The old injury you forgot you had

A few years ago, a friend of mine went for a run — nothing dramatic, just her usual route. Somewhere around the second kilometre, her knee gave out. Not from the run. From an old fall she’d had as a teenager, something that had been “fine” for twenty years. She hadn’t thought about that knee in decades. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, it came back. Louder than it had ever been the first time.

Her physio told her something that stayed with me: injuries don’t actually disappear when we stop noticing them. They go underground. And they come back when the conditions are finally right — when the body has enough resources, enough safety, to finish what it started.

I think about that a lot when I think about midlife. Because the same thing happens to us — not in our knees, but in our psyches. In our nervous systems. In the parts of ourselves we quietly learned to manage, survive, or simply not look at.

MY STORY

When childhood trauma comes back in midlife

I didn’t think I had childhood trauma. I want to say that plainly, because I suspect many of you reading this would say the same thing. I had a roof over my head. I wasn’t abused in ways I could easily name. By most measures I knew how to apply, I was fine.

And then midlife arrived — not with a bang, but with a slow, strange unravelling. I started having reactions I couldn’t explain. Feelings that seemed disproportionate to whatever had triggered them. A grief that didn’t seem to belong to anything current. A bone-deep exhaustion that sleep didn’t fix. An ache for something I couldn’t name.

I remember sitting with it one afternoon and thinking: what IS this? Because it didn’t feel like sadness about my life. It felt older than that. It felt like something that had been waiting.

What I eventually came to understand — through my own deep inquiry work, through gentle breath-led movement and meditation, through sitting with myself in ways I had spent decades expertly avoiding — was that there was a child inside me who had never been seen. Who had learned very early that certain feelings weren’t safe to have. Who had adapted, performed, achieved, and quietly carried a wound I didn’t even know existed.

“I thought I was fine. I had a good life. And I did. But there is a difference between a life that looks fine and a nervous system that is finally, after decades, asking to be heard.”

I wasn’t falling apart. I was being found.

WHY NOW

Why midlife is when it surfaces — and why that’s not a coincidence

There’s something important to understand about the way our psyches protect us: they are extraordinarily good at it. When we are young — when we don’t have the resources, the context, or the safety to process what’s happening to us — our nervous system does what it needs to do to get us through. It tucks things away. It builds strategies. It creates a version of us that can function, belong, survive.

And that is not a failure. That is brilliance. Those adaptations kept you going.

But midlife has a way of dismantling the scaffolding. The children grow up and leave. The career that defined you reaches its peak — or stops feeling like enough. The relationship that once felt solid starts to ask harder questions. The busyness that kept everything at bay becomes harder to sustain. And in that strange, uncomfortable spaciousness, something begins to stir.

The old injury surfaces. Not because you’re weak. Not because something has gone wrong. But because, for perhaps the first time in your adult life, there is enough safety for the wound to finally be felt.

“Your psyche doesn’t bring things up to punish you. It brings things up because it believes, now, that you can finally hold them.”

This is what I see in the women I work with, again and again. They arrive telling me they don’t know what’s wrong with them. That they’re crying without knowing why. That they feel a grief that doesn’t belong to anything they can point to. That they’re reacting to things in ways that confuse even themselves.

And what I know is this: nothing is wrong with them. Something is, at long last, right.

THE REFRAME

This isn’t a crisis. It’s a calling.

We’ve been taught to think of midlife as a crisis — something to get through, manage, or ideally avoid. We medicate it, we distract from it, we push harder into the life we’ve already built. And sometimes, for a while, that works.

But what if this is not a breakdown? What if it is, in the most profound sense, a breakthrough?

My friend’s knee didn’t come back to ruin her running. It came back because it needed to be properly healed — not pushed through, not ignored, but genuinely tended to. And when she finally did the work — the physiotherapy, the rest, the rehabilitation — she ran better than she had in years. She ran differently. She ran like someone who actually understood what her body needed.

That is what I believe is on offer in midlife. Not just survival. Not just coping. But a genuine, deep, lasting healing of things you’ve been quietly carrying for most of your life.

The unprocessed grief. The child who learned to be small. The needs that were never met and so were never even acknowledged. The version of you that got left behind somewhere in childhood, still waiting to be welcomed home.

Midlife is the invitation. The question is whether you’re willing to answer it.

WHAT’S POSSIBLE

What I’ve learned — and what I help others discover

When I stopped trying to fix what was “wrong” with me and started getting curious about what was coming up — when I turned toward the grief instead of away from it — everything shifted. Not overnight. Not tidily. But genuinely.

Through gentle breath-led movement and meditation, I began to access emotions that had been held in my body for decades — things I didn’t have words for, that dissolved not through analysis but through being felt, finally, all the way through.

Through guided self-inquiry — the kind of deep, gentle, honest inner work that doesn’t let you hide but also doesn’t ask you to perform — I began to see the patterns. The places where my childhood had shaped me in ways I’d mistaken for my personality. The beliefs I’d inherited and never questioned. The ways I’d learned to abandon myself to keep others comfortable.

Energy work was newer territory for me — I hadn’t always understood the language of the energetic body. But as I began to explore it, something shifted that I hadn’t been able to reach any other way. I began to feel what it meant to live in a body that wasn’t braced for something terrible. To feel, perhaps for the first time, what safety actually felt like.

This is the work I now do with other women navigating this same territory. It’s not about fixing you. You are not broken. It’s about clearing the debris from a self that has always been whole — and helping you finally, fully, live from that place.

If something in this post is stirring in you — if you recognise that quiet grief, that inexplicable heaviness, that sense that something old is asking for your attention — I want you to know that you are not alone.

This is the work I love most, and I’d be honoured to walk alongside you in it. If you feel ready to turn toward what’s surfacing rather than away from it, I’d love to have a conversation. Reach out here https://lisamkerr.com/contact and let’s explore what working together might look like.