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Ideas that explain what's been happening.

Most advice starts with what to do differently. That skips a step. If you don't know what's happening, or why, a strategy is just one more thing to carry. These models name the pattern.

Model one

Sensory Stacking

When your nervous system reaches overwhelm, the thing that tipped you in is rarely the cause. It was the last weight added, not the only one. Your system had been loading all day, often invisibly.

Sensory Stacking model. Two stacks of the same five inputs, Sounds, Sights, Smells, Social and Somatic. When State is rested the stack stays under the saturation point. When State is depleted each input weighs more, the stack crosses the line, and one small thing tips you over.

Six channels, all running at once

State · the multiplier

What you arrive with. Energy, mood, emotional load, leftover stress from yesterday. The same room lands differently depending on what you walked in with.

Sounds

Volume, unwanted noise, voices too quiet to catch, overlapping audio you're working to separate.

Sights

Brightness, glare, flicker, visual clutter, movement at the edge of your vision.

Smells

Perfume, food, cleaning products, smoke. Harder to filter out than sound or light.

Social

Small talk, masking, eye contact, unwritten rules, monitoring how you're being received. Usually the heaviest channel.

Somatic

What your body is telling you. Hunger, tension, pain, temperature, clothing.

It was never small. It was the last weight on a stack that had been building all day.

Which stacks to unstack, in your life, in the order that actually helps, is different for everyone. That's the work we do together.

Model two

The Boundary Shock Cycle

Someone gives advice you didn't ask for. Changes the plan. Talks over you, again. It lands harder than it should, you react more sharply than you meant to, and then you spend the evening replaying it. That's not who you are. It's a cycle, and it has five stages.

The Boundary Shock Cycle. Five stages in a loop: Boundary Intrusion, Boundary Shock, Reactive Boundary Assertion, Shame Collapse, Boundary Doubt Reinforcement, and back to the start, a little more sensitive each time.

Interrupting the cycle

Read this alongside the cycle above. There's a point where the loop can be interrupted, and it's earlier than most people expect: in the body, before the reaction. Noticing it creates a pause, and the pause creates a choice.

Interrupting the Boundary Shock Cycle. Five steps: Boundary Shock, the body reacts before conscious thought. The interruption point, body awareness: notice signals like tension, heat or the urge to react. Consider your response: pause to assess. Intentional boundary action: choose your next step. Recovery and boundary validation: support your nervous system and rebuild self-trust.

Finding your interruption point, and what works for you once you've found it, is what we work on together.

Model three

The Attachment Cycle

A need is signalled. Someone responds. The body settles. Repeated thousands of times, that loop teaches us that needs are safe to show and help will come. When care is missing or unpredictable, we adapt to what's available, and those adaptations come with us into adult life.

The Attachment Cycle, adapted from Fahlberg. A need creates stress, a caregiver responds, the body regulates, and each completed loop builds attachment. When the cycle breaks, stress has no relief and regulation gets little practice. A second route, the Positive Interaction Cycle, builds attachment through shared warm moments.

The patterns you learned early often show up at work and in relationships now. Seeing where they came from makes them easier to understand, and easier to change.

Four things worth saying plainly

Boundaries are not aggression.

They're how we look after our safety, energy and wellbeing.

Regulation is not suppression.

It's responding with awareness instead of reacting on autopilot.

Sensitivity is not weakness.

It's information, and it's been trying to tell you something.

You are not too much.

You're running a system that's been loading for longer than you realised.

More tools to come.

Recognising the pattern is the first half.

The second half is what to do with it, in your life, with your stacks and your cycle. That's what the coaching is for.

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