Sarah Baldwin Coaching

Sarah Baldwin Coaching I am a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner and expert in the field of trauma resolution. Host of the You Make Sense Podcast.

I specialize in Nervous System Regulation, Somatic Parts Work, and Attachment Intervention. Sarah Baldwin is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner trained through Peter Levine's three year trauma training and a member of the Polyvagal Institute training team. She is also trained in somatic Attachment Theory, Parts Work, Psychodrama and Martha Beck's life coaching program. Sarah is based in Los Angel

es and has grown to serve hundreds of clients from around the world and offers a variety of individual, group, and online coaching options.

That instinct to please? Your nervous system calls it protection.Fawning (or people-pleasing) isn't a personality trait;...
09/14/2026

That instinct to please? Your nervous system calls it protection.

Fawning (or people-pleasing) isn't a personality trait; it's not even its own state in your nervous system. It's a strategy your system reaches for, and depending on which state you're in, it can look and feel completely different in your body.

Here's what that can look like, my friend:

➡️ In Sympathetic (the "doing" state), anxiety fuels you into action, saying "yes" to something you don't want to do, scanning for what the other person needs, and becoming that for them.
➡️ In Freeze (the "stuck" state), fear and urgency are both there, but nothing moves. You appease through your silence.
➡️ In Dorsal (the "leaving" state), when a situation feels unwanted or unsafe, you shut down or check out and comply with whatever you sense is being asked of you.

Same protective instinct. Three completely different experiences in the body.

Here's what I want you to take with you: fawning is nothing to be ashamed of. It's a beautiful way you found to survive and protect yourself.

Healing is what lets you come back home to yourself and build the safety to show up more authentically with the people around you.

That's possible for all of us, my friend.

Behind that instinct to please is usually a part of you that learned it was the safest way to stay connected, or just stay safe, period. You Make Sense is where we get to know that part directly, instead of just managing what it does.

The part of you that's always scanning for what everyone else needs has been waiting for this. Comment YMS, and I'll send you the waitlist details (along with information on exclusive savings!)

With kindness and belief in your healing,
Sarah

Nothing in nature apologizes for its own becoming. 🌿👉 The sequoia doesn't shrink so the surrounding trees feel more comf...
09/14/2026

Nothing in nature apologizes for its own becoming. 🌿

👉 The sequoia doesn't shrink so the surrounding trees feel more comfortable.
👉 The river doesn't slow down to make itself more manageable.
👉 The pineapple doesn't produce less sweetness because it's worried about being too much.

Nature simply becomes what it is, fully and without apology, because that is the nature of nature.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that our becoming required an apology or that our fullness was too much, our needs were inconvenient, and our voice took up space that wasn't ours to take.

And so we made ourselves smaller. Not because we wanted to, but because it was the only way we knew to stay safe and loved.

I want to say something to the part of you still operating from that belief, my friend: the world does not need a quieter version of you. It never did. What the world needs is you arriving more fully into what you already are — the gifts, the voice, the particular and irreplaceable way you move through this life.

Your becoming is not something to apologize for; it is something to tend, to protect and to lean into gently. One tolerable step at a time. 💛

With kindness and belief in your healing,
Sarah

09/13/2026

One of the questions I hear most often in this work is some version of this: how do I heal from something I don't even fully remember? 💛

And the answer, one that I find both scientifically grounding and deeply hopeful, is this: you don't have to remember it to heal from it.

Traumatic memories, especially those formed in early childhood, don't always live in conscious, narrative memory. They live in what we call implicit memory, the memory of the body. The felt sense of something that happened before you had language for it, before you had the cognitive capacity to store it as a story, before you could make meaning of what was occurring around and within you.

Implicit memory shows up not as recollection but as sensation. As patterns. As the way your body responds in certain situations without knowing why.

As the tightening that happens before your mind has caught up. As the feelings that arise in relationships or circumstances that seem to echo something you can't quite name. ✨

This is how developmental trauma and attachment trauma live, not primarily in what you can consciously recall, but in what your body has been quietly holding, responding to, and organizing itself around ever since.

And this is also how they heal. Not primarily through the retelling of a story, or through consciously accessing a memory and reprocessing it. But through the body. Through the non-verbal, somatic, felt experience of something different, something safer, something more attuned, being offered to the implicit memory system that has been carrying the original wound.

You don't have to remember what happened. Your body already knows. And your body can learn something new.

In this episode, we explore what implicit memory is, how it carries developmental and attachment trauma, and what it actually takes to heal at this level.

🎙️ Comment YMSPOD below for the link to listen.

With kindness and belief in your healing,
Sarah

There's a reason the same situation that feels manageable one day can completely overwhelm you the next. ⤵️It comes down...
09/13/2026

There's a reason the same situation that feels manageable one day can completely overwhelm you the next. ⤵️

It comes down to something called your window of tolerance — the zone in which your nervous system can be with whatever is happening without either flooding or shutting down. Inside that window, you can think clearly, feel without being consumed, and respond rather than react.

When you're inside it, hard things are still hard, but you can be with them. When you're outside it, even small things can feel impossible, my friend.

What most people don't realize is that this window shrinks under stress. Poor sleep, a difficult week, an accumulation of unprocessed activation — all of it narrows the range of what your system can hold before it tips into overwhelm or collapse.

This is why you can handle something gracefully on Tuesday and completely lose yourself in the same situation on Thursday.

You weren't less capable on Thursday. Your window was smaller.

The goal of nervous system work isn't to never get pushed outside your window. It's to gradually widen it, and to build capacity through consistent regulation so that more of life fits inside without tipping the system over. 🌱

⭐ I created a free workbook called How To Gain Control Over How You Feel with somatic tools to help you regulate when you're outside your window.

Comment WORKBOOK below and I'll send it to you!

With kindness and belief in your healing,
Sarah

What's your relationship with time actually like?Do you feel an intense pressure to work harder or achieve more? Do you ...
09/12/2026

What's your relationship with time actually like?

Do you feel an intense pressure to work harder or achieve more? Do you feel like you've already missed your chance, or that you're losing time? Or do you just feel stuck, lost, or left behind?

If any of this sounds familiar, I want you to know you're not alone, my friend. These are such common experiences, especially in a society that so often ties achievement and success to self-worth.

But here's the thing about time…

The way we feel about it shifts depending on what's happening in our nervous system.

When we're dysregulated in one of our self-protective states, we end up with thoughts and feelings that are drastically different from what we experience when we're regulated in our Ventral state of presence, safety, and connection.

Swipe through to see just how different that looks in each state 👉

Here's what's important to remember: the thoughts you have while dysregulated are a self-protective response. It's the thoughts that show up in Ventral that we actually want to listen to, because those are the ones that are true.

Next time you notice yourself regulated, try asking:
💬 What's actually true?
💬 Do I feel like I have enough time?
💬 Does my pace feel right?

You might even notice you don't have many thoughts at all, just groundedness and connection.
That's the power of regulation, my friend. When we shift what's happening in our nervous system, we shift the way we experience our entire life.

Ready to get unstuck at the nervous system level? Take my FREE quiz “What’s Keeping You Stuck” for a personalized guide and downloadable worksheet. Comment QUIZ and I’ll send you all the details.

With kindness and belief in your healing,
Sarah

09/12/2026

The only person who can rescue your parts is you. 🌟

Not your therapist, not your partner, not the perfect relationship or the right program. Those things can create the conditions. But the actual work of going back for your younger parts – of giving them the safety, the presence, the attunement they never received – that belongs to your adult self.

And here's what makes that both hard and extraordinary, my friend: you are the only one who knows what it was like to be that child in that house. No one else has that access. Which means no one else can do this particular thing for them.

You are exactly the right person for this. 🌿

Comment YMSPOD for the link to listen to this week’s episode!

With kindness and belief in your healing,
Sarah

09/11/2026

One of the most important things I want you to understand about healing is this: it was never meant to be done alone. 💛

Not because you aren't capable. Not because you don't have enough insight or willingness or commitment to the work. But because of something fundamental about how the nervous system actually learns to regulate.

Your nervous system didn't learn what safety felt like in isolation. It was supposed to learn through the presence of another regulated nervous system, through co-regulation with a caregiver who could show your developing system, again and again, what coming back to safety felt like. What being soothed felt like. What it meant to be in the presence of someone whose own nervous system was anchored enough to help yours find its way back.

And when we do deep healing work as adults, the same principle applies. ✨

One of the most powerful things a skilled practitioner offers is not just their knowledge or their framework or their technique. It is their regulated nervous system. The ability to stay present and grounded while you move through activation, grief, or overwhelm, and in doing so, to lend your system something it can learn from. Something it can begin to borrow and eventually internalize.

This is also why the healing work a practitioner has done on themselves matters so profoundly. Because this work cannot be done from the head alone. It has to be embodied. A practitioner who understands trauma conceptually but has not done their own healing brings something very different into the room than one who has genuinely walked through their own history and come out the other side with a regulated, grounded, deeply present nervous system.

Healing requires support. Not as a luxury or a shortcut, but as a biological necessity.

In this episode, we explore why support is essential on a healing journey, and what to look for in the people you choose to walk alongside you.

🎙️ Comment YMSPOD below for the link to listen.

With kindness and belief in your healing,
Sarah

Safe, consistent love can activate old wounds precisely because it's unfamiliar, not because something is wrong with the...
09/11/2026

Safe, consistent love can activate old wounds precisely because it's unfamiliar, not because something is wrong with the relationship or with you. 💚

This is one of the most disorienting experiences in healing, and I don't think it gets talked about enough.

You finally find someone who shows up consistently. Who isn't hot and cold, who doesn't keep you guessing, who actually means what they say. And instead of feeling relief, something in you goes on alert.

The calm feels suspicious. The steadiness feels boring or wrong. You find yourself waiting for the other shoe to drop, scanning for what's actually true underneath the safety they're offering.

Your nervous system isn't being irrational, my friend. It's being faithful to what it learned. If love in your earliest experiences came with unpredictability, conditions or pain, then consistent and available doesn't register as love.

It registers as unfamiliar, and unfamiliar gets coded as unsafe.

So the person who's actually good for you can feel less compelling than the one who keeps you activated.

The healthy dynamic can feel flat compared to the one that had your nervous system working overtime.

This isn't a preference. It's a physiological response to what your system learned love felt like.

The work is showing your nervous system, slowly and through lived experience, that safe can also be home. That consistency is not boring; it's what you've been longing for all along, even when it doesn't yet feel that way in your body. 🌿

Has this been your experience? I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

With kindness and belief in your healing,
Sarah

Have you ever been told something like…"If you feel the feeling, it will pass.""All feelings move and change if you let ...
09/10/2026

Have you ever been told something like…

"If you feel the feeling, it will pass."

"All feelings move and change if you let them."

If your experience has been anything like mine, you've probably noticed that just "feeling into" a feeling or sensation doesn't always change much.

In fact, it can leave us feeling overwhelmed, engulfed, out of control, dysregulated, panicked, or shut down.

Here's why 👉

When we've experienced trauma that hasn't been fully resolved, our systems carry stored activation, energy left over from those events. And traumatic energy is overwhelming energy. It pulls us in like a black hole or a magnet, and it can feel incredibly powerful and scary.

So when we notice an uncomfortable or activating feeling, even one unrelated to the original trauma, our systems are primed to get pulled back toward that same black hole. Peter Levine calls this the trauma vortex.

Which means if we just sit with our feelings and try to let them pass, they can quickly become too much. Instead of processing the activation through, we end up pulled into even more of it.
What we want to teach our systems instead is something called pendulation. ✨

Pendulation is the ability to feel into dysregulation or activation, and then move back out of it. Our systems know how to do this naturally, but when trauma occurs and doesn't fully resolve, our systems can get locked into that vortex, pulled toward dysregulation, simply trying to protect us.

To bring pendulation back into our experience, we start by titrating the energy: feeling into a little bit of the activation, then turning toward something regulating, a pet, a funny video, time in nature. Then repeating that cycle.

This is how stored trauma actually gets processed through, and how those big feelings finally get to release.

If you want a hands-on way to start practicing this, comment "WORKBOOK" below to download my free trauma-informed workbook.

With kindness and belief in your healing,
Sarah

09/10/2026

You're punishing your partner for crimes your caregivers committed, and your partner wasn't there for any of it. ⤵️

This is the developmental trauma feedback loop in one sentence, my friend, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

When your nervous system detects something in the present that resembles the relational pain of your past, it doesn't pause to assess whether the person in front of you is actually the same as the person who hurt you.

It superimposes the past onto the present and responds accordingly.

You are back there, in your body, in your nervous system, even though you're standing in a completely different room with a completely different person.

The amount of relational hardship you experienced in childhood will tend to be reflected in the amount of relational work that needs to happen in your adult partnerships. Not as punishment, but as opportunity. Because your closest relationships are the only place where the final layer of that wound can actually be met and healed.

That's not a flaw in the design. It's actually a portal, if both people are willing to understand what's happening. 💕

Comment YMSPOD for this week's episode link.

With kindness and belief in your healing,
Sarah

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