The Strong Bones Coach Podcast

081: How to Rebuild TRUST with Your Body through Menopause, Illness or Injury

• Carly Killen

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How to Rebuild Trust with Your Body Through Menopause, Illness, or Injury

Have you ever felt disconnected from your body — like you don’t trust it the way you used to?

In this powerful and personal episode of The Strong Bones Coach Podcast, Carly explores how menopause, illness, fractures, or simply years of putting others first can leave women feeling unsure in their own skin.

This episode will help you:

  • Understand why you may feel disconnected from your body in midlife
  • Learn how strength training and breathwork can rebuild your body trust
  • Discover practical tools like grounding, journaling, and daily check-ins to reconnect
  • Shift from self-doubt to compassionate self-awareness
  • Hear Carly’s personal story of rebuilding trust post-diagnosis and illness

This isn’t about pushing harder — it’s about softening, noticing, and learning to trust your body again.

“When you stop being at war with your body and start working with it — that’s where freedom begins.”

Whether you're navigating peri/menopause, recovering from an injury, or just feeling a little lost in your body — this episode will support you in taking the first gentle steps back to trust.

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Thanks for listening to the Strong Bones Coach Podcast

If you'd like to get in touch to ask a question about today's episode or to find out how you can get support from my coaching, reach out on the following links:

hello@carlykillencoaching.com

https://www.instagram.com/thestrongbonescoach

Thanks for listening to The Strong Bones Coach Podcast!

If you’d like to get in touch with a question about today’s episode or find out how I can support you with coaching, here’s how to reach me:
📧 Email: hello@carlykillencoaching.com
📱 Instagram: @thestrongbonescoach

Do you crave unshakable confidence in your strength from midlife and beyond? Would you love to achieve your goals without sacrificing family time or self-care?

Ready to take your strength to the next level? Start building a stronger body and healthier bones with my Strong Bones Starter Kit—your step-by-step guide to safe and effective strength training at home.
👉 Click here to learn more and access today

🌟 Stay connected and inspired with daily wellness tips on Instagram @thestrongbonescoach.
🌟 For tailored advice or personal queries, email me at hello@carlykillencoaching.com.

Thank you for being here, and I look forward to supporting you on your journey to strength, health, and confidence! 💪🦴✨

Carly:

Hello, lovely people and welcome back to The Strong Bones Coach Podcast. I'm Carly Killen. Guide for living strong, vibrant, and fracture free through midlife menopause and beyond. Now, this has been on my heart lately to talk to you about something many of us experience, but barely name. It's that moment when we realize we've lost trust in our body. Maybe it was after an illness, maybe it was a fracture. Maybe it's the accumulation of years spent looking after everyone else. That one day you realize you've disconnected from yourself. Well, today we're exploring how to gently rebuild that trust. This isn't about Perfectional performance. It's about reestablishing a relationship with your body that feels safe, kind, and empowering. So let's start with something honest. That moment when we feel like trust has been lost. Have you ever found yourself saying things like. I just don't feel like myself anymore. I used to be able to do this. Why can't I now I'm scared to push myself in case something breaks. You are not alone. I speak to so many women on daily basis, especially those in midlife. They share this quiet that's usually unspoken, feeling a disconnection with themselves and it makes sense. When we experience illness, fractures, different diagnoses, and even those years of prioritizing others, it can leave us feeling like strangers in our own bodies. We might feel we've been betrayed by our body, something we thought we could rely on starts to act differently, perhaps not perform in a way you're expecting, or maybe even you feel like it's let you down just at a moment when you needed it. This, can leave you feeling like a stranger to your own body. And this happened to me too after years of illness in my earlier years with severe asthma hospital admissions, not being able to move the way I wanted to my brain, not working the way I wanted it to. Getting diagnosed with A DHD. More recently moving into my perimenopause when the symptoms that come with that, I found myself doubting my own capacity, physically and mentally. Strength I once had seemed harder to access. My motivation dipped to an all-time low, and especially after my A DHD diagnosis. I felt like I had to reintroduce myself to myself, but that moment of loss can be the beginning. Of something powerful if we choose to gently notice supports and rebuild ourselves. So today I'd like to share with you a few tools and techniques that have helped me over the years. I am going to share them in an order that I think might be helpful for you. That is not the order I came across them. I have very much found a lot of this through trial and error, through bumbling my way along, making mistakes, wishing I'd done things differently. So today I bring to you what I hope is a slightly faster route to reconnecting with yourself. But remember, these things take time and patience. So get gentle with yourself as you move through these. So here are the tools that have helped me and while also share with my clients as well. So firstly, we start with grounding. This is one of the simplest ways to return to your body, quite literally. if you're someone that often feels overwhelmed, but your mind is constantly chattering, like you have a monkey mind or a constant to-do list that you never get to the end of. This is a great one to bring you out of your head and into your physical body by making a connection with the Earth, it's there to ground us. So you can do this by standing on grass, on actual ground, or you can do it by simply just kicking off your shoes, standing on the ground, and just really feeling your feet as they connect to every little bit of the earth. Pay attention to your toes, your SOEs, your heels, and just feel them as they rest into the ground. Underneath that is supporting you every moment of the day. So even if you just take 60 seconds to pause. Can you soften your knees and just feel your weight drop into your feet? This is a great way to bring yourself back so you don't need a yoga mat or a wellness retreat, although these are beautiful things, we just can't do them every single day or anywhere that we are. But if you can find that moment, an intention to reconnect with yourself, that is a start. Even if you can't actually take your shoes off. Next we can look at body-based practices like strength training. This was a huge one for me. Strength training helped me reconnect with my physical body. After years of feeling disconnected of not knowing how my body felt, it reminded me of my capability, not just in terms of weight lifted, but of tuning into what my body needed. I'd spent years and years ignoring my needs. Just busy being academic people pleasing, getting qualifications. That's what I valued most. But when it came to connect with my body, I had no feeling there. When I started my strength training initially, it took me months and months to just basically squeeze my shoulders together. I had no feeling in my upper back at all. Those years of bending over desk, writing in medical notes and all those things just left my muscles overstretched and overworked in a really interesting way. But it's not uncommon. I see this in a lot of people I work with. It does take time and patience and a lot of self-compassion to start to get these sensations back. It might not take that long for you, and I hope it doesn't. None of my clients have taken as long as it's taken me to get that connection back, so there is hope for us all. But it was that point when I learned to feel my muscles work to move with intention. I also learned to listen to fatigue without guilt, without judgment, and to actually honor it to stop when it felt enough. This is a skill to learn, so you might find that some days you overdo it a little. Just notice for next time you can go a little bit easier. Remember playing the long game here so that your body. Can trust you to stop when you've had enough. You'll be able to start trusting your body to show up when you need it to. And that's why I'm so passionate about helping women strength train safely in menopause'cause it's not just about building bone, it is about building that trust. The next tool that I love to use is breath work and breath awareness. Now, I know I've spoken a lot about breath work in my podcast lately, but I can't overstate how profound it's been for me. Your breath is always with you, and returning to it is one of the quickest ways you can check in. It's why I created my Trust Your Breath workshop, which is this upcoming Sunday. So if you're in home and local, feel free to check that out. But when we feel disconnected or overwhelmed, it's our breath that can guide us home back to ourselves. So if you notice you're constantly breathing high up in your chest, taking shallow, fast breaths, this sends your body the message that you are under threat. So by slowing things down. Breathing lower into your belly, allowing your ribs to expand sideways, connecting and using your diaphragm. This signals safety to your nervous system, so it's free, possible and potent. Mm-hmm. It's not something you can leave on the kitchen side is it? Next? Daily check-ins and compassion are fabulous Ways to connect with ourselves on a day-to-day basis. It is another tool that's changed everything for me. I started with journaling. Now, it's not about journaling pages and pages, making it poetic or lyrical or profound. It's just a few lines, a few words, perhaps a sentence that captures how I feel what I need. Sometimes I just write tired, but hopeful. It's the act of noticing without judgment that starts to build trust. It's like saying to yourself, I see you, and it allows you to respond from a place of compassionate honesty. That compassion isn't just being soft. It's also about keeping promises to yourself, honoring your energy, taking breaks when you need them, even if it's just two minutes to breathe as you boil the kettle. How many times have we broken that promise to ourselves? How many times have you crossed your legs while you've finished a couple of emails before you go to the toilet? How many meals have been skipped either through dieting or through not making enough time for ourselves to sit and eat in peace? So easily done. I did this for years. So if you're noticing that this is you, please go gentle with yourself. Don't use this as an opportunity to speak unkindly to yourself. Just take a moment to notice where have you broken these promises. Gentle them down and just see if you can observe them without judging too much, and especially staying extra kind to yourself when we realize we have left our body behind maybe more times than we would like. Next, let's get honest. Regaining trust in our body doesn't mean life becomes perfect, and we don't need life to be perfect before we can start this process either. But it does mean you stop being at war with yourself. So when I stopped trying to force my body to operate the way it used to and I started working with it, I began to feel freer, more confident, more me. And this ripples out. Maybe for you, it might look like finally joining that gym class, asking for the support you need, taking steps toward the career you've been dreaming of, or simply walking through life without fear of breaking. So it's not about bouncing back, it's about how you can grow forward gently using your wisdom and on your own terms. So if you have been feeling a little lost in your body, if you've been doubting what you can do or who you even are now, let this be your invitation. Not to push harder, but to soften into reconnection with yourself. Start small, start where you are. Start by noticing and if you'd like support, I am holding 30 minute clarity calls to help you understand your next steps. We can figure this out together, and I would love to walk this path with you if it feels right for you. So when you feel ready, head over to carlykillen.com then you can book that free call. You don't have to do this. Hello? A link will be in the show notes to thank you for joining me today on the Strong Bones Coach Podcast. If you found this helpful, please share it with someone you love or that might benefit, and if you have a moment, please leave a review. It helps this work to reach more women just like you. So until next time, be kind to yourself. Be curious about what you need and know that your body is always listening, ready to meet you where you are. You can learn to trust it again. Take care.