You Can't Heal What You Won't Feel with Louise Cartwright

Louise was ready to leave her marriage before she even walked down the aisle. Fear kept her there for years. Fear of being alone, of breaking up her family, of what people would think. The day her husband finally moved out, she drove her kids to nursery school and noticed something she hadn't felt in years: a real smile. Not a performance. The actual thing.

That moment set off twenty years of becoming from personal trainer, to studio owner, to Certified High Performance and Somatic coach, and a lot of hard-won clarity about why we stay stuck long after we know better.

Louise is a mind-body coach who combines somatics with high performance coaching to help women release what they've been carrying in their bodies, not just their minds, for years. And in this conversation, she is as honest as it gets.

We talk about what it actually means to hold trauma in your body and why you can't think your way out of it. Why achieving more, more certifications, more credentials, more results, still left her feeling like it wasn't enough. What somatic work looks like in practice and the moment she realized something had genuinely shifted. We talk about the question she asks every woman she works with: what do you really, really want?, how to know when you're giving yourself a dishonest answer, and why stop gatekeeping other people's emotions might be the most important thing you hear today.

She also says something about her children that I think is going to stay with you: she could still see the impact of her first marriage on her kids, now in their mid-twenties. Not as a guilt trip. As a reminder of what's actually at stake when we stay too long.

Her parting message: you will always figure it out. And if the divorce wasn't your choice, the only question worth asking is, how could this be the best thing that's ever happened to me?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, Divorced Women's Alliance. This is Alex. Today is Thursday. Happy Thursday. We're almost at the end of the week. And I just wanted to bring on my friend Louise, who I've worked with in the past and who's actually done wonders for um how I kind of approach life and trauma and different things. So Louise, welcome. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. Thank you for having me. Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. So why don't you start us off and just tell us a little bit about your story and what you do?

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Okay, so as we just discussed, as we're in the Divorce Women's Alliance, I want to start with divorce, which was a very long time ago now. So I just turned 50 last week. Um, and I got divorced when I was 20, I think around about 29. I'd managed to um stay married for just shy of 18 months, but I had been with him for knocking the door of 10 years, I think. Um I had two very young children at the time. I think they were three and four, four and five, something like that. And the the reason I want to be that that to be the starting point is because as I look back, that was a starting point of the rest of my life. Um, and and I also want to say, like, I was I was ready to leave that relationship before we even got married. But I was so scared of having two children and being on my own, and who would who would have me and what would happen to my family, and how would I manage, and all those things that that kept me with him for way longer than I should have stayed. Um, and I can still very, very clearly remember the day that he finally moved out and driving the kids to nursery school and smiling, and like literally touching my face, thinking, Oh my god, like I'm smiling and I can feel it in my body rather than just kind of put it on, putting on a show. And yeah, my my entire life just it was almost in that instant my the trajectory of my life just completely changed. So that's where I want to start.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

Yeah, and that's totally okay because I think it's very similar to my story in that somebody asked me recently, when did you really get to know yourself? And I was like, I don't think I knew who I was until I got divorced because that's the first time I ever went in and started to try to figure me out. So totally, totally relate to that.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Yeah, I think that the thing is, I mean, I think it it depends on on the sort of the generational and the experience that we had growing up. So my mum and dad were married, you know, they were they were just shy of celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary a year a month before my dad died. And um, it was very old school. It was a case of, you know, I mean I can still hear my mum and dad saying to me now, relationships aren't supposed to be easy, Louise. You know, when I was saying how miserable I was, and and then when I had children, it was almost like, um, well, you've got kids now, you know, suck it up. And I don't think it was a mean thing. I I guess now we're having this conversation, actually, something else has just come into my mind. Um, I'd always been told that I was very uh feisty and that I always changed my mind and that I never stuck at anything and blah blah blah. So I wonder whether there was an element of that with my parents, like, oh, she just needs to stick this one out. Um my parents did quite quickly change their mind as they saw my sort of my the depression hitting and all that kind of stuff. Um, and I know nobody should take that, I don't think people should take that decision lightly um for any stretch because it is, as you know, very is life-changing. And I just feel I feel like it just freed me up. And I think also one of the things that maybe I could offer is that if you have got children, there was one part of me that kept saying, Well, how can you do this to your children? Because you're gonna break the family up. And there was a louder voice that was saying, But is this what you would want for your daughter? Because I've got two girls, so is that what you want for your children? Do you want to teach your children this okay to live with somebody that's constantly angry and that loses his temper? And that, you know, it and I just thought, no, I don't I don't want that for them. I don't want to teach them that that's acceptable. So that was kind of probably one of my final pushes to leave.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Yeah, it's uh it's amazing what happens when we put ourselves in other people's shoes, and for you it was, you know, your kids. So that can definitely be kind of a game changer for uh for women. So how did how did this precipitate like what you're doing today and and how you came to be a somatic coach and a CHPC?

SPEAKER_00 4:57

Oh gosh, right. Okay, so I've got 20 years to condense into like five minutes. Um I suppose, I suppose what if I had to kind of like nail it down, when I left, I suddenly saw options that I didn't have before.

unknown 5:15

Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

So when you take on that role of, okay, well, I'm a mum, I like I had to work part-time in a petrol station because we had no money. So that's I was working 12 hours a day, uh, 12 hours a week in a petrol station, absolutely hated it. And I I let he left and I thought, oh my god, I've got choice. And I went back to college and I went to started, I started to become, I started to become a midwife that hated it. But anyway, so I left that, but it was just it was the point that what what do I want to do with my so I'm gonna just move around the sun? Um, what do I want to do with my life? What choices have I got now? And I just remember I remember feeling like I wanted to grab every drop of experiences that I could. And um I also I had done I trained in several healing modalities when I was in my early 20s. So I got back into my meditation and I did a few other little sort of courses, and then I met my now husband, um, and we've been married, I think 17 years this year, something like something yeah, 17 years this year. Um, and it was just a this this path of consistent growth, I guess. And then it was purely accidental that I um became a personal trainer. So I'd always had an interest in exercise, but I had also had about 20 years worth of eating disorders. So, you know, once I was like, I'm gonna become a personal trainer, so I did that, and that was another one of those kind of um sliding door moments. Um, and it went from being something like, oh, this kind of looks quite exciting, to finding myself running a personal training studio. And but that was when I realized that when we have limiting beliefs about ourselves, when we don't feel worthy, it can show up in so many different ways. So it had shown up in my eating disorders, it had shown up in staying in a crappy relationship, it showed up again in generating another crappy, destructive relationship. And then when I started working for myself, it was just horrendous. It was like I felt like I wasn't qualified enough, I felt like I had to give stuff away for free, I felt like people weren't going to listen to me, and so that started a whole decade of investing huge amounts of money in every single course under the sun, all the certifications. And just like when you've been on a diet and you've like eaten salad for eight weeks and you get to that dress size and you still feel fat, you know, I did all this thing and still didn't feel enough. Um, and it was, you know, we we've talked at this, we've talked about this, you know. Sometimes you just have to accept that the breakdowns are your biggest breakthroughs. And so the pandemic hitting my dad going on his cancer journey, losing my dad, I had PTSD around that, I hit perimenopause, I moved house, I kicked my daughter out. All these things happened in a relatively small container, and um I was just on the floor and I couldn't coach myself out of it, I couldn't use my brain. It was like I was completely dysregulated, which I didn't know anything about at the time, which led me to somatics, which then for me just it just brought everything together, and so now my my mission, my vision, my passion is working with women on a mind-body level, so using coaching, using somatics, using an LP, so that we can actually deconstruct, release, remove all of these limitations that have come through experiences, through conditioning, through society, so that we because I I did it on Instagram the other day, and I said, you know, we often think that lack is is lack and feelings of self-worth because we're missing something, but actually it's because we're not seeing something, we're not seeing the truth of who we are. It's all the like we've actually got lack is because of all the things we've got on top of us, not because we're missing something. And so that's my passion now is that people women can just be recognized and find their true selves and find their courage and find their voice and find their purpose and just shine.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

So it's kind of like peeling an onion, right? So you've got the gold in the middle, yeah. If you can find gold in the middle of an onion, but you know what I mean, and but you start peeling the layers, yeah, and it's not because it's not there, it's just buried under so much BS. Yeah, that it doesn't have the strength or the opportunity to shine.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

And and that is, I mean, I cannot believe it's taken me like all of these qualifications and all of these experiences for me to really feel that. However, I like to hold the thought in my brain that I couldn't be anywhere else other than where I am now, and that whether we like it or not, I almost feel like we've got this learning line, if you like, and we can race ahead and we can try and speed things up to get out of the pain that we're in, or we can just slow down and do it properly the first time round. Like it's like I don't know, if you decide to decorate and you don't rub all the paintwork down, and you you know, like you're gonna be decorating again in six months' time, right? So let's slow the whole thing down and and and do it properly. And I think what the semantics taught me as well was that we're in a world that that says like our brain is the be all and end all. And yes, our brain's pretty important. I'm not saying it's not, however, we carry everything in our body at a cellular level joints, muscles, ligaments. We've talked about fascia at length because of the somatics. And um, I know firsthand what it feels like to have one release that has you feeling completely different, but it's just it's it's to keep going on that journey so that you can actually start to hear your body, you can hear your this innate wisdom that you've got. And I know it sounds a bit wooy, but if you go back to hundreds and hundreds of years ago, it's how we communicated with each other, yet alone ourselves. We just we just knew we just lived more by the land and by the moon and all that kind of stuff. So I find that a very beautiful yin, right? Let me just get 400,000 years worth of information at the touch of a button, please. Um, but we have we've we've become there's a there's a great quote in the book, The Art of Somatic Coaching, where he says something along the lines of, you know, the distance we live from the body is a distance that we live from our own life. And we've become so disconnected and we've gotten so caught up in doing and so caught up in thinking, and so caught up in in moving forward that we forget that actually um our entire life experience can change by us changing the inside of ourselves because we just look through different eyes. And I have I've said that before because I've read it, and I have experienced it in lots and lots of ways, but nothing like experienced over the last 12 months.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Yeah, I mean, just having been connected with you for the last few years, um, seeing the shift, I mean, just uh physically, how you look compared, and but not from a physical standpoint, but from an energetic standpoint, and how you're able to be present versus being distracted. Um, I've seen that firsthand. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:55

And and that for me, like if you've always if you've been somebody that's always felt like you had to keep going, you've always been a very alpha type, you've always been a go-getter, a decision maker, an action taker. There's a lot of us out there. When a coach like me says to you, let's just stop for a bit, and we go, uh, no, thank you. What for the crazy woman? I'm sucking you. Um, and the only reason I can say that with such authenticity is because I had to do it for myself. Like there were the I knew there was literally no other option. And I've shared this story a million times, but just for just so that other people know that I'm not talking rubbish. My my somatic experience began doing a free training. One of my friends had kind of bullied me into doing it. It was money mindset stuff. I wasn't interested. She said, just please, just sign up and do it. I said, Whatever. And I remember locking myself in my office. This woman starts talking, and she said, This is not gonna be your normal training. And then she just has us stood up, she puts this music on, and she just has us going left to right, like rocking on our feet, like left foot, right foot. And I think it took about two minutes maximum, and I was sobbing, like racking sobs on the floor, and I thought, I don't know what's happening, but I'm gonna just keep letting it happen. And that happened every day, pretty much for five days. And um, and I remember walking for a walk with my friends in that SAS day. I didn't tell them what I'd done because they all think I'm weird anyway, but I just said I've it was it was it was like a full circle moment. It's like when my husband left, I was like, oh my god, I'm smiling. I actually feel happy. And after losing my dad, I just thought I was never gonna feel happy again. It was like it killed me, literally. Um, and so I thought there's got to be something in that. We know that we hold if we're stressed, what do we do? We we raise our shoulders, we we clench our jaws. I do this. I since my dad died, I found that one of my responses was to clench my fists. Women, we hold our stomach in a lot because we're not supposed to have a fleshy stomach, you know, we or we squeeze our butt cheeks in. So we know that there are some ways that we do it, but what we can't see is what we're doing inside. Um we can't say to our brain, oh, just relax that muscle between my seventh and eighth we please. Like we I mean, we can take our attention there, um, but I mean, I did I did a somatic practice yesterday and had the biggest release, and it was um I I was literally, you know, when they do the hacker and they're like, I was like, I don't know what's going on, but I'm gonna just do that. There was nobody in my house. It's it was fine. Um and I want to I for me I've had so many opportunities these last few weeks to to test that change in real time in circumstances that before now would have had me feeling completely inadequate. And I came out thinking, oh my god, I just nailed that from a completely grounded, peaceful place, and I'm so detached from the outcome, like I'm almost laid back. 50 years that's taken me to get there. So, and I would love to offer that to more women because I think we are extremely good at working hard, we're extremely good at beating ourselves up, we're extremely good at never celebrating ourselves, or seeing when we've achieved something, or just sitting down to have a cup of coffee because you know. Um and so, and I think honestly think that all of that started from making that decision to claim my life back by leaving a relationship.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Yeah, it's amazing what happens when we decide because a lot of these things are decisions, right? When we decide that it's okay for me to go first because if we don't, I mean, I hate to use the cliche, but you can't pour from an empty cup, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

And we don't honor ourselves because we're we're too busy honoring other people, yeah, and we forget that we also need we also need that, and I think also, you know, our generation, we haven't been taught how to create healthy relationships either. We haven't been taught how to communicate. I've I feel so blessed, and I don't and I think you feel the same. I believe that the high performance coaching saved my marriage, my second marriage, because whilst in the initial term it almost wrecked it, because I was like, Well, I've completely changed, you haven't, you should off you go. And then I remembered, I was like, uh, actually, you know, he married a single parent with two children, and now you're jetting off around the world doing all these courses. Perhaps you should elevate some your compassion. But the the the CHPC just really dialed me in on who I wanted to be and how I wanted to behave and the kind of conversations I wanted to be having. That has changed my life in so many ways. I could just say to you, like, I've just got accepted as a trustee for a track a charity, which is a huge deal. And then Louise, my husband said to me, he said, two years ago, you would never have gone for that. I said, No, because I wouldn't have felt good enough. So, yeah, I and I think we have to understand that if we look at how the world has been changing so rapidly this last six months or 12 months, women are at the forefront of that. I don't like to do the whole man-woman thing, but we're bringing a different level of communication in.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

And a different energy. And I think when I look at what you're doing, where you're combining the schematics with the THPC, CHPC is very much brain-based, brain-based. It's thinking based, right? It's conscious-based. Yeah. It's intentional, it's making decisions and following through on those decisions. And you combine that with, so it's kind of, I don't want to say the surface work and the thematic is is the inside or the the foundation work, but it's almost it's almost like that. So I think what the the way that you're combining those two things is is very cool. So all right, Louise, any any final words, any parting words that you'd like to share with the ladies in the group?

SPEAKER_00 19:23

I oh god, I should have prepared for that one. I just feel like if we if we ask the question like what do we really, really want, and we ask it enough at times, like we know when we're BSing ourselves with the answer. And I think if we knew that we weren't gonna feel guilty, if we knew that if if we said, Okay, I'm gonna leave this relationship, whatever, and this other person's not gonna feel any pain, like we need to stop taking responsibility. I could I say stop gatekeeping other people's emotions, right? Yeah, because you don't have to sacrifice yours for theirs. Life has hurt involved, life has really hard times. I'd say think about the messages you want to be giving to your children if you've got children 100% because they're learnt they're listening and they're learning all the time. I I my kids are 24 and 25, and I see the impact of my first marriage on them still now. Um, and I would just say, like, you will always figure it out. You will get so strong in making those difficult decisions. And if it has not been your choice and you find yourself getting divorced, the only option I would say there is like find a way to say, How could this work for me? How could this be the best thing that's happened? Because when we just go back to that somatic, when we hold on to resentment or or or hurt or sadness or hate or all those things, that just sits in our body and we see the entire world through that, and it's just it's horrid.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

Yeah, and and there is um piggybacking on that. I think today I'm able to look at my divorce as the biggest gift I ever got because it made me who I am today. So I fully um agree, completely agree with what you just said. So Louise, thank you so much for being here today. This was awesome. Ladies, if anything that Louise said really resonates with you, um, you know, feel free to reach out to her. I'll throw her links in the comments. And Louise, if there's anything else you want to throw in the comments, feel free to feel free to do that. And um just want to say thank you again. And ladies, thank you so much for watching. And I will talk to you soon. Take care. Bye. Bye.