From exhausted and disembodied to a life that feels like mine again

Where Hadley began

Hadley called me fourteen months after her divorce was finalized. She had read a blog post about somatic grief, and something in the language — about grief living in the body — had stopped her mid-scroll. "I thought I was supposed to be over this," she said when we spoke. "It's been over a year. Everyone keeps asking me when I'm going to start dating again. But I can barely feel my own hands."

By the time of our free consultation, Hadley had tried most of what a capable, self-aware person tries after a major life rupture: a therapist she liked but saw inconsistently, two short courses on post-divorce recovery, daily yoga, a meditation practice she had abandoned, and what she called "rigorous amounts of journaling." She had cut her hair, reorganized her apartment, started a new job, and adopted a dog. None of it had reached the place where the stuckness lived.

She described herself, in a way that landed with the weight of a careful sentence, as "fine-ish." She was functioning well at work. She was sleeping. She had friends. But she had not cried in nine months — not once — and when she noticed this, it frightened her. "I don't feel numb, exactly," she said. "I feel like I'm occupying someone else's life. Like a very polite house-sitter of my own days."

What she was looking for, she told me, was not advice and not a fresh start. She wanted somewhere to bring the part of her that had gone quiet — the part that had been the loudest in her marriage and that had been the first to go silent after it ended. She suspected that part was not gone. She suspected it was waiting to be met.

That is the question that brought her to her first Integrative Energy Healing session.

The journey, session by session

1. Session 0 · The free consultation

   Mapping what was held

   A 20-minute phone call. Hadley did most of the talking; I listened, asked a few questions, and let the shape of her inside come through. The picture that emerged was clear: a grief held mostly in the chest and hips — dense, exhausting, layered beneath what looked on the outside like a successful reorganisation of her life. Underneath, something older and quieter was asking to be met. We agreed to begin with a 90-minute Integrative Energy Healing session, with room to let the work find its own direction.

2. Session 1 · Integrative Energy Healing

   The first time she cried in nine months

   Hadley lay on the table still in her work clothes, which she later described as "a metaphor I didn't catch at the time." Within the first twenty minutes, something let go in her chest and she began to cry — quietly, then more fully, then quietly again. She had not cried in nine months, and she cried for nearly an hour of the session. By the end, she described feeling "lighter, but also emptier, in a way that felt clean." She left with instructions only to rest and drink water, which she did for the next three days.

3. Session 3 · Grief & Loss

   Grieving a relationship that was not the whole story

   By the third session, Hadley had begun to notice that the grief she was carrying was larger than her ex-husband. It included the shared life they had planned, the friendships that had not survived the marriage, and the version of herself she had been during those years — the version that she had quietly loved and then quietly lost. In the Grief & Loss work, we held space for each of those layers in turn. She left the session saying, "I think I am grieving a lot of people, including me."

4. Session 5 · Past Life Trauma

   The thing underneath the thing

   By the fifth session, the present-day grief had begun to settle into something quieter. What surfaced next was older — a pattern of disappearing inside long-term relationships that Hadley had carried for longer than her marriage. In the Past Life Trauma work, she met an image of herself at a younger age — "tired, but with a sense of humour" — and she described the session as feeling like "writing a letter to a version of myself I had been ignoring." She laughed for the first time in session, and we both noticed it.

5. Session 7 · Integrative Energy Healing

   Coming home to her own body

   By the seventh session, Hadley's relationship with her own body had changed. She had stopped saying "my hands don't feel like mine" — which had been her description at the free consultation. She had begun to notice temperature, texture, and her own breath as small, ordinary sensations that she had lost access to for over a year. In this session, we did grounded, gentle work with her root and sacral centres, and she left saying, "I feel like I live here now. Not visiting. Living."

6. Session 10 · Closing phase

   A life that feels like hers

   By the tenth session, Hadley had begun to imagine again — not the life she had planned with her ex-husband, but the one she actually wanted. She had stopped fielding questions about dating with the polite deflection she had been using for a year. In a follow-up note a few weeks after our last session, she wrote: "I am not finished. I will probably come back. But I am not a house-sitter of my own life anymore. I am living in it. Thank you for the room to come back."

What shifted, specifically

Hadley's pathway was hers, but the markers of change often rhyme across the post-divorce work I do. These are some of the specific shifts she named, in her own words, over the course of our time together:

What this is, and what it isn't

What happened with Hadley is not a guarantee, because no two arcs rhyme exactly. It is also not unusual. Many of the people who come to Alif Healing have been carrying a quiet, layered grief — not just the loss on the surface, but everything that disappeared alongside it, including pieces of themselves they had stopped expecting to find. Integrative energy healing, grief work, and past-life trauma work together create the conditions for those pieces to be met rather than chased.

If something in Hadley's story has landed for you, you don't have to know where to begin in order to begin. The first step is usually smaller than people expect — a free 15–20 minute conversation, a quiet question asked and answered, and a sense of whether this is the right room for what you are carrying.