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It's Saturday morning.
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The coffee's hot.
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Nobody needs a ride anywhere.
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And for once you didn't make a list last night.
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You're sitting on the couch and your hands kind of don't know what to do with themselves.
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So you pick up your phone, then you put it down.
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You notice the pile of shoes by the door and tell yourself, you're not dealing with that today.
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And then you think about it for the next 40 minutes anyway.
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It should feel like freedom, this doing nothing.
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It feels a lot more like standing in a room right after someone turned the music off.
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You're listening to the emotional truth, somatic healing and nervous system regulation for the midlife woman who's done everything right and still feels stuck.
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I'm Leslie Turner, somatic practitioner and intuitive coach.
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I work in the body, I work intuitively, and I have a pretty uncanny ability to see what's actually running underneath.
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The stuff that therapy touched but never quite moved.
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Because understanding why you do something and actually stopping it are two completely different things, and that's exactly where we work.
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We cover people pleasing, mom burnout, perimenopause, relationships, money, and what it actually costs the woman who's always been the responsible one.
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Short episodes, real stories, specific enough to stop you in your tracks.
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Let's get into it.
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So in episode 25, What We Get Wrong About the Eldest Daughter, we went underneath all the eldest daughter content that's everywhere right now.
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We found the calculation, that moment really early, maybe when a new baby came home, when a smart little girl figured out that if she needed something, she was a burden.
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And if she helped, she was valuable.
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At the end of that episode, I said we'd go deeper.
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So this is part two, and it's about what happens after.
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After you see the calculation, after you start setting it down, and after the first Saturday on the couch with your hands not knowing where to put them.
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Most of the content out there stops at the recognition.
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You see yourself in the real, you feel seen for 30 seconds, and that's it.
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So when stopping feels uncomfortable, a lot of women will pick it right back up again because the discomfort feels
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like proof they were right to carry it in the first place.
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So let's start in the body, because that's where it shows up first.
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When you stop overfunctioning, your nervous system doesn't throw you a party, it gets nervous.
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For 30 to 40 years, being useful is how your body has known that you are safe.
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Busy meant secure.
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Being needed meant being wanted.
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So when you take the usefulness away, even for one afternoon, your system reads that empty space as a threat.
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That's the restlessness.
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That's the guilt that comes out of nowhere.
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Sometimes it's this weird flatness, like you're sitting in your own life waiting for someone to tell you what your job is.
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In the last episode, I called it free fall.
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Who am I if I'm not doing these things?
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And the answer for a little while is that you don't know yet.
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And that's supposed to happen.
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Your body needs to recalibrate and it needs time to do that.
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It's collecting new evidence that you can exist without a function and nothing bad happens.
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That evidence only comes one way, which is by staying in the discomfort a little longer than feels natural.
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Five more minutes on the couch, letting the shoes stay by the door, letting the email sit until Monday.
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Every time you do that and the world keeps turning, your body files it away.
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You're still going to do the dishes, by the way.
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The shoes will get put away eventually.
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Like I said in episode 25, the house does run better when you're on your game.
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What changes is that you can relax while things are still undone.
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The dishes are in the sink, the laundry's in a pile, and your body can look at all of it and go, huh, not my issue right now.
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And then you go back to your coffee.
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And the guilt is information.
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It's the old calculation getting louder because it's losing its grip.
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It always gets louder on the way out.
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Then there's the people.
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When you've been holding everything, everyone around you has organized their lives around that.
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Your family, your friends, your workplace, they know who remembers the birthday, who books the reservation, who fixes it when it breaks.
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So
when you set some of that down, they feel the weight shift because now it's landing on them.
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People react to that in a few different ways.
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Some will get irritated, some will call you selfish, some will call you lazy, which might be a word you've heard before.
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Some will test it, they'll drop something in your lap just to see if you'll catch it.
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And some people, and this is the one that surprised me, will step right up.
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The friend who always let you plan starts planning.
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Your partner figures out the school forms without asking where they are.
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When one person in a system changes, everyone else has to change a little too.
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And that's uncomfortable for everybody.
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Their reaction is about the adjustment.
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You can let people have their feelings about it without picking that weight back up to make those feelings go away.
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Remember this.
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And if you're in that spot right now where you're setting things down and it feels messy, that is exactly why I made the put her down four guided somatic practices you can do in your car or in your bed or wherever you find 20 minutes.
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And it's in my shop at Leslyturner.ca.
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The part that catches most women off guard is what shows up once there's room.
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When you are busy all the time, there's no room for feelings to arrive.
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That's kind of the point of being busy.
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So when you slow down and the feelings you've been outrunning finally catch up, for a lot of eldest daughters, there's massive grief.
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Grief for the little girl who was making lunches when she should have been making mud pies.
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Grief for all the years that went into holding things together.
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And sometimes it's anger, big anger.
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It needs to move through you and then it will settle.
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The grief and the anger are both signs that she's finally being heard.
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I do have a podcast episode on why am I so angry lately?
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The good girl doesn't make it past 40.
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You do you remember that one?
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Now for the good part.
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Everything she built is still yours.
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And I want to spend some time with this because these skills that you developed as the eldest daughter are phenomenal.
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She built them under pressure with no roadmap at an age when most kids
were worried about what was in their lunchbox.
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And she got really, really good.
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People spend years in therapy, leadership coaches, and coaching programs trying to learn what she figured out before she lost her baby teeth.
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The difference now is that you're the one who decides where they go.
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So take the fact that you can read a room the second you enter it, that 10-second scan when you walk in, who's upset, who needs something, who's about to say the wrong thing.
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That's genuine intuition and it's incredibly refined.
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You're picking up on tone of voice, posture, the half-second pause before someone answers, the energy in a room before anyone says a word.
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Therapists train for years to track that much at once, and you do it while walking in with a casserole dish.
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It's why people tell you things they've never told anyone.
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It's why you know a friend's not okay from one text.
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For most of your life, that radar has been pointed outwards at everyone else.
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Now you get to turn it around.
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Walk into a room, and before you read anyone else, read you.
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What's my body doing right now?
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Am I tight?
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Am I bracing?
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Do I even want to be here?
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That same sensitivity that catches everyone else's shifts can catch yours.
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Then there's the calm.
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The eldest daughter is the one you call when everything falls apart because she won't panic.
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Think about how rare that is.
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When most people hit a crisis, their thinking brain goes offline.
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Yours sharpens.
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You get clear, you get practical, and you know the next three steps before anyone else has stopped crying.
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That's a nervous system that learned to stay organized under enormous stress, and it's the exact quality we look for in ER nurses and pilots and the person you want beside you on the worst day of your life.
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That steadiness is a gift, and you get to choose whose crisis you bring into it.
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You can still be the calm one.
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You just stop being the calm one by default for everyone who calls.
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And you get to bring the calm into your own life too.
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So when your own stuff falls apart, you're the one you'd call.
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Then there's the one I talked about in episode 25.
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When someone says it can't be done and you're already halfway through doing it, you don't really know the words can't be done.
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That's resourcefulness at a level most people never reach.
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You see a problem and your brain immediately starts building the solution.
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Who to call, what to move, what you can make work with what's already in the room.
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That's creativity, that's persistence, that's a deep belief that things can be figured out, and it's what gets businesses started, like families through hard years.
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The only catch is that you've usually been halfway through something before asking whether it was yours to do.
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So now you get to pause at the start.
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Is this mine?
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Do I want it?
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And then the best part, you get to point that same refusal to accept, can't, at the things you've decided aren't possible for you.
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Rest.
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Help.
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Wanting something just because you want it.
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You have found ways to override that, and now you get to do it because you know it can be done.
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And then the roadmap, you were the first one through.
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You figured it out without anybody ahead of you.
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Then handed the map back to everyone behind you.
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Do you know how hard that is?
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That's what founders and pioneers do.
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The first woman in the family to go to university or leave her hometown or start a business or say out loud that something wasn't okay.
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It takes vision and nerve and a tolerance for uncertainty most people never build.
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That's leadership.
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And that's probably what let you build a career and a family and maybe a business out of nothing.
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Now you get to go first for yourself, first on your own rest, your own wants, that dream you haven't told anybody about yet.
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You already know how to walk a road nobody's walked before.
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This time it's yours.
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Same skills.
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Now they belong to you.
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No, I'm not gonna say you're not gonna pick this back up.
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You might not be perfect about this.
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Probably next week, someone's in a pinch, your hand shoots up before your brain catches it, and suddenly you're organizing the whole thing again.
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That's part of it.
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You're rewiring something that's been running for 30 to 40 years, and no one gets that perfect on the first try.
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The work is noticing.
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Oh, I picked it up again, and then setting it back down as many times as it takes.
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Every time you notice, you catch it a little sooner.
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There's a phrase I love, not my monkey, not my circus.
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But the real skill is asking as a question, is this my monkey?
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Is this my circus?
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Because sometimes it is.
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Sometimes it's your kid, your business, your marriage, and you want to be in that ring.
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And sometimes it's absolutely not.
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Your whole life you've been walking into other people's circuses, straightening out the monkeys, calming down the lions, timing the trapeze so the whole show could run a little smoother.
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Nobody asked if you wanted a job at the circus.
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You just showed up with a whistle.
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So now, before you grab the whistle, you get to ask, is this my circus?
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If it is, go run it beautifully.
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And if it isn't, you get to enjoy this show from the stands.
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Something to try this week.
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The next time someone asks you for something, before you say yes, pause for one breath.
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Just one.
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In that breath, point the radar inward.
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Drop your attention to your chest or your belly and notice what happens when you picture saying yes.
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Is there a lift or a little clench and a sinking?
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Your body will answer faster than your brain.
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And then ask it, is this my circus?
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You don't even have to say no yet.
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Just notice.
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That one breath is where you start choosing instead of calculating.
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You spent a long time being the one who held it all.
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But she did an incredible job.
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She kept everything running with nobody ahead of her to learn from.
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And she's earned her rest.
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And you get to find out who you are when you're not holding anything at all.
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Sounds exciting.
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Thank you for being here.
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If you're here and listening, you're already doing this work.
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Until next time.
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If this episode landed somewhere, don't just let it sit there.
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That feeling you have right now, that's not a coincidence.
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That's your nervous system telling you something is ready to move.
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I have a free pattern discovery call where we do exactly that.
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We find the pattern that's actually been running the show, and I give you one tangible next step to start integrating it.
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You can book yours at Leslie Turner.ca.
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And if this was the episode that made you pull over and think, wait, is she talking about me?
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Please subscribe.
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Leave a review and send it to the woman in your life who needs to hear it.
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You know exactly who I'm talking about.
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Find me on Instagram at the Leslie Turner.
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And until next time, the fact that you're here and listening means you're already doing this work.