The Space Between Coping Alone and Needing Therapy

The yoghurt in my trolley

Last week I stood in the supermarket while my daughter placed the expensive skyr and kefir pots into our trolley, one after the other, without a second thought. For myself I reached for the big tub of own-brand yoghurt, the sensible one. I was halfway down the next aisle when something made me stop. I turned the trolley around, put the tub back on the shelf and took the Greek yoghurt I like best, the one I always look at and rarely buy.

It was a small moment, and I felt a flicker of guilt as I did it. Somewhere along the way I had learned that the good things were for everyone else first. Choosing that yoghurt felt like a very modest act of rebellion, and also like a sign of how far I have come.

I tell you this because last week I received my certificate as an integral coach, and that tub of yoghurt says more about why I do this work than any diploma could.

A calling I did not understand

Ten years ago I already knew I wanted to become a coach. If you had asked me why, I could not have told you. Sometimes life calls me towards something long before I understand the larger picture, and I have learned to follow that pull even when I cannot explain it.

The story starts earlier. At eighteen, just out of secondary school, I wanted to become a psychologist. I studied for three years, very young and still searching hard for who I was and what I wanted from life. Then I stopped. Deep down I think I realised I was not ready. I had growing to do as a person, and I needed to experience the world and life itself before I could sit across from someone and help them through theirs.

What followed was a year of searching and the simplest jobs I could do without a degree. Then I found my way into midwifery, and it felt like coming home. I was allowed to accompany women through one of the most profound transitions of their lives, becoming a mother. I devoured books and was determined to become a very good midwife. Life called again, and I moved to the Netherlands to experience the profession fully. Many home births later, I came back with a rucksack full of experience.

The years of holding everything together

Then came the years so many women will recognise. Becoming a mother myself, raising children, building a career in healthcare and academia, juggling the household, the school runs, the studies and the deadlines. Some of those years were hard. There was loss and there were goodbyes, setbacks, and seasons in which nothing seemed to work and life felt more like a fight than a journey. You may know that feeling of trying to climb a wall and somehow getting no higher.

What I remember most from those years is how alone I often felt. I was too proud to say that things were not going well, and asking for help did not come naturally to me. I knew how to keep going. I was capable, I would figure it out. And eventually I did. The road was simply much longer and lonelier than it needed to be.

The space between coping and needing therapy

I see the same pattern wherever I look. In the women I cared for as a midwife, in female colleagues during my years as a researcher and lecturer, and in friends around the kitchen table. Women who keep everything running while they quietly lose sight of themselves. One day they sense that it cannot go on like this, and yet nothing seems wrong enough to make an appointment with a psychologist. They know how to function. What they miss is someone who walks beside them for a while.

That is where I believe coaching belongs. Coaching does not replace therapy or medical care, and when someone needs that, the right step is to refer her on. For many women, though, the question is a different one. They want to pause long enough to look at their lives with more clarity, without escaping the life they have built. They want to reconnect with who they are beyond the roles they perform. To me, that process is about returning to yourself rather than becoming someone else.

Psychology never quite let go of me. It took a career in healthcare, three children and a fair amount of life before I understood where it wanted to take me.

What birth taught me about support

My years as a midwife taught me something I carry into every coaching conversation. How a woman experiences her birth often has surprisingly little to do with how it went on paper. I remember long and difficult births, during which I felt the stress myself and hoped everything would turn out well, and yet the mother later spoke about the experience with warmth. I remember a planned home birth that ended in hospital with every intervention imaginable, and a mother who did not carry it with her as a failure.

Research confirms what midwives see. In a systematic review of 137 reports, the Canadian nursing researcher Ellen Hodnett found that a woman’s expectations, the support she received from her caregivers, the quality of that relationship and her involvement in decisions shaped how she evaluated her birth more strongly than pain, medical interventions or the setting. How she was accompanied mattered more than how things went.

Life works in much the same way. It rarely turns into a pink cloud, but with the right support it often feels considerably lighter.

Small seeds, slow growth

The last few years asked a lot of me, and I felt that much had to change. Reflection brought me to a standstill for a while, searching for who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live. Change came slowly, one small piece at a time.

It began with tiny seeds. Signing up for the coaching training I had dreamt of for years, while wondering whether I could justify spending that money on myself. Short pauses in my day to sit on a bench in the sun. Walking to the supermarket instead of rushing there by car. Endless scrolling made way for crochet, and I can now make flowers and a scarf. A series on the sofa with my daughters. A cup of coffee on a little tray with a cheerful napkin and a biscuit, instead of drunk standing at the counter.

None of it looks like much from the outside. Yet this is what I see in coaching as well. We start with something very small, and that small step sets something in motion. It grows and keeps growing, until it begins to move almost by itself.

Growing is never finished

I am in my late forties now. Perimenopause has arrived, my children are largely independent, and I have grown more as a person than I ever thought possible. Am I finished growing? I doubt I ever will be. Allowing myself something good still does not come easily, as the yoghurt shows. The point was never to arrive somewhere. What matters is what I can do today, for myself, for my family and for the people around me.

That is the thought my coaching practice grows from. I want to walk alongside women on their way to a life that feels lighter. A life in which you laugh a little more often, and in which you catch your reflection in a shop window and think: who is that lovely woman? So much in life is demanding already. Perhaps that is exactly why the small moments matter, so that at night, when you close your eyes, you can think: today was good.

Ten years ago I wanted to become a coach and did not understand why. Today I hold that certificate, and I know I have been working towards it my whole life.

If these reflections speak to you, you are warmly invited to subscribe to this newsletter. If a conversation feels like the right next step, a first introductory conversation through kaathelsloot.com is free and without obligation. And if you know a woman who might need to read this today, feel free to pass it on to her.

Referentie: Hodnett, E.D. (2002). Pain and women’s satisfaction with the experience of childbirth: a systematic review. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 186(5 Suppl), S160–172. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12011880/