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I am blown away by the growth of our little community here in the past couple of weeks. A lot of you found me this month through my collapse videos on Instagram or TikTok. So let’s talk about it, because there’s more than one kind. From the outside, they look virtually the same. But from the inside, they’re completely different, and what helps depends on which one you’re in.

This is based on my Spiral framework, which has 4 stages: the Ashes, Ember, Flame, and Rise. If you want to go deeper, you can read The Primer first.

The Ashes collapse

My ashes collapsed into utter flatness, with nothing underneath. Every night I’d find myself out on the porch, staring into the dark. I didn’t remember walking out there. And it didn’t hurt. I knew something was wrong, and I’d get those little embers now and then, but mostly it was nothingness and emptiness. No emotions and no feelings.

Then other days it flipped. I was overfull and overflowing. There was too much, and I couldn’t hold it together. That was the Ashes too. Flat one day, flooded the next, and never anywhere in between.

I like to equate this to a pressure cooker. When it’s pressurized and cooking, everything looks calm and almost a little boring, but twist that tiny vent knob on the top and stand back. In the Ashes, you don’t control that knob; it flips between calm and erupting whenever it feels like it.

The Ashes usually descend slowly over time. You eventually just resign yourself to “this is life,” or “this is just who I am.” Your life doesn’t really feel like it’s going anywhere, because you aren’t really in it.

The Flame collapse

The Flame collapse is different because you can see what is actively burning away. It just doesn’t feel like there is anything to do about it.

I go much deeper into this in Spiraling Into Control, but for me, it was serving at my church. My divorce had been finalized, and I had begun dating again. I was excited to share my new relationship with someone I had thought was a close friend. Instead of sharing my joy, she was appalled at my “behavior” and threatened my position in the church. I watched as this fake facade of friendships burned away. All of a sudden, that was gone, and I sat there thinking, well, I don’t know what to do now.

Those things needed to go. They needed to be burned away. But it felt like my whole life was actively disappearing in front of me.

That’s the main difference. In the Ashes, things fade out without you noticing. In the Flame, you’re sitting there consciously watching things burn, and you have feelings about it. You’re pissed off that certain people don’t want to be around you anymore. You’re scared because you don’t know what the next step is. The Ashes are empty. The Flame is desperate.

If you’re in the Ashes right now

Look for the embers. They’re the little sparks that tell you something’s not right and that there’s more than this.

When you find one, hold it. Don’t explode it into a fireball (that’s a whole different article), where you grab that spark and change your whole life overnight. Just look at it. Figure out where it came from, and why it’s sparking now.

I want you to hear that there is something more. It’s going to be slow, and the embers are going to be tiny. But finding those tiny embers is what’s going to help you climb out of the Ashes collapse.

If you’re in the Flame right now

It hurts, and it sucks. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But the things burning away were serving your costume and your mask. They weren’t serving the person underneath. And there is a person underneath, one you’re ready to be introduced to.

That’s why I really discourage looking backward. When you say “I just want to be who I was before,” what you’re asking for is the costume back. I get why. Everything seemed fine when you were wearing it. You were the yes person, doing everything everyone wanted, the good little soldier. It felt safe. It wasn’t serving you.

The Flame is about finding a way to serve yourself. It means you have a role to play in your own life, and a say in what happens in it.

So which one are you in?

If you’re flat, or swinging between flat and flooded, you’re probably in the Ashes. Start looking for embers. If you’re watching your life burn and you’re furious and scared about it, you might be in the Flame. It feels worse, and that doesn’t mean you’re going backward.

Not sure? That’s what the You Are Here assessment is for: youarehere.laurentobey.com

Say it was hard, and people nod. Say it was trauma, and suddenly you’re the one being dramatic. Because the word hard is vague, and vague lets everyone off the hook.

When we hear the word trauma, most of us immediately jump to the worst-case scenarios. The PTSD that soldiers come home with. The people who lived through the worst day of their lives. But then there’s everything else. Those are the small cuts.

If you think of your life like a piece of paper, PTSD is a cut straight down the middle. It’s obvious, and it’s impossible to miss that it’s changed the shape of your life. But complex PTSD is different. It’s those tiny, small things. But no, before you come at me, it’s not every negative experience. The things that count are the ones that alter the course of your life, or how you move through it.

And how you move through it is the important piece. It’s the times you swallow what you want to say just to keep the room calm. The decisions you make around someone else’s needs, someone else’s mood, instead of your own.

Trauma doesn’t always feel like trauma. Sometimes it just feels like keeping the peace. But each of those swallowed sentences is a tiny shave off that piece of paper. And over time, the paper gets smaller and smaller without you noticing. Until one day you look down and wonder where it all went.

Right before I got married, my mom and I went shopping. He and I had decided we wanted a rustic wedding, and I really wanted to wear cowboy boots under my dress. So my mom offered to buy me a pair. Her treat.

And he said to me, “Well, what about me? Why don’t I get new boots?”

I swear, I don’t know how I didn’t clock this man's audacity sooner.

When my mom and I got in the car, she asked out loud why she would buy his boots. I could already feel where the night was going. She bought mine anyway, and we had a great day out together.

After she left, he was upset. She’d gotten me something, and he hadn’t gotten anything. So I told him I’d buy him new boots. We went out, he picked the pair he wanted, and I paid for them. We weren’t married yet. No joint account. It came out of my money.

By then I’d stopped expecting to keep anything good for myself. Something nice would show up, and I’d already be bracing for what it would cost me later.

So my mom bought me boots so I wouldn’t have to spend my own money. And I spent my own money anyway. On his.

There’s a name for what that costs you.

Let’s put our lab coats on for just a minute and talk about allostatic load. That’s the fancy science word for it. I guess that’s what happens when you cope by reading scientific research papers at two in the morning. It’s the wear and tear on the body when the stress never fully switches off. Your system is built to brace and then stand down. Mine just never got to the second part.

In 1993, McEwen and Stellar wrote a paper called “Stress and the Individual.” What they found was a reframe for stress. Before that, people thought of stress as one bad event. But what they figured out is that the system in your body that’s supposed to switch off sometimes stays on, when the stress keeps coming and you never get relief from it.

That’s what explains why the same stress wrecks one person and not another. It’s cumulative, and it’s individual. It’s based on your own history, and your own load.

Think back to that small piece of paper. Two people can go through the exact same event. For one, it’s the last shave, the one that finally makes them look down and see how much smaller their paper has gotten. For the other, it’s the first mark on the page, barely a line.

Ultimately, it’s your life and your experiences. You can call it what you want.

But until we start calling it what it is, it keeps getting minimized. By you, and by the people around you. And the more it gets minimized, the more it hurts. Not just you. Because you never know what someone else is carrying when they hear you wave yours away.

I thought that was just who I was.

It wasn’t.

The parts of me people admired most weren’t my nature. They were my armor. I wore it so long it fused into something that looked like identity. And the world rewarded me for it.

You’re so strong. You’re so resilient. You’re so capable.

I heard those words my whole life, but never once asked what they were costing me.

The people-pleasing was really me running threat assessments, making sure everyone else stayed comfortable, so I didn’t have to deal with the fallout of their discomfort.

The perfectionism was just an attempt to outrun criticism entirely.

And that easygoing, low-maintenance version of me? She wasn’t relaxed. She was disappearing. Calculating which parts of herself were safe to show and which parts would cost too much to defend.

Who wouldn’t love a woman who never needs anything? Who never complains, never pushes back, never takes up emotional space? It made everyone’s life easier. It didn’t make mine better.

This is the hidden wound of so many high-functioning women. A lot of us weren’t abused into perfectionism. We were loved into it.

Some children learn that acting out gets them noticed. Others learn the opposite. Being responsible, high-achieving, and easy to be around makes them worth keeping around. Makes them safe. Makes them loved.

Once that pattern locks in, it stops being a choice. It becomes a reflex. Somewhere in that cycle, the nervous system makes a quiet, devastating equation. Achievement means attention; attention means worth; failure means danger.

Disappointing someone doesn’t just feel uncomfortable. It feels like survival is at stake.

And that makes the wound so much harder to see, so much harder to name, so much harder to escape. How do you rage against a wound that came wrapped in warmth? How do you dismantle a survival strategy that actually worked?

You can’t point to a villain. You can only point to a little girl who figured out how to be safe, and then spent the rest of her life running that same program until her system collapsed under the weight of it.

The most dangerous adaptation is the one that hides inside respectability.

It accumulates quietly. One small adjustment at a time. No explosion. No dramatic moment. Just a body keeping score while the mind calls it normal.

Emotional labor can wear down a nervous system just as much as chaos does. Chronic self-containment is a load. Relentless responsibility has a cost. The very traits getting you promoted and praised and called “the strong one” are the same traits slowly grinding you down into the ashes.

The girl who learns not to be a burden becomes the woman who never asks for help. The child who reads the emotional climate of a room becomes the adult who manages everyone’s mood before checking in with her own.

And the person with the most “normal” childhood? She’s often the one who gets blindsided hardest when her system finally breaks. Not because she’s weak. Because no one ever told her the truth.

When survival mode finally loosened its grip, I didn’t feel free. I felt lost.

I stood in my own life blinking like someone who’d just taken off sunglasses indoors. After my marriage ended, I started noticing things I’d never questioned. I’d spent years doing things I had no desire to do. I didn’t want to hike all the 14ers in Colorado. I didn’t want to dress up historically and have battles. Not once had I stopped to ask myself whether I actually wanted to be there, because that would have rocked the boat.

It wasn’t until after the separation that I realized: I just love calm. I love being at home. I value quiet.

None of those things were allowed before. They were treated as deficiencies. But it turns out they weren’t personality flaws. They were my actual preferences, finally audible now that no one was talking over them.

That realization should have felt like relief. Instead, it surfaced something scarier.

What if I don’t like the person underneath all this? What if there’s nothing under the armor at all?

That fear keeps more women stuck than any practical barrier ever could. Not the logistics of leaving. Not the financial concerns. This fear: the real you isn’t worth knowing.

It makes sense. It’s rooted in years of being told, directly or indirectly, that your authentic self was a problem. That your preferences were inconvenient. That the parts of you that didn’t fit needed to be managed, suppressed, or apologized for.

So you learned to perform. And the performance got so convincing that even you started believing it was real.

But here’s what actually happens when the armor starts to come off: you don’t find emptiness. You find the parts of yourself that were there all along, waiting for permission to exist.

You’re not hollow under the armor. You’re simply unfamiliar to yourself. You’ve spent so many years performing the role that kept you safest that you haven’t had a chance to meet the woman who never got to come forward.

You’re not losing yourself when the armor comes off.

You’re losing the version of you that was built for a war that’s over.

That’s the sentence I can’t get around. Not the gallbladder removal. Not the months of pain I’d ignored because I’d stopped registering my body as something that deserved attention. The moment in the recovery room when my mom stood beside my hospital bed and I looked right past her to absorb his version of reality instead.

She’d flown from Texas. Booked the flight the day I texted her from the ER. She wanted to be there when I came out, to make sure someone was actually paying attention to me for once.

I should have felt relief.

I felt nothing.

The surgery was routine. I woke up foggy, that specific anesthesia haze where the room feels both too close and too far away. My mom was there.

And then he walked in.

Already mid-accusation. Voice sharp with that edge I knew in my bones, the one that meant I needed to fix this now, smooth it over, make it make sense before it became something bigger.

My mom had overstepped. Challenged him. Disrespected him.

I was still trying to orient myself to the room. To my body. To the fact that I’d just had an organ removed. And somehow his anger, his grievance, his wounded pride made more sense to me than the woman who’d crossed state lines to take care of me.

That’s the part that won’t leave. Not that he said it. That I believed him faster than I believed her.

We’d been together five years by then. Five years of learning that my reality mattered less than his comfort. That my pain, any kind, was always secondary to keeping him calm. I’d gotten so good at distrusting my own signals that I could be lying in a hospital bed, literally cut open, and still prioritize his feelings over my own body’s truth.

When I got home from the hospital, lying on the couch with fresh incisions, I tried to make my mom understand. His words came out of my mouth. His logic. His version of what happened.

My mom rescheduled her flight. Left two days early.

I can still see her on my porch, roller bag beside her, waiting for the Uber. I didn’t argue. Didn’t question it. I sat on the couch with fresh incisions, guarding a peace that had nothing to do with peace at all.

I told myself I was being mature. That this was how relationships worked. You made compromises, you kept things calm, you didn’t take sides. The distance I felt seemed like proof I was handling it well. Something adult about not being reactive.

Something in me had gone completely offline.

Years earlier, I would have felt it. The wrongness of his accusations that didn’t match reality. The look on my mom’s face when she left. The way my body was screaming that this wasn’t right.

But I didn’t feel any of it.

I just sat there, managing the aftermath. Like I always did.

It would be five more years before I could see it. Five more years of apologizing for things I didn’t cause. Of questioning my own memory. Of choosing his version of events over mine because his certainty was always louder than my doubt.

But that moment in the recovery room was the clearest picture of what I’d become.

A woman so disconnected from herself that she could be convinced her own mother was the problem. While she was foggy from anesthesia. While her body was trying to heal from being cut open.

The anesthesia wore off in hours.

The other fog took years.

Because that numbness I felt that day? It wasn’t from the drugs. It was from years of learning that what I experienced didn’t matter as much as what he needed me to believe. That my pain was always negotiable. That my reality was always up for debate.

The gallbladder was gone.

But I’d lost something else long before I ever got to that hospital bed. I’d lost the ability to trust that what I was experiencing was real. To know that my version of events had the same weight as his. To believe that my body’s signals, the pain, the wrongness, the screaming intuition, deserved my attention.

I’d learned to be a stranger to myself. And I’d learned it so well that I could do it while coming out of surgery, with my mother standing right there.

That’s what gets me. Not that he manipulated the moment. That I was so far gone I couldn’t tell the difference anymore between his reality and mine. That the woman who flew across the country to care for me seemed like less of an authority on what happened than the man who walked in angry.

My mom and I are okay now. Better than okay.

She never held it against me, which somehow makes it worse. She knew, even then, what I couldn’t see yet. She knew I was lost. She just had to wait for me to find my way back.

It took five more years.

Five more years of sitting on that couch, guarding a peace that was really just silence. Of thinking the fog was normal. Of calling it love.

I think about that woman sometimes. The one who woke up from surgery and immediately started managing his feelings instead of her own pain. Who watched her mother leave early and felt nothing. Who’d become so good at disconnecting that she couldn’t tell the difference between anesthesia and the numbness she’d been living in for years.

I thought it was the drugs.

It wasn’t the drugs.

If any part of this feels familiar, you can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline any time at 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. You don’t have to be sure it’s “bad enough” to call.