Long-Awaited Personal Update

On Healing My Son and Possibility-Based Living

This is a long essay, my dears. Probably takes 5-10 minutes to read. And it’s one of the rawest things I’ve ever written.

The TL;DR: This is a heart-on-the-table update about the depth of my 2023 so far, how we healed my son’s health through re-wiring our family system, and what it taught me about myself, my own journey, and my work with the many incredible people like you. I’ve never looked deeper into the depth of my soul, and I never felt more alignment with where I am going in life. Thank you for being part of it. Without further ado… 

On “Possibility-Based Living”

You know the type of friendships and loved ones in your life who intrigue you to look at yourself in a completely different way? The people who bring you alive in you something that you weren’t yet willing or able to see? Merely by showing you their level of reflection, presence, and joy. 

This is how I’d love it to feel when you read this update. And my wish for you is that after reading, you feel a natural desire to catch up with yourself, and with others close to you. 

I have always used writing as a way to make sense of my own life and its meaning, release myself of some of the stories in my body, and reflect on the growth that happens between the lines, between the days, weeks, and months that blur together and sometimes seem all the same but actually tell the story of profound personal evolution.

This growth that happens “between the lines” is the growth that changes how we show up, how we keep unfolding with new aliveness, and how we continually transform sorrow into wisdom. I feel like I’ve had a lot of this “between the lines” growth recently. 

The following paragraphs describe my in-between-the-lines growth and the vastness of my personal human experience since January 2023.

The last 8 months have been full of mud, tears, hard decisions, long walks, and looking desperation in the eye again and again, the overarching theme has been “possibility-based living.”

This has meant not giving up when things get hard, and even transcending the duality of hard versus easy. Stretching my own idea of truth to be more than society’s menu of binary choices. 

When executed with conviction and purpose, Mother Nature shows us that all the paths, shades, textures, and extremes we choose to follow can eventually lead us toward harmony.

Self-Honesty, and Transcending Pain and Pleasure

Ever since our 5-year-old son was born in 2018 we knew we’d welcomed a special soul, someone who had come with centuries of wisdom the moment he came out of my womb. It wasn’t something I was able to put into words at the time, but there was something about him that made me feel almost scared to engage with him fully because I wasn’t sure how. This feels incredibly raw to type out, but it’s the truth. 

We’ve always felt that he hadn’t fully arrived in his present body and that he was almost speeding through his first 24 months. He was sitting by 4 months, standing by 6 months, climbing ladders by 7 months, and walking by 9.5 months. He taught himself how to ride a scooter at 17 months, and is easily out-competing his 8-year-old brother’s athletic strength today at 5. His running form is that of someone who’s trained for years.

By 19 months he started to talk to us about his former life in Africa, the people he had to leave behind, the fires that destroyed everything, and how he was able to rescue some of his animals. One time we visited an African wildlife park in Italy; afterward he refused to ever go back and see African animals, saying his memory of their death was too painful. He told us about his other parents and until today he reminds us that getting old means we’re getting younger again. 

He is the happiest when he can just be, just play, no planned activities. It’s often felt as though he just wanted to arrive a little more into the little boy’s body that he is just getting to experience now. 

I am sharing all of this because his skin would tell us so much more about the stress levels he was experiencing. When experiencing eczema, some children have a few spots here and there, and their legs and arms are itchy. For Benjamin, eczema means full-body coverage. For the majority of his young life, he slept with bandages covering his body, screaming all night, when it seemed to be its worst because his skin was burning. It always felt like the more he became aware of his body, the worse his eczema got. 

By year 5 (8 months ago, January 2023), his skin exploded. As his mother, I put my podcast on hold, maintained current clients, and made his healing my 24/7 #1 priority. We continued getting blood and stool tests to get a more comprehensive understanding of his gut microbiome, I started cooking every single meal for him from scratch, produced fresh celery juice every morning for him, started mixing my own lotions, and built out nervous-system regulating rituals with him that would give him moments of relief before going to sleep - a time of the day that his body had learned to associate with anxiety because of the itching that was about to come.

Here’s what happened: It got a little better…

…before it got waaaaaay worse. 

Typing this out puts my body into absolute dissociation. The hopelessness was unbearable. The burning sensation his skin felt became constant, and he started associating all joyful hobbies like running, swimming, and meeting friends at their house with fear of flare-ups. As his mother, my heart was sobbing. It felt like nothing I was doing was working. It felt like I was failing him.

One night at 3:00 a.m. after not being able to sleep yet again, I sat on our couch and I meditated on the question I had meditated upon a million times before: “What is his body saying? What is his body saying that he can’t verbalize? Which message can I receive?”

This is the level of inquiry and curiosity that I invite my clients to practice. Listening to ourselves in this way requires patience and humility, as we are so quick to detach from our own bodies. Even just spending 20, 30, or 60 minutes listening to our bodies’ signals: the stress it holds; the judgment it feels toward others; the conditioning overcoupling our innate desire for belonging, safety, dignity, and inner strength, can be an act of courage. Our bodies are a perfect system - they tell us what it is that we need to listen to. But most of us haven’t learned how to listen.

Our desire for progress, achievement, and growth always comes at the cost of our attunement to ourselves. Not in alignment with it.

So sitting there inquiring with myself, here’s what came up: “Fuck, Franzi. You are not doing this for him, you are doing this for yourself. You are healing him because you want to be the one saying that we healed him. You receive some form of strange joy out of fixing this. You are not really listening, you are just reacting.”

Let me tell you, knowing this hurts and makes me want to throw up. I feel like purging this side of me, but I had to really inner-stand what it was that I was doing, and what was wrong about it. So I stayed there. I stayed with this feeling for another hour. 

The truth was: We were keeping his illness alive by obsessing over the urgency of fixing it. What I actually needed to do was pause, listen, and create a protocol that would suit HIM. And him only. 

In all of my doing, I had lost sight of the being that he needed from me. And I had also stopped listening to my own body. My maternal care became a maternal emergency room. And my anxious nervous system became his. I thought I was doing the right thing until I realized I wasn’t.

This is the work I perform daily: priming leaders of any kind for the type of radical self-inquiry that results in somatic opening, so that we can re-write the unconscious narratives that dictate their daily behavioral choices. Most clients come to me limited in their emotional and mental availability to be fully present, communicate clearly, and provide unexpected value to their clients, customers, teams, community, and family. 

We have to get out of our own way - we have to release our own conditioned tendencies and traumas that protect us from truly seeing others the way they are. This is when toxic relationships end, this is when people start moving closer together after years of silent resentment. This is the type of work that provides belonging, safety, and dignity at scale. 

The truth is that we can choose whether we experience sensations as pleasure or pain. Sensations are neutral. It’s our body’s interpretation of an emotion/sensation whether or not we experience it as painful or pleasurable. 

It hurts to admit this, but in order to create meaning out of my son’s suffering, I turned the pain of witnessing him in such pain into the pleasure of fixing him. Let that sink in. It took me a while to truly understand what I was inadvertently doing there and what was wrong with it.

As much as that 3:30 a.m. realization was uncomfortable and humbling, it was also exactly what my son and our family needed.

I am so willing to be flawed and imperfect that I was able to allow this new clarity to liberate me. So much so that I was immediately willing to find help. For the very same reason that I am a coach and preach that leaders can’t go through most of what they experience on their own, I also decided that I won’t be the person who heals my son. I need a community, I need others dedicated to holistic healing, understanding chronic illnesses in children, nervous system regulation for children. I needed people who could show me where I needed to step out of my own way and help re-wire my actions and behaviors on a daily basis.

And I found it. That night. Through radical inquiry, it came to me. Don’t ask me how. All I know is that by being open to listening, I was ready to find it. And Google provided.

We’ve now been part of a community that focuses on healing children’s severe cases of eczema through healing the parent’s nervous system, helping them to regulate themselves, sleep training, and a clean diet that is based on the books of Anthony William (which we had adopted 6 months prior to getting here).

What we are integrating is what is part of every somatic leadership inquiry process. I am excited to have eaten my own dog food yet again to feel more grounded in it than ever before: 

• Treating chronic imbalances with urgent emergency solutions provides only temporary relief, and delays real healing. Read that again. 

Example: For clinically depressed individuals, anti-depression medication can be a bridge that allows the individual to re-stabilize. From a stabilized emotional state, a person can rebuild their capacity to work on the internal imbalances that caused the anxiety or depression in the first place. Trauma still has to be integrated, exhaustion still has to be healed through deep muscle relaxation, actual rest, and a new definition of success, anger, irritability and frustration is still a sign of a nervous system that spends most of its time out of its window of tolerance. The linked article here also describes how the window of tolerance is so important in workplace settings. The longer the body spends time in states of hypervigilance, the greater the risk that allostatic load will accumulate and prime the body for severe chronic illnesses such as hypertension, muscular rigidity and tension, loss of libido, a decrease of amino acids supporting the transport of dopamine, serotonine, etc.

• Salutogenesis can only occur from a place of acceptance. Where energy goes, energy flows. And the quality of that energy is important. 

Example: If I try to overcome my imposter syndrome by pushing myself through and then create moments of anxiety for my nervous system, my body continues to perceive “pushing through” as a threat. If I instead consider my imposter syndrome as my body signaling me something that I am afraid of, and channel it with curiosity, I have a chance to get to know what it is that I struggle with and how my physical sensations relate to it. This works for anything else too. Chronic work anxiety, burnout, chronic stuckness (often accompanied with digestive issues, by the way), and loads more.

• We can’t train our bodies to work a certain way, we have to create a new capacity to hold ourselves. 

Example: My son couldn’t sleep anymore, and neither could I. Instead of relearning how to sleep, I learned how to perceive sleep as a deeply regulating, calming experience. Not as a traumatic event we would be scared of before it even started. Sleep is natural, we can all do it, we all know how to do it. But life events may overcouple our innate abilities with adaptive coping mechanisms. This doesn’t mean that they need to stay, it just means that we need to learn how to relate to our emotional state, and not become it. Talk to me if that nuance strikes you.

• Knowledge is a rumor until it lives in the body.

The practices we keep shape our Gestalt. We need consistency in moments of change, if we want to truly see, feel, and acknowledge what changes. 

There have been many moments where we thought about moving to the seaside in the first 5 years of his life - a place that always seemed to help him every time we went on vacation there. And overall, we thought about a lot of deeply radical changes for him. Even taking him out of pre-school entirely. I am glad we didn’t.

Now that we understand the deep implications of mirror neurons in children and parents on an even deeper level than before, we understand that it wasn’t the sea (while helpful), but it was because we were more relaxed too. On vacation, no work, long mornings, no rushing to places, just going with the flow and being present with each other.

Luckily, Ted and I have brick-by-brick built a life over the last 8 years that allows us to make more space for our children in our everyday experience. We spent a lot of time being incredibly intentional about our life design so our children would be lessexposed to the general lack of support in our care economy (AKA the village, or lack thereof). 

The same applies to you. You don’t need to move to an exotic country after burning out from your work, or changing every single aspect of your growth strategy as an organization because turnover has recently much higher than before, you also don’t need to question all of you if you keep seeing the same interpersonal challenges and fights with people across multiple areas of your life. You need to pay attention WHAT it is that GETS TRIGGERED, and then commit to practicing a new shape, and transforming your historical shape.

• Leadership isn’t a title, it’s a sense of ownership. It’s dedication, and commitment to continue becoming and unfolding.

Nothing has shaped my daily leadership, my sense of calm and trust, my commitment to turning obstacles into opportunities more than the last 8 years as a mother, and 5 years in particular with our son. I owned this. While feeling exhausted, beaten up, partially devastated at times, there was always this light inside of me… maybe more like a fire that knew we would find a way, and that there is a message his body is sending us that we don’t understand just yet.

There were ample moments, where I felt a deep sense of inspiration by the sheer existence of our little man. The days where he barely slept and still had the greatest time with his brothers and friends, or solved a 200-piece puzzle at barely 4 years old.

So many moments that I used to inspire my coaching business. The way I would choose to show up, face my fears, make strategic decisions at crossroads, or come up with new approaches for clients when I felt they were stuck. So many of my best moments have come from him.

This shows that we can source our momentum from literally anywhere if we allow the spill-over to happen, if we allow ourselves live with less separation. When we own and embody our whole messy truth,  overall capacity increases, the switching costs between family and work decrease, life becomes seamless. This is an active choice, this is an active practice, this is an active belief unfolding in front of you. You have to show up for it.

• The scariest thing for all of us is to be at the 51%+ mark of personal power.

The most hidden elements of our potential reside in our lack of courage to move beyond the life’s 51% mark. To truly believe, to truly insist, to truly matter, to truly unfold beyond societal measures, to truly believe in magic that nobody else can see, to find unconventional love, to build something that defies traditional measures of success and find fulfillment in new or very old ways. This is where true influence starts, this is where we can help others to look and move beyond what is currently impossible and show what it means to embrace “possibility-based living”.

We visited my sons’ pediatrician today for his annual check-up and he could not believe what he saw. He asked what we did. I told him that we don’t use any lotions, any special treatments, outside of olive oil baths three times per week, and a consistent practice around nervous-system regulation and learning our family’s stress triggers. He asked for the practices, brought in his assistant doctor, the in-house dermatologist, and started citing research from the early 90s that hinted at the same thing.

He was excited to pass this onto the many other families deeply struggling with this puzzling skin disorder.

THIS IS INFLUENCE. This is living at 51% and beyond. This is providing unexpected value that ripples as positive influence through your social circles. This is what happens when you care, and believe and keep unfolding. If I hadn’t gotten out of my own way as a person, my son would still be struggling. 

Thank you to Chris Scott - a dear friendtor - who was willing to unfold this with me during our recent conversation. Because of the conversation with him, I was able to develop the language for something that I had been looking for and feeling into for a while.

If you as a leader in your family, community, business, or team don’t get out of your own way, you may keep your people hostage below 51%. Be aware that the old command and control ways of leading might not work as well as they did, when your people find the interoceptive capacity to say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done, do what’s inherently right. Your boldest move may become to step into the power of giving away power. More on that soon.

I don’t think I have dared to be as holistic in my updates thus far, and it is not easy. I am deeply aware that this challenges all of us in different ways.

So instead I am asking you something very different today:

If something stood out to you in all of this, FEEL what it is. Really feel what the emotions are that are rising to the top, and feel which part of your body is most activated, or where you are dissociating as a sign of feeling overloaded and overwhelmed. Let this tell you where you want to spend time to get to know yourself better, and how your body is signaling things that are important to you. 

I’d love to connect with you deeply and meaningfully, beyond the usual “Please hit reply" and let me know how you’re doing”.

If you made it until the end of this long update, I thank you and hope I was able to create a moment of reflection, value, and/or new ideas inside of you. I’ll send another essay soon with other exciting news. 🙂

All the love, all the power, 

Franzi