When a Life Change Isn’t Enough: Nervous System Healing for Life Transitions
- Tanya Master
- Aug 2, 2022
- 5 min read
A few years ago, I made what I thought was the most aligned move of my life. I left my apartment in Hamburg, Germany, said goodbye to the city, and relocated to the middle of the German countryside. My partner had been invited to take part in a small-scale organic farming project rooted in sustainability and community. We were offered housing on the land, and I had just left my corporate job to go fully self-employed. So it felt like a dream.
I thought I was escaping the Matrix.
The noise. The pressure. The performance. The constant override of city life. I believed I was finally stepping into the kind of slow, intentional, conscious life I had always wanted: growing food, being close to the land, living in harmony with nature, and finally having time to build my practice.
And then came the crash.
What I discovered, over the months that followed, wasn’t peace or clarity — it was nervous system collapse. The move hadn’t taken me into a nourishing, grounded environment. In fact, the relational dynamics I encountered were highly activating. There were toxic behaviours, blurred boundaries, and emotional dynamics that echoed old wounds I hadn’t yet faced.
I hadn’t escaped the Matrix. I had walked right into a new version of it — one that wore a more conscious costume, but still surfaced every survival strategy I’d carried from childhood.
The Illusion of Escape
Many of us dream of leaving systems that feel extractive, disconnected, or unsustainable. We want to build a life that reflects our values. And that’s a good thing. But what I learned the hard way is this:
Even the most promising environment (one that looks conscious on the outside) can still retraumatise us if the relational field isn’t truly safe. Especially if our body is still wired to tolerate what hurts.
The Matrix isn’t just external. It’s internalised. It lives in the nervous system. In the habits of override. In the roles we’ve learned to play. In the parts of us that believe we only get to rest once we’ve earned it.
And that means even the dream life can feel unsustainable if your system is still holding onto unresolved stress, relational trauma, or burnout.
When “Conscious” Environments Aren’t Trauma-Informed
A core part of what I learned is this: just because a space uses the right language — “community,” “regenerative,” “intentional,” “conscious living” — doesn’t mean it’s trauma-aware, or relationally safe.
In fact, high-control dynamics, emotional bypassing, and lack of boundaries are often hidden inside so-called “conscious” or community-based environments. And when we carry unintegrated trauma, our systems can mistake that familiarity for resonance; until it overwhelms us.
It wasn’t just that my body needed healing. It was that I hadn’t yet learned to discern what safety actually felt like.
Why Nervous System Healing Is Essential for Life Transitions
Moving to a beautiful, abundant place with organic food and meaningful work didn’t take away my overwhelm. It just exposed it. I was out of the loop. Off the treadmill. But without the scaffolding of routine, urgency, and external validation, something unexpected happened: my body didn’t exhale. It braced.
All the internal material I hadn’t fully metabolised came rushing to the surface — stress responses I thought I’d outgrown, relational patterns I thought I’d healed, and a nervous system still wired for survival.
For many of my clients, this story sounds familiar:
You leave the corporate job.
You move to a quieter place (internally and/or externally).
Perhaps you start your own solo-work.
You do everything "right."
And yet your body doesn’t relax. The pressure doesn’t lift. You start wondering what’s wrong with you. But there’s nothing wrong with you.
Your system simply hasn’t caught up to your new reality. Because trauma isn’t stored in logic — it’s stored in the body. And the body doesn’t update just because your circumstances change.
Even after you leave what wasn’t working, your body might still be running on the same survival physiology that helped you cope with it. That includes:
Hypervigilance and anticipatory stress
Emotional reactivity or shutdown
Trouble resting or trusting the moment
Difficulty connecting even when things are safer
This is why nervous system healing after transitions is so important. Without it, we risk re-creating the same patterns in new places, or abandoning the very changes we fought for, because our system never got a chance to truly land.
What I Needed (and What Most People Need) — Trauma Work after Life Transitions
It wasn’t more alignment that I needed. It was more capacity.
Capacity to feel what I had been avoiding.
Capacity to rest without guilt.
Capacity to hold the uncertainty of self-employment.
Capacity to speak boundaries, not just value them.
Capacity to lead, not just escape the systems I rejected.
This is the work I do now.
I support leaders, founders, and trauma-informed practitioners who are building lives outside the norm — but whose nervous systems haven’t yet caught up to the freedom they’ve created.
I help people work not just on the outside of their life and business, but on the inside:
The relational patterns that still loop.
The inner parts still holding fear, shame, or perfectionism.
The body symptoms that don’t go away, even in safe environments.
Postscript: I Didn’t Stay
For the record: I didn’t end up staying in the German countryside. I lived in that community for nearly two years. And in many ways, the quiet of that place gave me exactly what I needed. It allowed me to slow down, recalibrate my nervous system, and lay the foundations of the psychosomatic practice I now run full-time.
But eventually, the isolation became too much.
Because healing isn’t just about leaving. Sometimes we do need to leave — to interrupt the noise, to reorient, to touch something real again. But for many of us, especially those with complex trauma or chronic override, leaving is only one part of the arc.
Eventually, we’re meant to reemerge.
I left to be closer to people. To civilisation. To the living tension of real life... not just the ideal of it.
What I learned was that it’s not about escaping the Matrix.
It’s about becoming someone who can stay in contact with yourself inside it.
If You’ve Escaped the Matrix But Still Feel Stuck…
Your body might still be running an old program: built in childhood, reinforced by culture, shaped by survival.
Psychosomatic coaching helps you update that program. It works at the level of your nervous system, your inner parts, your relational field. It restores the connection between your vision and your body’s actual capacity to hold it.
If that’s what you’re seeking, I invite you to start with a 60-minute Psychosomatic Introductory Session, or explore my trauma-informed approach in more detail.
You don’t have to choose between a meaningful life and a regulated one. You can have both.
