What we often call crisis is rarely a collapse, it’s a threshold.

In therapy and in life, I’ve seen again and again that the most painful moments are not signs of failure, but signals of transformation. The self we’ve known, shaped by survival, expectations, roles, and old stories, begins to dissolve. Not because something is wrong, but because something deeper is ready to emerge.

This transition is rarely graceful. It doesn’t come with clarity or certainty. It often feels like confusion, grief, depletion, anxiety, or a deep sense of not recognizing yourself anymore. The mind panics: What is happening to me? Why don’t I fit into my life the way I used to? Why am I questioning everything?

But this isn’t the breaking of you. It’s the breaking of what can no longer hold you.

Crisis is the moment the old identity becomes too small for your becoming.

When your nervous system is overwhelmed, when the strategies that once kept you safe begin to hurt more than they help - shutting down, pleasing, perfectionism, control, shrinking - the body and soul begin to rebel. And that rebellion can look like crisis, but it is also a form of truth.

Healing in these moments doesn’t mean rushing to “fix” what is falling apart. It means learning to listen to what is asking to be released and what is trying to be born.

Here is where growth begins (that’s what we do in therapy):

 • Instead of judging the breakdown, we name it as transition.

Your system is reorganizing itself around a truer version of you.

 • Instead of clinging to what is leaving, you learn to grieve it with love.

Even the identities that harmed us were built to protect us once.

 • Instead of numbing the discomfort, we create space for it in safety.

Awareness, breath, presence, and compassion regulate what panic tries to silence.

 • Instead of asking “How do I go back?” you begin asking “What is calling me forward?”

Crisis cracks the shell of who you were taught to be, so you can remember who you are becoming.

In therapy, I don’t rush people through these thresholds. I hold space for the in-between - the dissolving, the confusion, the uncertainty- because that is where the nervous system reorganizes itself. That is where the heart rewrites its story. That is where truth starts breathing again.

Identity shifts are not signs of instability - they are signs of growth.

And growth is not clean. It is emotional, cellular, sometimes devastating, and often sacred.

If you are here - in the unraveling, the questioning, the not-knowing - please hear this:

You are not lost.

You are in transit.

A version of you is ending. Another one is forming. And while the ego calls it crisis, the soul calls it evolution.

🤍May you have the courage to let the old you go with tenderness,

the patience to honor the space in between,

and the trust to grow into the one who is waiting to be born.

With love,🤍

Aniela

🤍 Sessions online.

🤍 Office: THE BOX, 425 Boardman Ave, Traverse city, MI

“The place where people bloom.”