Unraveling After Rupture

Your life can fall apart and still be a gift, but only after you stop trying to rebuild the same old version of you. I’m sharing the raw story behind a major rupture in my world: building a successful dance studio in my twenties, living in nonstop pressure, then being forced to walk away and losing far more than a job. When the community disappears, the identity dissolves, and the nervous system stays stuck in fight or flight, it can feel like you’re drowning even when you’re still standing. 

We get honest about what helped me survive and what later kept me trapped. I talk about toxic dynamics, people pleasing, overgiving, and the constant urge to perform for approval, plus why spiritual one liners like “move on” can feel like a slap when you’re deep in grief. Instead of treating healing like an endless self-improvement project, I offer a different frame: unraveling. Rupture points create scaffolding, protective patterns that once kept us safe but slowly become the structure of our whole life. 

Then we move into the new stage: becoming. What happens when your nervous system finally calms down and you don’t need the urgency anymore? Who are you without the roles, labels, and titles? If you’re navigating identity loss, trauma recovery, nervous system regulation, burnout, or the aftermath of narcissistic abuse, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s rebuilding, and leave a review with the role you’re ready to release.

Transcript

Welcome And Why Stories Matter

0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Spiritual Shit Show. My name is Julie Nguyen, and this is the podcast where we talk about healing and how life gets messy. But more importantly, I am here to share my own story with the intention that it resonates with you. I recently started listening to a friend's podcast and I was like, oh, I remember why it's important to not only share stories, but listen to stories. There's such a beautiful human aspect to it. When she was sharing her story, I just felt it in my heart. So I was like, oh, yes, I am not alone.

Running A Studio In Survival

0:34

And when my life first ruptured, so almost 10 years ago. At the time, if you haven't been following the journey up until this point, a small little synapsis is, I was a dance teacher and a dance studio owner of a very successful studio. I started the studio when I was 21 and at, in my mid twenties, we had two locations. I was working seven days a week. Playing all the roles. Costume designer, studio owner, choreographer teacher, also dealing with dance moms and students leaving and coming, and it was just a lot. It was really, really a lot and it was really intense. Now that I'm thinking back on it, because those were my really formative development years. Moving into adulthood. And when I look back at that time in my life, I'm like, geez, Louise. I had zero guidance. I didn't have any, a mentor or a support system. Literally was like jumping into the ocean with a raft and surviving, and I'm really proud of. What I was able to accomplish and the creativity and the drive and the success that I was able to work towards. And I can also see how much of a, it was like collateral damage that I experienced from that being a part of my life. Not to mention that I was also in a really toxic. Narcissistic relationship as well. So it was business and it was family, and it was narcissism and it was a lot.

Losing Everything And Feeling Alone

2:13

So when I left all of that, in my late thirties, that leaving of my own dance studio came unexpected. It was after years of just being beat down and again, surviving. I was being edged out of my business, which was painful, and the, the grit that it took every day to say, I am not being edged out of my own dance studio. I am staying here I am claiming what is mine. And then at the end of it all being forced to leave because I literally could not take it for one more second. God, that was so hard, and then that just kind of spiraled me into a whole other level of chaos, of fuck, what do I do now? I was drowning in attorney fees. I was fighting with family members. I couldn't get a job. Everything that I knew in my life was suddenly gone. The community was gone. My, reputation was gone. My work was gone. My ability to create and teach and be a light was gone. My life force was gone, and the pain felt so heavy that I, I couldn't hold it. And I felt like I was such a Debbie Downer for other people. And the one healing thing that helped me through it was when somebody else would say, this happened to me too, or I experienced that too. Or There's rupture in my family too. And to have somebody share. Vulnerably. Their human experience too made my entire heart just exhale. Fuck, I'm not alone. Oh my God. This happens to other people too because when you're in it, it feels so devastating. It feels like this isn't supposed to be happening. This isn't, what I thought my life was going to be. This isn't the trajectory. This isn't what I've been working for. And so when there's such a huge disruption on your path, it really is hard to understand. It's hard to, to ground in to what is actually really happening for you. And then. You hear people say, well, you should let it go, or You should move on. Or the universe is always working for you or you manifested this and, and those moments, you don't wanna hear that shit like at all. The pain can be so hard and you feel so alone and it feels so heavy and it feels so disorienting that it's hard to ground to rebuild.

Why Advice Can Hurt In Grief

5:04

For me, it has taken 10 years. Of what I have been unraveling, and I am here to say the unraveling has been really cool. Now that I am through most of it, because I've been able to see in real time, I haven't really been healing, I've been unraveling, and I can see now it's like, fuck. That's where I came from. That's that point in my life that made me feel a certain way or protect, or build or react. And what I am noticing now is that so much of my life, I have been living from these rupture points, moments where something broke, something hurt, something shifted, and from there. I built my life forward. It's almost like each rupture created a piece of scaffolding. And over time those pieces became the structure of my life, the way I thought, the way I showed up, the way I related to people, the way I tried to stay safe, the way I tried to prove myself, my people pleasing ways, my performing ways. And now in this phase I'm in, I'm not adding more. Which feels wild. I am dismantling, I am seeing the scaffolding for what it is, something that helped me survive, but it isn't necessarily who I am that these rupture points or my early ways of living and surviving and creating. Especially from a revved up nervous system to be able to notice how

Unraveling The Scaffolding Of Identity

6:58

that took a hold of almost like my light. It's like if I can put it in a way, it's like I can see the light of who I am and life and other people kind of leed it like a dog, and now I am freeing myself from that leash. And when you start to take that apart, there's this moment that you're left with, and that's the space I'm in now, which is okay. I can see how my life has been built and how I have created my life from all of these said rupture points. From all of these times that I was forced into fight or flight from all of these times that I was listening to my abuser, to the narcissist, all of these times that I had to survive, that I had to jump into action to save or to people please, or to perform or to create, or to make somebody happy. Now that I can see that scaffolding and I am in the process of compassionately dismantling it this question is, so then who am I now? Who am I

Regulating After A Revved Nervous System

8:19

without these roles? Who am I with a more regulated nervous system? Who am I without these patterns and these fight or flight responses? And I'll be honest, it feels like a really strange new stage for me because for a long time, especially the past 10 years, my life has been centered around healing. When I left my dance studio and I left all of it. I wasn't prepared for what was gonna come. It was the loss of, of, the community, my friendships, my identity, my ability to teach and to create. I never have gotten that back again, and so I could only turn to. What I had, which was, okay, I guess I'm healing. I wanna understand radical forgiveness. I wanna understand radical acceptance. I want to figure out who I am. I had to understand, I had to process, I had to journal, I had to figure it out. I had to move through the devastation and the pain and the sadness and, and the loss. And that work was necessary and it got me here. And thank God for my gray hairs and these added wrinkles because when I look in the mirror now, time is what is pushing me and shifting me into a new space. This awareness that I can stay in this healing cycle, or I can allow something else to arise, I can. Allow more gray hairs to come onto my head while I'm still wallowing in sadness, or I can see something different that this new phase is not about like what's wrong with me or what, what else do I need to heal? But it's more about what's actually true for me now. Oh my God, I've spent so much time investigating these internal parts. And so now what I can see how much of my life has been, fight or flight and performative, that I have been

Releasing Roles Without Replacing Them

10:35

great. Brilliant at people pleasing at overgiving, trying to be liked, trying to make other people happy, successful, a champion for other people's lives, trying to find my place. Now I have to do that for myself. And even after I left the studio, I can see how quickly my system went into survival mode. Like, okay, if I'm not that, then who do I need to become next? And then I. My nervous system and my psyche kinda was like, okay, well I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm a teacher again, or I'm a spiritual healer, or I am, I was so desperate to find this new role. And now I am realizing that I don't need that urgency. I don't need that survival mechanism. I don't need to have a clear answer of who I am and what I do for a living. And that is really uncomfortable because I'm used to having something to hold onto. There is a grip, there is a strong identity of who I was. And now even calling myself certain things like I'm an intuitive channel, or I'm a coach, or I'm a dancer, I can still see that there's a part of me that's wanting to spin a role, that there's part of me that still feels incomplete, like I haven't fully arrived in what I'm supposed to arrive into, and I can feel that yes, I am. Still a dancer, and I do love coaching people in life, and I love being a spiritual hype girl. I love intuitive channeling. I love it. And I am also not limited to that either releasing the old identities without needing to create a new one. That has been one of the deepest layers of my healing and my personal awareness identity, unraveling, whoa, I am and I am not. What a powerful phrase. And in that it's. Being able to ground deeper into what parts of me have always been true and what parts of me have been stuck and tangled up in these rupture parts of my life.

From Healing To Becoming

12:55

And the choice here is, and what do I actually want to carry forward because I can see which I am so proud of myself. That I have done enough of the work of the healing, of the understanding of the therapy, that my nervous system isn't in panic anymore. I am not in a constant state of survival mode, and I don't need to create my life forward from that old state of being of survival, fight or flight, panic, proving people pleasing. Not being in that state feels really unfamiliar. There's a different energy in my body now. There's more space. Thank God there's more calm, thank God. But that can also be a little disorienting when you're used to. Having a system that is structured around survival and proving and rebuilding and healing, and keeping your head above water so you don't drown in life, and now you realize that I've never been drowning. I've always had the opportunity to live. Is that state of being okay. I'm used to the chaos. I'm used to the survival. I'm used to this anxiousness within my body. I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop because that's how my life for my entire adulthood has been In the dance studio world, there was never a calm day. Somebody was always quitting. There was always a dance mom who needed a meeting. There was always some sort of of emergency, costumes didn't come in or somebody sick at the competition or they're quitting or they like. It literally was always something. So up until this point in my life, my nervous system was always revved up for that next thing, that next fire to be put out. And it has taken me 10 years too. Unravel and dismantle that scaffolding that I have built my life around. And maybe healing comes in stages. There's the disruption and there's this dismantling. So we have these rupture points that we begin to build the scaffolding from how we survive in life. Then we reach this point where we realize that that's not who I fucking am, and I don't desire any of that. So you begin this, what we call healing, which is just the dismantling of the old scaffolding that you've built your life on, and you're realizing that you're more than that, you're more powerful than that. You don't wanna get stuck in that scaffolding. You don't wanna continue to build up in that scaffolding. You want to dismantle it and then becomes the becoming. And I am standing right at that edge of the becoming, and it's exciting, it's disorienting. It's new, but it also feels like a really beautiful, big exhale. It feels honest. It feels like I don't have to perform for a role. I don't have to perform for this identity, I can see that I have a choice on how I want to embody me, that I don't have to build my life on old pain, old patterns, old reactions. I don't have to build my life on what I think other people need me to look and act and be like. There's a certain sense of freedom actually, which right

Questions To Ask Yourself Now

16:40

now I'm hearing this almost like for the first time in my heart, so I'm gonna say it again for myself. There is actually a freedom without needing the role in the identity, and I can now see that that has been the gift, the rupture of an old life. And the survival mechanisms that I have held onto to grip that old identity that I once was. And can I be that again? And how devastating that has been to lose all of that and to not really see and float in the freedom of what has been happening literally for me, which is an incredible. And hard. It's been hard, but an incredible gift of fuck. You don't need the identity to be somebody. You don't need the, oh, I am a dance studio owner. Oh, I'm an intuitive channel. Or, oh, I am a life coach. I don't, that still all is that myself in a box and making me perform for a role. Oh, my dancing days are not over, but I think my performative life skills are, and the more interested now, and what does this feel like to just truly authentically be me? Just to be me and to experience life as me at a soul level. And what does this feel like to evolve? I don't need to prove who I am anymore. I just get to be it. That's the shift, and that's what I think maybe. This spiritual shit show is truly about being a spiritual being, having a very human experience, getting caught in patterns, personalities, pain, stories, traumas, lack, and then at some point pausing long enough to see that you're not stuck there, that you can take the scaffolding down. That you don't have to keep building from an outdated version of yourself, that your nervous system might still react, but it doesn't have to lead. Not fixing yourself forever, but becoming aware enough to choose how and where and what you want to build. If my old scaffolding was weak, it's kind of a shitty house. I get to tear it down and I get to consciously choose to build. Again, thank you for being here. Thank you for being a part of my story, my journey, and today. May you be inspired to maybe think about. What are these old roles that I'm still gripping onto? What is this identity that I, that I feel like I need to grow into to become someone? Does that feel uncomfortable to just be, am I ever allowing myself to just be. What is in my life? Maybe an old scaffolding, an old wall that I've built up that I actually don't need. I can see that I've built that for survival or from a pain point, or from a point that I needed to build. 'cause I wanted to protect myself. And who am I now? And can I build new scaffolding, new energetic pathways for myself to authentically continue to grow, build, create, evolve, and love food for thought?

Closing Gratitude And Blessing

20:32

I love you so much. Thanks for being here.