The Balanced Soul Strategy · Sara Christine
There's a version of this story that's easy to tell.
Girl has hard childhood. Girl works hard anyway. Girl overcomes. Girl helps others.
That story is true. But it skips the parts that actually matter — the years of pushing through without ever feeling through, the way love got tangled up with performance, the long and unglamorous work of becoming someone I finally recognize.
So here's the real one.
Take the Soul Wheel Quiz → I Was Five Years Old
My brother and I were in his bedroom playing with toys when we heard a loud scraping sound against the living room wall. We ran out and found my dad standing over my mom. She was on the floor, not responding.
We started yelling at him. You killed her. You killed her.
He said, "She's not dead. She's fine." He was completely unconcerned.
Eventually, she started to come back — disoriented, confused, asking what had happened. My dad sent us back to my brother's room.
I remember standing in that hallway feeling something I didn't have words for yet. I knew that what I had just seen was wrong. I didn't understand why no one was treating it like it was. And somewhere in that moment, I learned a lesson that would take me thirty years to unlearn:
It's better not to ask questions. Just act like everything is okay. No matter what.
The Air in That House
If you had stood in the middle of my childhood home on any ordinary Tuesday, here's what you would have felt: the specific, particular tension that lives right before something explodes.
Everyone was angry. My dad was angry. My mom was angry. They were always fighting. My dad hit my mom more than once. As my brother got older, he and my dad would get into physical fights, and more than once — despite being a fraction of their size — I stepped between them to break it up.
Both of my parents were alcoholics. We were always clean, always fed. But the emotional atmosphere of that home was unpredictable in a way that teaches a child to become very, very good at reading a room. You learn which footstep means what kind of mood. You learn which silences are safe and which ones aren't. You learn to disappear when disappearing is the safest option.
When I was five or six, I watched my dad have a mild seizure from drinking. When he came back to consciousness, he acted like nothing had happened. He was fine. Everything was fine.
I filed it away. I kept moving.
I Became the Peacekeeper
From the time I was five years old, my brother and I would spend summers at home alone — no supervision, just the two of us and whatever the day brought. I was five. He was nine. I microwaved my own eggs and made my own baloney sandwiches. I called my mom at lunch to make sure everything was okay.
I was okay.
This went on for years.
By the time I was twelve, I had started doing deep cleans of the kitchen cabinets — throwing out the expired food, the open bags with bugs crawling on them. Our only table was always buried in junk mail and papers; we never used it as a table. I wrote in my journal about how frustrated I was with my mom about the mess. I was twelve years old, and I was frustrated with my mother like a tired adult.
My role was never spoken, but it was never unclear: keep the peace. Manage what you can. Don't ask for anything. Be fine.
And when I wasn't fine? I learned early that my feelings were liabilities. The few times I opened up to my mom about something hard — a breakup, a bad day — it would get turned around on me in ways that cost me more than the original hurt. So I stopped. I tucked my feelings somewhere very far back, and I performed fine so consistently that eventually I stopped remembering where I'd put them.
My own emotions were managed, suppressed, stored. Other people's emotions were my full-time job.
But There Was My Grandpa
Not everything was shadow. In the summers, seven cousins — ages six to fifteen — would gather at my grandparents' house and spend weekdays together. Before anyone could go outside to play, the older kids had to read a chapter of a classic and write a book report. My younger cousin and I were too small for that, so we got to play an educational computer game instead. Gizmo's and Gadgets. I can still remember the sound of it starting up.
When I was three, my grandpa taught me how to look a man in the eye and give a proper handshake. He corrected my grammar. He gave me twenty dollars every time I brought home straight A's. He taught me how to carry myself in a room, how to conduct myself in public, what it felt like to be someone worth developing.
He was the first person in my life who saw me that way — not something to be managed or redirected, but someone worth investing in.
I am who I am today in large part because of him.
Worth Was a Performance
Here's what I learned about love in my household: it was conditional. Not stated outright — just structurally true. If I earned straight A's, I'd be celebrated. If I won an award, they'd be proud. But the celebration was always one bad mood away from being swallowed whole.
I had boxes of awards. State recognitions. Honor societies. I threw myself into every club, every musical, every activity I could find. And when I did something well and the outside world recognized me for it, my parents would recognize me too.
But the mood could shift without warning, and an award I'd worked for all semester could be completely overshadowed by whatever fight came before or after. My accomplishments were real. Their weight, at home, was always conditional.
I learned to tie my sense of worth to what I could prove. To what I could earn. To what someone outside me would confirm.
It would take me decades to understand how much of my life I spent performing for an audience that was never really watching.
Then There Was the Boy
From ages sixteen to twenty-one, I was with someone who was afraid of me. Not in those words — jealousy never uses those words. But that's what it was underneath: my potential, terrifying him.
He didn't want me to audition for musical theater in college, because stage kisses. He didn't want me traveling. When I landed a job with Apple in college — promoting products, leading trainings, genuinely good at it and genuinely lit up by it — he was afraid I'd want to move to California and leave.
I was the kind of girl who wanted Broadway. Who wanted to see the whole world. Who wanted to fill a room.
And I let someone else's fear become the architecture of my early adulthood.
I chose my college based on what kept him comfortable. I picked my major based on what seemed stable rather than what called to me. I showed up in the world based on how I calculated he'd react.
When his behavior got me kicked out of my parents' house at seventeen, I moved in with him. And I still found a way to make everything work — I got a job, got a car, made it to prom, homecoming, graduation, and got myself into college entirely on my own.
I was always good at surviving. I just didn't know yet that surviving and living are not the same thing.
The First of Several Rock Bottoms
While I was in college, my dad died.
I was working near full-time at a restaurant, taking an overloaded course schedule, and scraping together rent most months by waiting until I had just enough cash to pay our landlord. There were weeks I had twenty dollars for groceries for two people.
I remember sitting with my mom at the hospital after he was gone and thinking: I have to be strong for her. She can't do this without me.
So I put everything in a box, pushed it to the back of my mind, and went back to work within the week.
I was twenty years old. I was already so fluent in compartmentalizing grief that I didn't skip a beat.
A year after my dad died, I finally ended things with the controlling ex. I started dating someone in the military, got married quickly, moved out of state. The economy collapsed and there were no jobs, so we moved back six months later. I took a corporate role with real travel and real opportunity.
And somehow, I was still doing all of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, meal prep, and finances. I started an Amazon business on the side, staying up until 2am talking to sourcing agents in China, trying to figure out a path out of the corporate cycle. Trying to build something that was mine.
My husband wanted something different. A stable life. A submissive wife and babies at the table. He fell into a depression because we didn't have children yet and I wasn't ready. He became resentful. I became resentful. We fell apart in slow motion.
When my mom died, I was sitting at her funeral with him beside me when it hit me like a freight train: This is not the person I want next to me when life gets hard.
I put that realization in a box too. I'd deal with one traumatic event at a time.
Almost a month to the day after her funeral, I told him we needed to figure it out or go our separate ways. Three weeks after that, we were done.
I moved into my childhood home — my mom's house — to clean it out and get it ready to sell. That same weekend, I completed my Master's Degree remotely.
It was my twenty-seventh birthday.
I have never had a sadder day in my life. And I would later understand it was also the beginning of everything.
A Word About My Parents
I've spent a long time with the complicated truth of who they were.
My mom became my best friend after my dad died. We'd do movie nights with steak and crab legs. We'd hit happy hours all over town. She was creative, and warm, and laughed easily, and she loved hard. She found joy in the simplest things. She was charming and kind in ways that people still talk about.
None of us knew she had a drinking problem. She hid it well, until it was too late to change anything.
My dad — even with everything — was just a wounded little boy. His own father had been horrifically abusive. He found himself in a life he didn't ask for, trying to do the right thing, and his shadows got bigger than he could handle. He was daddy's little girl's dad for much of my younger life, until the darkness got too heavy. Hurt people hurt people. I believe that now in a way I couldn't have when I was five.
I honor my mom by living the life she always really wanted — one full of peace and freedom.
I Moved to Colorado
People were worried. I'd just navigated my mom's death, a divorce, and graduate school in the same month. They expected me to fall apart completely.
I didn't fall apart completely. But I fell apart in smaller, quieter, more drawn-out ways.
For a few years, I was drinking most nights of the week — sometimes to blackout. I was twenty-some years deep into not knowing how to feel my emotions, and alcohol was the only thing that quieted the noise. I had a lot of friends. We would go out. None of them knew what I was carrying, and I'm not sure I fully knew either.
There were what I started calling my "brain injury" days. I'd wake up with a fog so thick I could barely form a sentence — slow mental processing, emotional instability, a numbness that felt physical. I'd have to shut off any major mental load and spend most of the day in bed or sleeping. I would later understand this is what CPTSD does to brain chemistry. At the time, I just knew something was wrong that didn't have a name.
And then there were the worst days. Anxiety so loud and physical that I'd take the pillows and blankets off my bed, pile them in the bottom of the shower, climb in, close the door, turn off all the lights, and just wait. Wait for the emotional storm to pass. Some days I would watch the sun come up through the closed blinds, then eventually watch it set again through those same blinds — and only then could I find enough ground to get myself out.
I looked fine from the outside. I had always looked fine.
Little Girl
I need to mention my dog.
I'd had her and her brother, Chunk, since the day they were born — back when I was still with the boy from high school. Chunk passed a few years before she did. And she became my companion through everything that followed.
She moved with me fourteen times in twelve years, across three different state lines. She was there for the death of both of my parents. She was there through every serious relationship, the marriage, the divorce. She was in my studio apartment on the top floor of a high-rise in downtown Denver. She had seen every version of me.
On the nights when grief would crack me open — really crack me open, not the managed kind — she would find me and stay with me. She loved me in the uncomplicated way that only a dog can.
When it was her time, I held her heart and felt her last heartbeats as she crossed over.
I knew when she went that an era had ended. Everything she had witnessed, all the versions of me she had kept company — she carried it all with her.
I still miss her terribly. And I am forever grateful for the part she played.
The Slow, Unglamorous Turn
There was no single moment. I want to tell you there was — a speech I heard, a sunrise I stood in front of, a book that changed everything on page forty-seven. But the truth is quieter than that.
It was the gradual decision to make peace my non-negotiable.
I got back into yoga. I sat in spiritual circles. Every time an intention was set, mine was the same, every single time: to find peace.
Slowly, I started using that intention as a filter. If this decision doesn't bring peace into my life — this person, this invitation, this friendship, this event — it doesn't get a yes.
My calendar started to empty. The friendships that cost more than they gave began to fall away naturally. I bought a house outside the city. I started saying no to the people who needed me as an accessory, not a person. The ones who wanted me around to maintain appearances and guilt me into doing what served them.
And one ordinary afternoon, moving through a quiet moment at home, I stopped.
Everything was still. My body wasn't bracing. The constant background static that had been running for thirty-something years was simply... gone.
That was the turning. Not a dramatic realization. Just a still, dawning recognition that something had quietly, finally, shifted. Holy crap. It actually happened.
When I looked back from that moment, I could see how far I'd come. Not because someone had fixed me. Because I had been, slowly, choosing differently.
April 2025
I got the call that I was done, effective immediately.
No goodbyes. No wrap-up. Do not pass go. Two years of building a major initiative. Two years in a row of doubling my sales numbers. Annual quota hit seven months into the year.
Done. Effective now.
I scrambled to hand off everything I could — open projects, customer relationships, anything my clients would need. I called as many people as possible to let them know what had happened. I didn't want anyone to suffer for something that wasn't their fault or mine.
Less than three months after my departure, nearly every relationship I had built and every deal on the verge of closing had gone to a competitor. The people who took over couldn't maintain what I'd built. That wasn't my failure. But the grief wasn't really about the work.
The grief was about discovering how fully I had made a job the center of my identity — without ever realizing I had done it. The skyscraper fell, and I realized I had been living inside it.
What followed was disorienting and necessary. The anxiety I'd been outrunning caught up. The heart palpitations I hadn't had since around the time my mom died were back. And my mind — which had been running on extreme overdrive for longer than I could name — started, for the first time, to slow.
As it slowed, I felt something I hadn't expected: relief. Like emerging from a cave I hadn't known I was sealed inside.
I used my severance to travel. I went to Alaska. I went to Thailand — two weeks on a self-chartered sailboat through Phang Na Bay with people I love. I had never felt freedom like that. I never wanted to let it go.
That season is where The Balanced Soul Strategy stopped being an idea and became something I was compelled to actually build. Not from a place of success. From the unraveling that finally let me see clearly what I'd been trying to say all along.
The Breath
In late 2025, I found my way back to breathwork — this time with real intention.
I had experienced it through yoga over the years, through community circles, through the occasional class. But when I found my current teacher, something aligned that hadn't before. I knew two things almost simultaneously: I needed this for myself. And I needed to be able to give it to others.
That's when I began my training as a certified somatic breathwork practitioner.
Here's what I understand now that I didn't before: your nervous system doesn't care how much inner work you've done. It doesn't respond to good intentions, clear vision, or the right affirmation said with enough conviction. It responds to your body. To your breath.
I had spent decades trying to think my way through what my body was holding. Breathwork was the first thing that actually moved what all the thinking couldn't reach. It's not mysticism — it's biology. Your exhale activates the vagus nerve. That's your reset button.
And when you learn to use it — really use it — everything else starts to have room to shift.
What I Know Now
I am, clinically, a work in progress. I mean that more warmly than it sounds.
I've done the therapy. I've sat with the CPTSD, the hyperindependence, the disorganized attachment, the inner critic that was never mine to begin with — made up entirely of other people's voices, none of them my own. I spent intentional years dismantling it and replacing it with something that actually sounds like me.
I'm gentler with myself now. When something falls off — a habit, a routine, a healthy relationship with something I was building — I notice it. I come back. Without the shame spiral that used to swallow me whole.
Falling off is not failure. It's information. And having a defined path back to yourself — a Plan for Failure — is what makes real change sustainable instead of seasonal.
The Soul Wheel isn't a concept I invented in a notebook. It's a map I built from trying to navigate without one — from years of unconscious decisions, from patterns I didn't choose but inherited, from the long, necessary work of becoming someone I actually recognize.
Will I ever be completely healed? No. But the path forward is less treacherous, and I trust myself on this part of the journey. The scars are real. I've just finally stopped reopening them.
For You
If you've read this far, I think I already know something about you.
You've done the work — or you're trying to, or you've wanted to but kept hitting the same walls. You've had seasons that took more than they gave. You've pushed through things that deserved more room than you could give them at the time.
You're somewhere in the gap between who you were and who you're becoming, and it feels like it should have closed by now.
It hasn't, not because something is wrong with you.
It's because the bridge between your inner work and your outer life requires something most of us were never given: a framework that holds both worlds at once. Not just the soul work, not just the strategy — both, together, in a real and flexible system that accounts for the fact that you will fall off, that life will happen, and that none of that makes you broken.
That's what I built. Not because I had it figured out, but because I desperately needed it and it didn't exist yet.
I'm so glad you're here. Take all the time you need. There is room for all of you.
"Hold on, baby. We're almost there. I promise I won't let you go, and I won't let you down. You will not believe how incredibly strong you are — but one day, you'll see it."
— Sara Christine