whole answer.

She’d already told us she was the first lawyer in her family. That she’d built the kind of career most people spend their whole lives chasing. And when someone asked her how she does it, she didn’t reach for discipline or willpower or a five-step morning routine.

She owed her success to one thing: Her uncompromising ability to switch off.

Then she went on to say something I wasn’t expecting.

After a long day of high-stakes meetings, she leaves the office, gets on the light rail, and starts “ripping toks.”

Ripping toks?!

Yes. She loves TikTok. She said it to a room full of senior lawyers in suits, deadpan.

So there it was. Her advice to that room full of ambitious lawyers, me included, was to switch off and to stop apologising for it.

I already knew this. That’s exactly why I needed to hear it.

Here’s the part I want to be honest about.

None of this was new to me.

A couple of years ago I did the hardest internal work of my life to get off the treadmill. I went from chronic stress, burnout and over-performing, to slowing down. I’ve written about how that unravelling began, in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series on Releasing the Identity of Hyper-Independence.

So I sat in that room and knew the value of switching off. I’ve lived the before and the after. I know which one I’m choosing.

And I still needed the reminder.

Because knowing something and living it are two different things. The old pattern doesn’t leave just because you understood it once. It waits. It bides its time for the busy season, the big deadline, the week you’re stretched too thin, and slides back in while you’re not looking.

Hearing it from someone at that level, someone who could have credited her success to any number of impressive habits, reinforced what I too often forget.

The switching off isn’t the reward you get once you’ve made it.

It’s how you make it, and stay in one piece while you do.

What I only noticed once I slowed down

When I look back on my life, the happiness never arrived when I hit the goals.

It arrived when I let myself switch off.

Because the more I slowed down, the more I could notice.

The sound of autumn leaves under my feet on a walk I wasn’t rushing through. The creative ideas that only surfaced once I let myself sit in silence long enough for them to reach me. How good dinner tastes when you cook it with patience, instead of inhaling a protein shake standing at the kitchen bench. (If you read Part 2, you know.)

For years before that, I ticked every box. Good grades, finished school, went to university, landed the career.

And I ticked them as if my life depended on it, when the truth was I didn’t feel very much alive at all.

You know the feeling. You achieve the thing you worked months, sometimes years, for. And instead of

“Oh wow. I did it. I’m so proud of myself. Let me take the afternoon off, at least.”

it’s

“OH FINALLY. OK, WHAT’S NEXT.”

The goal lands, and the next one is already waiting. You never get to stand at the surface and breathe. You get pulled back into the abyss of the next set of obligations.

Everything is optimisable now. Your time and energy are not.

We live in an era where you can optimise almost anything.

Your sleep, your workflow, your morning, your macros, your calendar, your focus. There’s a system, an app, a protocol for all of it.

But two things sit outside the reach of all that optimising.

Your time is finite. Your energy is finite.

You cannot optimise your way into more hours in the day. You cannot hack your way into a limitless supply of energy. Those things have a hard edge, and no amount of discipline or willpower talks them out of it.

Having uncompromising respect for that edge is what sets you apart from the 99% still sprinting on the treadmill, wondering why they’re exhausted and no closer to feeling alive.

The general counsel understood this. It’s why, at the top of a brutal profession, her answer wasn’t do more.

It was know when to stop.

You don’t need to escape the 9-5 to feel alive again

I want to say this, because it’s where a lot of high-functioning people get stuck.

You don’t need to quit the job. You don’t need to blow up the life you built. You don’t need a sea change or a sabbatical or a different existence to feel something again.

You just need to give yourself permission to step off the treadmill.

You don’t have to leave forever or make some grand gesture out of it. You just have to let yourself step off at the end of the day, long enough for your nervous system to register that the sprint is over for now.

Here’s the catch. If you’ve spent years in survival mode, permission alone won’t do it. You already know you’re allowed to rest. You’ve been told a hundred times. And you still lie there at 10:50pm, tired but wired, mind racing, unable to power down.

Because the inability to switch off doesn’t live in your logic.

It lives in your body.

Why you can’t think your way into switching off

This is the same wall we hit in Part 1 and Part 2, and it’s worth saying again here.

You can understand, in perfect detail, that you’re safe to stop working. You can lecture yourself about balance. You can read every article on rest ever written.

And your body will keep the alarm on.

Because a nervous system that spent years treating stillness as danger doesn’t update on command. It learned, a long time ago, that slowing down wasn’t safe. That if you stopped moving, something would fall apart. So it keeps you switched on, long after the threat has passed.

Safety is the starting point of any real change. I keep coming back to this because it’s the whole foundation.

Switching off is a skill. And like any skill your body holds, you build it through repetition, until the old alarm learns it’s allowed to stand down.

That’s what EFT tapping is for.

Here’s a short session for the part of you that can’t power down at the end of the day.

You can find more EFT tapping videos on my TikTok:

SomaScript on TikTok

A parts work session for the part that never lets you rest

Before we finish, I want to take you a little deeper.

There’s a specific part of you at work here.

The one that keeps you switched on. The one that treats rest as risk, that floods you with guilt the moment you sit down. That voice in your head that says you haven’t earned it yet.

It’s been guarding and protecting you for a long time.

Let’s turn toward it.

Find somewhere you won’t be interrupted for the next few minutes. Sit however you’re comfortable. You can close your eyes, or let your gaze rest soft on a point in front of you.

Take a slow breath in. Let it fall out again, longer than it came in. Do that a couple more times, and let your shoulders drop and allow any tension to relax.

Now bring to mind the last time you tried to rest and couldn’t. The evening you sat down and something in you would not let you stay there. The guilt that showed up. The list that started running. The pull to get back up and be useful again.

See if you can find where that lives in your body. Maybe it’s a tightness in your chest. Tension in your shoulders. A restlessness in your legs, like they want to carry you somewhere. There’s no right answer. Just notice where the “I can’t switch off” feeling sits.

That feeling is a part of you. Not the whole of you. A part.

See if you can turn toward it, instead of trying to push it away. You’ve spent a long time at war with this part, wishing it would quiet down. Today we’re doing something different.

Let it know you can see it.

And then ask it a question. Not out loud, just inside.

What are you afraid would happen if I stopped?

Then wait. Don’t reach for the answer with your mind. Let it come up on its own, in whatever form it wants. A word. An image. A memory. A younger version of you.

You might hear something like, if you stop, it all falls apart. Or, if you rest, you’ll be left behind. Or, we’re only safe when we’re on top of everything.

Whatever it says, don’t argue with it. This part learned that a long time ago and it has been holding the line for you ever since. It was this part, keeping you safe the only way it knew how.

So let it hear this from you.

Thank you. I know you’ve carried this for a long time. I know you were only ever trying to protect me.

And then, if it feels true:

Something has changed. I’m not in that moment anymore. We’re safe now. You’re allowed to put some of this down. You’re allowed to rest too.

You don’t have to convince it. You don’t have to force anything to shift. You’re letting it know it isn’t alone in there, and that it doesn’t have to run the whole show on its own anymore.

Take one more slow breath.

And when you’re ready, come back to the present moment.

Sit with whatever came up for a moment. You spent time with a part of you that most people spend their whole lives outrunning. That matters.

If you’d like to commit to this journey and release the pattern underneath all of this, I put together a 5-day EFT Tapping Audio series on Releasing the Identity of Hyper-Independence.

5-day EFT Tapping Audio series 🎧

Five sessions, everything I learned to get here. The patterns I had to acknowledge, the beliefs I had to put down, and the new ones I built in their place. The thing I wish someone had handed my younger self, all those years ago.

Before you go

If this article found you, let it be your sign to switch off.

Give yourself permission to step off the treadmill today, even for an hour. Notice what you can hear once the noise dies down.

In the next article, we’ll turn to what makes stepping off so hard in the first place. The part of you that feels safe doing everything for everyone else, but panics the moment you put yourself first. Part 4 is all about feeling safe to choose yourself.

Until then, be gentle with yourself.

Follow your light,

Mary-Anne

Founder of SomaScript

I hit snooze for the 8th time.

“How many more minutes can I stay in bed for without being late?”

The same question I ask myself, for the 100th time.

Stiff and zombie-like, I begrudgingly rise from the warm embrace of my bed and start getting ready for work.

Shower, brush teeth, fix face, cover eye bags, fix hair. Slip on my corporate armour (aka a suit that I find annoyingly uncomfortable). Grab food from fridge. Make coffee in less than 2 mins. Rush to the train station. Sit on the train, out of breath, sip my coffee, and wipe the slightly spilt coffee off my hand.

Then I squeeze my way through the sea of corporate people, also trying to get to work. Keeping myself as small as possible.

“Sorry.”

“Excuse me.”

“All good!”

It’s 8:28am and I thankfully made it into the office on time. I put my bag down and log on.

“Did you need help with that file review for [client name] today?” my colleague offers.

“No thanks, I’m all good! Appreciate it though,” I respond, cheerfully, despite my aching awareness that I am not all good, at all.

A couple of hours later I get a call from my sister.

“Dad mentioned you’re taking him to a bunch of appointments over the next few weeks. Did you want me to take him to any of them? I’m happy to.”

I couldn’t agree with this because she lives further away from us. Although I would’ve loved the help, I was drowning in work, and it wasn’t easy to get the time off.

“Thank you for offering! That’s all good, I’m happy to take him, not an issue at all.”

Shortly after, my manager knocks on my office door. “I see you’ve got a lot on your plate right now. Did you want me to get started on the statement for [client name]?”

“Oh no, it’s all good, I’m totally fine! I’ll have the statement done first thing this morning.”

Calls from clients start flooding in. They all seem to call at once, as though they’re telepathically conspiring to catch me in my vulnerable, agreeable state.

“Sorry it’s taking longer than expected. I’ll get back to you asap!”

“Yes, sure, I’ll do that for you now.”

“I’m on top of it, don’t worry. I’ll get back to you by COB.”

“I was just thinking about you! Working on it as we speak.”

The hours go by, too slowly and too quickly at the same time. I feel like I’ve been here forever, but I also wish I had more time to get things done.

It’s 6:07pm and I rush to get the next train, so I don’t have to wait another 15 mins. Standing in the humid train, I wish I could take my coat off, but there are too many people around me.

I shrug it off and continue listening to Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins on audiobook.

About an hour later I get back to my local area and start driving to my mum’s work to pick her up.

While I’m driving, she calls. “Do you want me to buy you some food for dinner?”

“No thanks! I have some leftovers at home.” I was in need of some ‘cheer me up’ takeaway, but I felt bad about accepting these things too.

I get home and I did not, in fact, have leftovers. So I whip together a protein shake. Better macros, at least.

Still hungry, I go through the reversal of the day. Undress, shower, get ready for bed.

I lay awake, tired but wired. I grab the book from my nightstand, hoping this would help me wind down.

As I’m reading through How to Win Friends and Influence People, I get an email on my phone. From a client. Absolutely going off at me.

It’s 10:50pm and there’s no chance I’m going to sleep now. My mind is racing, strategising, problem solving.

“I should call in sick tomorrow. I’m so depleted.”

No - that’s just putting off the problem.

“I should bring this to my manager, he’ll know what to do.”

No - he’ll think I’m a complete idiot. I don’t want to be a burden.

“I should delegate some of my other work, things are slipping through the cracks.”

No - it would take longer to train people, I’d rather just do it myself.

After going in circles in my mind, I decide to put on a sleep meditation.

“Why didn’t I do this earlier?”

My surrender to sleep begins, and it feels nice. I like this sleep meditation. The music is so relaxi-

* siren sound *

Did I even sleep?

For several years, this was an ordinary day in my life.

Did you notice how many times someone offered to help me in that one day?

Four. My colleague. My sister. My manager. My mum.

All in ways that could have changed the trajectory of my day.

I had four open doors, but I closed each one with a smile.

“No thanks, I’m all good.”

“That’s all good, I’m happy to.”

“Oh no, I’m totally fine.”

Not one of those was true.

In part 1 of this series on releasing the identity of hyper-independence, we looked at how the hyper-independent part of me was born. The endless giving and trying to become everyone’s solution before I was old enough to drive.

Today, we’re covering the part that took me far longer to see. The hyper-independent person is not just the over-giver, they are also the under-receiver.

Why I couldn’t accept help

On a typical day in which I was drowning in stress and burnout, I had offers of real help, from people who love me. And still, something in me turned it down every time.

There was a part of me who believed, perhaps subconsciously:

• If I accept help, I am a burden. I am harming others.

• If I let someone into my chaos, they’ll think less of me. They’ll think I’m incapable.

• If I need anyone, I am not safe. Depending on people is dangerous.

Remember the 15 year old version of me from the last article? The one who became the family’s safe pair of hands?

That kid learned very early that being the strong one kept everyone afloat. And that my needs could wait, because everyone else’s couldn’t.

So she stopped having needs at all and developed an identity of compulsive self-reliance. Not a strength I chose, but a strategy I survived on until I couldn’t tell the difference between the two.

By the time those four people offered to help me, receiving felt like a trip straight back into the Amazon Rainforest. My body had already made its decision. My nervous system had filed “needing help” under threat a long time ago, and never updated the file.

This is a survival pattern that made complete sense when it formed and kept running long after the danger passed.

That’s me in 2019, overstimulated with stress breakouts, trying to keep it together.

Living this way has a cost, even when it looks like strength from the outside.

You carry weight other people were willing to share. You do it alone and call it independence.

But when you deflect every hand for long enough, the hands stop reaching.

People learn that you don’t need them. They stop offering. And you’re left with exactly the isolation you were afraid of, except this time you built it yourself.

The belief that you’re on your own becomes true, because you practised it until it came real.

Unlearning the pattern of refusing help

In the last article I shared that safety is the starting point of any material change. It’s true here too.

You can’t force yourself to accept help.

You can’t think your way into it, or shame yourself into it, or grit your teeth and push through to feeling okay about it.

None of it works, because the resistance doesn’t live in your mind. It lives in your body.

This is the whole reason thinking and contemplation alone are not enough. As Dr Alok Kanojia (also known as Dr K / my fave psychiatrist) and others in this space describe it, trauma lives in the body and not in the mind. You can understand your pattern in perfect detail and still be run by it, because understanding speaks to the mind and the pattern is held somewhere older.

What your body needs to learn, slowly and lovingly, is that receiving is safe. That letting someone help you won’t cost you anything you can’t afford. That you’re allowed to be held, not only to hold.

Your body learns it the way it learns anything, through repetition, until the old alarm stops firing.

That’s what EFT tapping can achieve for you.

Here’s a short explainer:

I also explain more about EFT tapping in part 1 of this series.

Let me take you through another EFT tapping session

Set aside a few minutes and find a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted. Allow yourself to be comfortable, in a seated position. Set up like you would if you were going to meditate.

Do a few rounds of deep breathing. Inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, exhale for 8 seconds.

Then, follow along with me below. Repeat each phrase, and tap the same points I do. If you’ve never done this before, don’t worry about doing it perfectly.

This one is for the part of you that has never felt safe to receive.

What you just did might seem small. But you let yourself sit with the idea of receiving and you stayed with it instead of turning away. For a nervous system that has spent years guarding against help, that might be your turning point.

That’s how you begin to unlearn patterns that have been embedded for years, maybe for most of your life.

Come back to this any time you need it. Before a conversation where you know you’ll be tempted to say “I’m fine” on autopilot. After a day where you gave more than you had. Any moment the old reflex to do it all alone kicks back in.

You can find more EFT tapping videos on my TikTok:

SomaScript on TikTok

If you’d like to go deeper and begin your own journey of releasing the identity of hyper-independence for good, I put together a 5-day EFT Tapping Audio series:

5-day EFT Tapping Audio series 🎧

These five sessions are everything I learned to get here - the patterns I had to acknowledge, the beliefs I had to put down, and the new ones I had to build in their place. It is the way through, distilled into five days. The thing I wish someone had handed my younger self, all those years ago.

In the next article, we’ll spend time with the part of you that can’t switch off. The tired but wired, the racing mind at 10:50pm, the guilt that shows up the moment you try to rest. I’ll take you through a session on feeling safe to finally get the rest you deserve.

Until then, be gentle with yourself.

Follow your light,

Mary-Anne

Founder of SomaScript

I knew our mortgage was in arrears.

At the time, my dad had a cleaning business as a subcontractor. I was helping him clean offices after school.

But in the months leading up to this conversation, the person who contracted my dad was always late to pay him. Therefore we were always late on our mortgage payments.

My mum also worked at a supermarket full-time.

But it wasn’t enough to keep the house. Which by the way, was pretty empty by that point. There was barely any food in the fridge or cupboards, things were falling apart. They argued a lot.

It felt very cold in there.

My parents held onto the house like oxygen. But it was slowly becoming impossible.

“We don’t know what to do.”

“It’s okay, just sell it. I’ll find somewhere for us to rent,” I said, in an encouraging voice, secretly hoping they would agree.

I didn’t care about anything material; I just wanted the stress to end.

“But we wanted you to have this house to live in later on.”

“It’s fine,” I assured them. “I’ll be able to buy my own house, plus I’ll buy you a house when I’m older.”

I was 15 when I told my parents I’d buy them a house. Like any child of immigrant parents, you want to give them the world. You grow up watching all this sacrifice, this suffering, for you to have a normal, conventional life in the Western world. I felt like I owed my life to them.

But I was 15, so in the meantime, my immediate priority was to spend every waking hour looking for a place to rent.

As soon as I got home from school, I’d jump online, and start searching. My dad read through the newspapers. I searched the internet.

I’d compile a list of potential rentals within our budget, and my dad and I would jump in the car and drive to the inspections. I’d fill out the rental applications for all family members.

I remember it being quite fun, going on these drives with my dad. He had a GPS navigator at the time (those standalone devices people used before the days of Google Maps), which took us to places we’d never been before. I recall him naming it ‘George’.

“Okay George, tell us where we need to go next.”

Eventually we landed on a duplex, a bit outside of our budget. But it was convenient because it was located right across the road from my mum’s workplace (she didn’t drive), and it was much cheaper than our mortgage repayments.

We sold the house privately, to a house flipper. The deal was that he’d pay our arrears and the remainder of the mortgage, and we’d hand the house over.

I had never been so relieved in my 15 years of being alive.

Soon after, we had food in the fridge and cupboards again. My parents fought less.

It felt like freedom. Like breathing again for the first time.

This is the earliest example I could think of where being somewhat of a problem solver paid off.

Where giving my parents a solution, and helping to facilitate that solution, resulted in an objectively better life for all of us.

It’s perhaps where the hyper-independent part of me was born.

Or maybe not born, perhaps cemented is a better word. Prior to that I was also an independent child, as independent as any child could be, outside of needing basic survival support.

I never wanted to be a burden to my parents. I wanted to please them, never disappoint them. I wanted them to validate me and praise me.

Over the years, these patterns continued and compounded. Fuelling and shaping a version of me that constantly offered solutions and too often tried to save the day.

The requests would come from my parents, and my answer was always the same.

“Can you take me to the doctor?” Sure.

“Can you fill out this form for me?” Done.

“They need me to do this online.” I’ll do it for you.

“Can you speak to them on the phone for me?” Yes.

“Come with me to this appointment.” Of course.

“I don’t know what to do.” Here are our options.

Whenever there was a problem, I offered the solution.

And whenever I had my own problems, issues, goals, desires, the outcome was the same.

I offered myself the solution.

I did not depend on anyone, did not ask for help.

To seek external support was like trying to breathe underwater.

This hyper-independent part within me quickly became my full identity.

And with this came a solid stack of benefits: being in control of everything, achieving the things I set out to do, accomplishing all of my goals and ambitions, never being let down, never being disappointed, because everything was completely up to me.

As far as I knew, it was a superpower.

Until it wasn’t.

Until it became the very thing that ate away at my survival; my sense of self.

Until any love I had for myself slowly eradicated into nothing but unrealistic expectations, unrealistic goals, shame, guilt, disappointment, self-hatred.

My accomplishments were not a source of joy, but a set of obligations. Achieving anything objectively good was like reaching the surface of a deep ocean, then taking a few desperate breaths, before being sucked down again, into the abyss of the next set of obligations.

If you’re still reading, and if any of this feels familiar or relatable.

If you do everything yourself. If you’re the one everyone leans on, the one who has always been the strong one.

I know that you are incredibly tired.

And I want you to know that I am sorry. I am sorry that you have carried this.

I want you to remember that you never did anything wrong. All you ever did was try to save the people you love.

I’m also here to tell you this article found you for a reason, and it’s finally time to save yourself.

The journey of releasing the identity of hyper-independence

The adversities I had experienced in childhood and adolescence put me on a constant pursuit of self-development.

Which I’m sure is somewhat of a universal experience.

I had read all the books, listened to the podcasts, watched the YouTube videos, paid the coaches, bought the courses, all to make my life objectively better. To earn more money, to increase my intelligence, to develop my skills.

This was all driven by a relentless desire to not struggle; to never struggle the way I did growing up.

When I wasn’t being an overachiever for my parents, I was being an overachiever for myself.

I can’t say there was a single moment in my life where I decided I didn’t want to be so independent anymore.

My journey of releasing this pattern - releasing the identity of hyper-independence - has been an interesting one, to say the least.

In fact, I didn’t go looking for it.

It manifested in the form of a chronic illness, my body finally catching up to me, my body telling me that enough was enough.

While my mind could handle more, and probably had no limit, my body didn’t.

Our bodies have limits that no level of resilience, discipline or willpower can deny.

It forced me to put down the books, the podcasts the videos. To stop working myself into the ground in my job. To stop looking externally.

It forced me to go inward, and look at myself. Truly look at myself.

I realised that in the course of desperately making my life better, I had completely neglected myself.

My face looked exhausted. I had no energy. My body was in pain.

When I looked in the mirror, I could see the sadness behind my eyes.

I began the process of releasing emotions from my body

For the first time, I tried something different.

I stopped operating at the level of the mind, and started to notice how I felt in my body.

What emotions were there? How do they feel? Where in my body do they sit? What are these emotions telling me?

What do I need to let go of?

This is where somatic work took me on a path that I had never been before.

A path of immense healing, wisdom and courage to truly be myself for the first time in my life.

It was by no means easy; I can only describe it as some sort of internal warfare.

But very quickly, it became the answer I was looking for this whole time. The internal presence and connection that the 15 year old version of me needed the most.

As I continued to engage in somatic modalities, the sky began to look brighter. My surroundings looked more colourful. I was lighter in my step.

I no longer woke up every morning with dread and crippling anxiety.

I finally saw the truth of who I really am and what I desire in this life, at the most fundamental level. This all resided within me; none of this required me to reach for something externally.

And what felt miraculous about somatic work, is how accessible it is. No appointment, no one else in the room. All I needed was myself and a quiet space.

Rather than explaining it, let me take you through it

Set aside a few minutes and find a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted. Allow yourself to be comfortable, in a seated position. Set up like you would if you were going to meditate.

Do a few rounds of deep breathing. Inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, exhale for 8 seconds.

Then, follow along with me below. Repeat each phrase, and tap the same points I do. If you’ve never done this before, don’t worry about doing it perfectly.

You can find more EFT tapping videos on my TikTok:

SomaScript on TikTok

Sit for a moment to acknowledge what you just did. You turned toward a part of yourself that most people spend their whole lives avoiding. That is a huge first step to building a life you’re in love with.

You just completed an EFT tapping session

EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique. It was developed in the 1990s by Gary Craig, building on an earlier method called Thought Field Therapy. It involves tapping with your fingertips on a series of acupressure points on the face and body, while gently focusing on an issue you’d like to resolve, or desire you’d like to achieve.

The tapping sends safety signals to your nervous system, to bypass the mind and show your body that it is safe to settle. Over time, the thing you were tapping on stops registering as a threat, and your body will begin to experience safety around it.

And safety is the starting point of making any material change in your life.

Today, EFT tapping is used for stress, anxiety and overwhelm, and there’s a growing body of research behind it, including randomised controlled trials on anxiety and PTSD.

When I was at rock bottom, EFT tapping is what saved me from myself. Nothing else came close.

I truly believe that somatic tools like this are especially powerful for people who are prone to intellectualising their feelings and emotions.

The people who “know exactly why they’re feeling what they’re feeling” but are unable to make any meaningful change.

If this is you, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You are hyper-aware of your patterns but still feel stuck inside them. Thinking and contemplation alone do not release what the body is holding.

EFT tapping reaches the layer that thinking can’t. And once you build this habit, you can do this on your own, any time you need it. In the bathroom on your lunch break. In the car before a high-stakes meeting. At night when you’re trying to switch off for the day.

For example, if you’d like to begin your own journey of releasing the identity of hyper-independence, I put together a 5-day EFT Tapping Audio series:

5-day EFT Tapping Audio series 🎧

These five sessions are everything I learned to get here - the patterns I had to acknowledge, the beliefs I had to put down, and the new ones I had to build in their place. It is the way through, distilled into five days. The thing I wish someone had handed my younger self, all those years ago.

And before I go, just remember - you’re never meant to carry all of it alone. You don’t have to figure all of this out today.

The part of you that does everything alone has been waiting a long time for you to turn around and meet it. You just did, and you should be so proud of yourself for taking this step.

In the next article, we’ll turn to what hyper-independence makes hardest of all: feeling safe with receiving help.

Until then, be gentle with yourself.

Follow your light,

Mary-Anne

Founder of SomaScript

You spent years grinding through school and university, while working a bunch of jobs to stay afloat.

Driven by pure discipline and willpower, your belief was that as soon as you land that job, in that career, you will have everything.

You will be happy. Your struggle will pay off.

After getting your degree, the day finally came when you accepted that job offer.

“This will solve everything.”

You signed your name on the dotted line in a contract that promised you a salary in exchange for your time and skills.

On the surface, you were energised. Inspired. Hopeful.

And perhaps subconsciously, you felt that:

• People would finally accept you

• Your parents would finally validate you

• You would finally feel like you have a place in this world

But not long after that, you realised a different type of struggle ensued.

One that was compounded by years of anticipation. Anticipation of fulfilment. Anticipation of freedom, which didn’t seem to arrive when you thought it would.

You may have started to suspect this way of living wasn’t sustainable. Maybe it showed up as the kind of burnout that doesn’t subside on the weekend. Maybe it showed up in your body, as illness, as pain, as a nervous system that never quite stood down.

And you started to wonder. Is this it? Is this worth it? Can I really do this for the next few decades?

“Is this what I worked so hard for?”

I’m glad this found you

You, Unburdened is for the woman who built a good life and can’t quite work out why it still feels so hard to be in it.

The woman who achieved it all but lost her spark.

More specifically:

The high-achieving woman. You’re good at your job. You’re good at many things actually. Yet your nervous system is in disarray and you don’t remember the last time you truly switched off. Despite being in a state of exhaustion, you find yourself wide awake at night, staring at the ceiling. Thoughts racing. You wonder whether your success will always come at the cost of your wellbeing. It doesn’t. This is for you.

The hyper-independent woman. For as long as you can remember, you’ve done everything yourself. You’ve carried everything for others. And from the outside, everything’s fine. Everyone sees you as the strong, capable one. Yet you find yourself crying in the office bathroom (I can relate), running on caffeine and adrenaline. You can’t remember the last time you put yourself first. You wonder what life would be like if you didn’t have to carry it all. This is for you.

The woman tired of mindset hacks. You’ve done talk therapy, the productivity systems, the 5am rises. You understand your patterns better than anyone, you can explain exactly why you are the way you are. And still, none of it has changed how you actually feel at 3pm on a Tuesday. You don’t want platitudes and you’d never follow anything that sounds too good to be true. You just want something that works. This is for you.

When I created this newsletter, I put out the intention that it would find the right people at the right time

See if any of these feel familiar:

• You can’t switch off outside of work. You close your laptop, much later than you should have. Then you go home, spend time with your loved ones. And whilst you are physically there, your mind is still at your work desk, replaying the events of the day or rehearsing the events of tomorrow.

• Success doesn’t feel the way you thought it would. You hit the goal, you ticked the boxes. But instead of feeling the joy you thought you would, you felt a combination of dread and discontentment. Then you quickly moved onto the next goal to work towards.

• You’re exhausted and chronically stressed in a way rest doesn’t fix. Because it’s more than just being tired. It’s a nervous system that hasn’t felt safe in a very long time.

• You dread things that shouldn’t be a big deal. Going through your email inbox is the equivalent of walking through the Amazon Rainforest. Those dreaded Teams notifications (I have mine on mute, permanently). The meetings. The Sunday blues. Every day, on repeat.

• You’ve outgrown who you used to be, but your body hasn’t caught up. You’ve made significant changes to your life, for the better. Objectively, your life is better than it has ever been. But your nervous system remains attached to your old reality, and you’re struggling to let it go.

• You over-prepare, over-rehearse, over-function. Because some part of you learned a long time ago that being on top of everything was how you stayed safe.

• You’ve tried to think your way out of it. You have an insane level of self-awareness. But you also have a habit of intellectualising your feelings. You know why you feel the way you feel, but you don’t know how to actually change it for good.

• You’re suspicious of “woo woo.” The crystals, tarot cards, the toxic positivity. You want something practical and grounded, with science to back it. Modalities that actually work, somewhere between the esoteric and the overly clinical.

• You feel guilty for struggling at all. Perhaps your parents struggled and sacrificed for the life you have now. So why does it feel like this? And what right do you have to find it hard?

• You’ve subconsciously accepted that this is how it is. I’m here to stop you in your tracks. This is not just “how it is.” The daily dread, the running on empty, is not the price of the life you built.

You deserve to fall in love with the life you built

Four years ago, I woke up every day with crippling anxiety.

After years of pushing through university and landing my dream career, I was empty.

Perhaps even numb. Chronically stressed and burnt out, with an illness that would be later diagnosed as endometriosis.

And for the longest time, I thought the answer was to do more.

Push harder.

Optimise. Optimise. Optimise.

I spent thousands of dollars on courses and coaches.

After everything I put into making my life “look good on paper,” all I wanted was to feel better.

All I wanted was to feel something.

Then at a pivotal point along my journey, I found somatic work.

Which forced me to finally ask the difficult questions. To truly face myself and the truth that resided within my body; the truth my mind could not comprehend.

I quickly learned that the answer was never in doing more. It was in going inward and coming back to my own body. Learning that the suffering I’d accepted as the price of success was never the price at all.

The most important lesson along my journey is that so much of what we carry lives in our body; in the parts of us we’ve ignored the longest.

The parts that have been protecting us on the front line for years without ever being acknowledged.

With You, Unburdened, you’ll skip all my trial and error. You’ll learn everything that helped me go from waking up with crippling anxiety every day, to finally falling back in love with life.

Plus, how to apply the somatic modalities that were most life changing for me — EFT tapping and parts work.

After closely studying these modalities, I trained in EFT and parts work, and over time, started developing my own way of combining them. Which you’ll learn a lot about in this newsletter.

You, Unburdened is where I share practical somatic tools to help you:

• Self-regulate amidst the chaos

• Feel safe in your success

• Fall in love with the life you built

And finally reclaim your energy, clarity and capacity - for good.

It’s a place where you can finally put down everything you’ve been carrying.

Somatic tools in every issue

In short, EFT tapping (or Emotional Freedom Technique) is an evidence-informed self-regulation method that uses fingertip tapping on acupressure points to signal safety to the nervous system. Research has shown that EFT significantly reduces cortisol levels and amygdala activation, while facilitating the release of emotions from the body.

Parts work commonly refers to the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model developed by Dr Richard Schwartz. The core premise is simple: we are not one single, unified self. We are a collection of parts, each with their own beliefs, protective roles and histories. Parts work is the process of turning toward those parts, understanding and witnessing them, so they can unburden what they’ve carried for so long.

This combination of EFT tapping and IFS-informed parts work, is the foundation of my work.

Every issue of You, Unburdened will contain practical tools to help you down-regulate in real time and reach a more expansive state. This includes:

• EFT tapping demonstrations

• Parts work demonstrations

• A combination of both modalities

• Meditations

• Journal prompts

• Exercises, frameworks, and much more.

Start here

The best first step is the one you can take now.

Here’s a short tapping sequence you can follow along with. You don’t need to know anything about EFT, just follow along the same tapping points and repeat each statement after me.

I share more EFT tapping videos on my TikTok:

SomaScript on TikTok

If anything in this post resonated (and before we may never cross paths again), I warmly invite you to subscribe.

As a thank you for joining the SomaScript world, you’ll instantly receive my free somatic audio for releasing stress - a 15-minute self-guided parts work & EFT tapping session to help your body unlearn the stress patterns it has been holding.

And one last thing. I'd love to learn as much as possible about readers of You, Unburdened, so I've put together a short two-minute survey. This will help me understand what you're carrying and ensure that future issues of this newsletter are tailored and relevant.

Reader Survey

(A bonus gift will be waiting for you at the end of the survey! 🎁)

Thank you for being here my friend.

Follow your light,

Mary-Anne

Founder of SomaScript