The Honest Work of Coming Undone: A EMDR Trauma Therapist's Take on November

It's not about being thankful for abundance. It's about recognizing your responsibility within a web of relationships—to land, to each other, to the more-than-human world.

November's Gift: Learning to Live in Unmade

I'm sitting here thinking about the year, 2025, and how can it be November? The 11th month of what feels disconcerting and somehow nearing a new beginning.

The trees outside my office window are just beginning to make their mess. It's a late feeling of Fall here in Central California. The seasonal changes are less pronounced, even from last year. Everything feels slightly off-tempo.

The calendar says November, but the thermometer argues otherwise. Each year the seasonal changes seem less pronounced and more delayed, while our stores rush to push each holiday earlier and earlier, creating this weird sense of urgency about time that doesn't match what's actually happening outside. Our bodies are trying to figure out what season we're in, whether to prepare for cold that isn't coming, how to regulate when temperatures don't match the light.

And it's not just the weather. We're closing out 2025 with a geopolitical atmosphere that feels less like a conclusion and more like a question mark. Wars continue. Democracies strain. The climate keeps shifting. And here in our smaller lives, we're supposed to be gathering around tables soon to perform gratitude for a holiday whose origin story we can no longer honor.

The Thanksgiving Problem

Let's talk about Thanksgiving for a minute.

Many of us are sitting with this cognitive dissonance of a meal we loved as children, attached to a narrative we've completely outgrown. That "pilgrims-and-Indians" story they taught us in elementary school? It doesn't hold up to historical honesty, to the lived experience of Indigenous people.

So what do we do with the turkey and the pie and the relatives? Some of us are reinventing it. Some are abandoning it. Some of us are sitting uncomfortably in both impulses at once—wanting the warmth without the lie, the connection without the erasure.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes about November differently in her work. In Indigenous traditions, this isn't the month of performed gratitude—it's the month of assessment and reciprocity. Have you tended your relationships? Have you prepared adequately? Is your community ready for what's coming?

It's not about being thankful for abundance. It's about recognizing your responsibility within a web of relationships—to land, to each other, to the more-than-human world.

What if November isn't asking us to be grateful?

What if it's asking: What have you given back?

That's a different kind of disorganization, isn't it? Not pathology. Not falling apart. But the dismantling of a worldview. The place where colonial constructs stop fitting and older, more honest frameworks start to emerge.

What if November isn't asking us to be grateful" What if it's asking: What have you given back?

When Midlife Unmasks Everything

In my work with women navigating midlife, I'm seeing this disorganization show up everywhere right now. And not just in November—in bodies and lives and identities that are refusing their old assignments.

You know what I mean. The carefully constructed holiday myths start to crack—the perfect table, the harmonious family, the role of caretaker-peacemaker-gratitude-generator. Perimenopause scrambles the hormonal equilibrium that helped maintain certain performances. Kids leave or don't. Parents age or die. Partnerships evolve or don't. The career that defined you stops defining you. The body you've been managing starts managing you differently.

And underneath all of it: a nervous system that's been holding a particular shape for decades, suddenly asking, "Wait... why am I doing this?"

From a polyvagal perspective, so many of us have spent years—decades—in states of sympathetic activation (fight/flight) or dorsal shutdown (freeze, please & fold) organized around threats that may no longer even be present. Our bodies learned to be hypervigilant, to mobilize, to please, to freeze. These states became so familiar we stopped recognizing them as stress responses. We just called them "my personality" or "just how I am" or "being responsible."

But the body keeps score, as Bessel van der Kolk reminds us. And somewhere around midlife, it stops cooperating with the performance. The nervous system that's been running on chronic stress starts sending louder signals: fatigue, pain, digestive issues, sleep that won't come, that feeling of being constantly wound tight or completely flattened.

The women who come to my office often start by describing this feeling of "falling apart." They apologize for crying. They're embarrassed by their anger. They feel ashamed of not having it together the way they used to. They're lonely in their unmaking—watching everyone else seemingly hold their lives in neat formation while they're surrounded by their own internal leaf piles.

But here's what I've come to understand, and what I want them (and you) to know:

Disorganization is not always dissolution. Sometimes it's the only honest response to having lived in arrangements that were never truly yours.

Kimmerer writes about how what we call "weeds" or "invasive species" are often plants responding to damaged land, trying to heal it. What looks like mess to us might be the earth doing repair work.

What if the same is true for us? What if the disorganization of midlife isn't failure—it's your psyche's attempt to heal damage you've been taught to call normal? What if it's your body finally saying: I can't hold this shape anymore?

There's a specific kind of loneliness that lives in disorganization.

The Particular Loneliness of Coming Undone

There's a specific kind of loneliness that lives in disorganization.

When the structures that once held your life—your identity, your relationships, your routines, your beliefs—begin to loosen, you can feel unmoored in a way that's hard to put into words. Everyone else seems to be keeping their leaves raked, their narratives straight, their holidays meaningful.

Meanwhile, you're standing in the middle of your life wondering what any of it means.

This loneliness isn't incidental. It's structural.

We live in a culture that worships organization: productivity, optimization, the life well-managed. Vision boards. Five-year plans. Morning routines. The monitored body, the curated feed, the relationship that "does the work." There's very little cultural support for the season of not knowing. For the fallow time - in-between time, when the field is left unplanted, resting and appearing with nothing visible seems to be growing. For the necessary mess of becoming someone you haven't been before.

And for women specifically—for those of us raised to maintain, to smooth over, to hold things together for others—disorganization feels like failure. We're supposed to be the organizers. The rememberers. The emotional managers of families and workplaces.

When we can't even organize ourselves? When we ARE the mess? It feels like betrayal.

There's a somatic dimension to this loneliness too. When your nervous system has been organized around connection through caretaking, through being useful, through staying small or staying busy—and then that organization starts to fail—you lose your primary strategy for feeling safe with others.

The ventral vagal pathway, the social engagement system that Stephen Porges describes, gets confused. How do I connect if I'm not performing? How do I belong if I'm a mess?

So we end up isolated, not just emotionally but physiologically. The nervous system reads: I'm alone. I'm not safe. I need to mobilize (hello, anxiety) or collapse (hello, depression). The loneliness becomes embodied.

But here's something Kimmerer talks about that shifts this: the dominant culture operates on a scarcity model—there's never enough, you're never enough, you must constantly extract and produce and prove your worth.

But in gift economies, in ecological thinking, abundance and "mess" often look the same.

The leaf litter on my lawn isn't disorder—it's feeding the soil, creating habitat for overwintering insects, protecting roots from temperature swings. It's doing essential work that looks like doing nothing.

What if your disorganization is also doing essential work?

What if the falling apart is actually feeding something that hasn't grown yet?

What if your nervous system, in its seeming dysfunction, is actually trying to reorganize around something more sustainable?

We hide it though. We push through. We try to get back to the person we were, not realizing that person was constructed too. That maybe she was never as solid as she seemed. That maybe the real loneliness isn't in the falling apart, but in pretending we're still held together.

What Your Body Already Knows and EMDR Trauma Therapy Reveals

I'm an EMDR therapist, so I spend my days helping people reprocess trauma. EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—works with the brain's natural capacity to heal itself, to reorganize information that's been stuck in maladaptive patterns.

But here's what's interesting: the healing doesn't look organized. Not in the middle of it.

When someone is processing trauma through EMDR, there's often a phase where things get messier before they get clearer. Memories surface that haven't been thought about in years. Emotions intensify. Beliefs that seemed stable start to waver. The body speaks in ways it hasn't before—tightness, heat, nausea, trembling. Everything feels like it's coming loose at once.

This is the nervous system doing what it needs to do.

Trauma gets stored not just in memory but in the body—in muscle tension, breathing patterns, postural habits, the constant scan for danger. EMDR helps the brain reprocess the memory, but the body has to release what it's been holding too.

In polyvagal terms, we're helping the nervous system move out of chronic sympathetic activation (fight/flight) or dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze/collapse) and find its way back to ventral vagal regulation—the state where we can actually be present, connected, and responsive rather than just reactive.

But you can't think your way there. You can't organize your way there.

The body has to feel safe enough to let go of the protective patterns it's been holding. And that process? It's messy.

Clients will sometimes panic: "I thought this was supposed to help. I feel worse."

And I get to say: "Your nervous system is doing exactly what it needs to do. It's been holding all of this in a very organized way—organized to survive, to keep functioning, to get through the day. Now it's reorganizing around truth instead of around threat. That process is messy."

The disorganization isn't a detour from healing. It's often the evidence that healing is actually happening.

Because here's the thing about trauma: it creates really rigid organization. Hypervigilance is extremely organized—scanning, monitoring, predicting, controlling. Perfectionism is organized. People-pleasing is organized. Shutting down is organized. These are survival strategies that helped us manage impossible situations. They're incredibly coherent systems.

They're just not systems built for actual living. They're systems built for enduring.

When we start to discharge the old threat, when we begin to trust that we don't need those strategies anymore, the whole architecture wobbles. The body starts to release tension it's held for years. The breath deepens. The jaw unclenches. The shoulders drop. Emotions that were locked away start to move through.

And in that wobbling—in that somatic disorganization—there's space for something new. Something that doesn't have to be named yet. Something that doesn't have to make sense to anyone else.

This reminds me of what Kimmerer writes about ecological succession. After a disturbance—fire, flood, clearcut—the forest doesn't immediately return to what it was. First come the pioneer species, the "weeds," the plants that can handle disturbed soil. It looks chaotic. It doesn't look like a forest. But it's doing the work of creating conditions for the forest to eventually return.

The mess IS the process.

Maybe trauma recovery works the same way. Maybe midlife does too. The disorganization isn't the opposite of healing—it might be the necessary stage before something more complex and truthful can grow. The body has to unfold from its protective crouch before it can stand in a new way.

What If We Just... Stayed Here for a While?

What if we allowed midlife to unmake us without rushing to remake ourselves in familiar images?

So here we are in November. The eleventh month. The time between autumn's death and winter's dormancy.

Historically, November has been about remembrance and preparation—the practical work of assessing what you have, what your community needs, whether you've lived in right relationship.

But what if, instead of rushing through this assessment—in our lives, our holidays, our bodies, our world—we actually inhabited it? What if we stopped trying to construct narratives that feel false just for the sake of comfort?

What if we sat at Thanksgiving tables and told different stories? Not the mythology of pilgrims and Indians sharing a harmonious meal, but acknowledged the truth of Indigenous peoples who understood reciprocity long before Europeans arrived with their extraction model.

What if we asked, as Kimmerer suggests: What have we given back? What are we giving back? To the land we live on, to the communities we're part of, to the bodies that carry us?

What if we allowed midlife to unmake us without rushing to remake ourselves in familiar images? What if we recognized that what looks like personal disorganization might actually be a reasonable response to living in social structures that were designed to exploit rather than sustain?

What if we let our bodies be disorganized for a while? Let the nervous system recalibrate without forcing it back into old patterns? What if we trusted that the shaking, the crying, the exhaustion, the rage—all of it—is information, not malfunction?

I think about the clients who come to me exhausted from trying to pull it all back together. And I think about the moment—and there's almost always a moment—when they stop trying. When they let themselves be as disorganized as they actually feel. When they stop performing coherence. When they let their bodies speak instead of overriding all the signals.

That's when the real work begins.

Not the work of fixing, but the work of allowing. Of grieving what doesn't fit anymore. Of admitting loneliness instead of covering it with busyness. Of sitting in November without knowing what December will bring. Of letting the nervous system do its slow, unsexy work of finding a new baseline.

The nervous system starts to settle when it stops having to pretend. The body releases what it's been holding. The mind stops generating stories to justify staying the same.

And in that space—that disorganized, leaf-strewn, embodied, narrative-less space—something true gets to emerge.

Not a return to organization. Not completion. Just: the truth. Whatever that is for you right now, in this eleventh month of this particular year of your one particular life, in this particular body that's been carrying you all along.

Rethinking Gratitude

There's a kind of gratitude that only comes from disorganization.

There's a kind of gratitude that only comes from disorganization.

It's not the gratitude we perform at holiday tables—the rehearsed list of blessings, the forced positivity, the pressure to appreciate what we're supposed to appreciate.

Kimmerer writes about gratitude as a verb, not a noun. It's not a feeling to conjure or a list to recite—it's an active practice of reciprocity. Gratitude that doesn't change how you live, how you give back, how you're in relationship—that's not gratitude. That's just performance.

So maybe the gratitude of November isn't about being thankful for what we have. Maybe it's about recognizing what we're part of.

The cycles we can't control. The climate that's changing. The communities that are struggling. The bodies that are aging, aching, reorganizing. The systems that are failing. And asking: what is mine to tend? What is mine to give? How do I live in reciprocity with all of this mess?

I'm grateful for the clients who trust me with their disorganization. For the women who walk into my office and say, "I don't know who I am anymore," and let that be true. For the ones who let themselves shake, cry, rage, rest—who let their bodies have a voice. For the conversations that don't resolve. For the EMDR sessions that end with more questions than answers. For the messy, nonlinear, beautifully embodied process of becoming someone new by unbecoming someone old.

I'm grateful for November, actually. For this month that won't stay in its lane. For unseasonably warm days in Fresno that remind us nothing is as stable as we pretended, that our bodies have to adapt to conditions we didn't evolve for. For the holiday that won't let us forget its origins, that forces us to reckon with stolen land and broken treaties. For the approaching winter—or whatever this is—that asks us to stop performing certainty.

I'm grateful for disorganization—mine, yours, ours. For the geopolitical chaos that makes pretending impossible. For the midlife unraveling that reveals what was real all along. For the nervous system that knows how to release what it's been carrying, if we'll just stop telling it to hold on. For the body's wisdom, which is older and truer than any story we've constructed about who we should be.

Maybe the trees this year are letting us be a mess but what might actually be mulch, habitat, food for the soil. Existing in conditions they weren't designed for. Doing the work of adaptation without asking permission or waiting for perfect conditions.

Maybe that's what I'm learning: beauty doesn't require meaning. Disorganization doesn't require a lesson. Sometimes the mess is just the work—unglamorous, necessary, embodied, part of a longer cycle we can't see the end of.

Sometimes living in the uncertainty of November, in the practical questions of "are we prepared, have we given back, what do we owe," in bodies that are recalibrating to new realities, is exactly where we're meant to be.

Not as punishment. Not as failure. Just as the honest assessment of this particular moment in this particular time on this particular land in these particular bodies.

What are you letting be messy this November? And what does that mess feed?

Download: The Mess as Medicine: Reciprocity, Time, and November's Honest Reckoning

Five prompts with trauma-informed language and somatic check-ins. I made this for myself first, honestly—and then thought it might be useful for you too.

This isn't gratitude journaling. This is honest assessment.

Mess as Medicine (1).pdf

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Julie Cardoza, LMFT is a licensed trauma therapist, EMDR Consultant, and women's midlife health and nervous system specialist practicing in central California. She works with women navigating the complex terrain of midlife transitions, trauma recovery, and nervous system regulation.

Land Acknowledgment

 I acknowledge that much of my work is created on the traditional homelands of the Yokuts and Mono peoples, whose relationship with this land spans countless generations. I honor their enduring presence, resilience, and knowledge of the interconnectedness of people and place. May the circles and offerings in this book reflect reciprocity and care, listening to the land as a living relative.

Disclaimer

The content in this blog is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional mental health care. If you're struggling with trauma, anxiety, depression, or other mental health concerns, please seek support from a qualified mental health professional. EMDR therapy should only be practiced by trained and certified therapists.

A Note on This Writing

I collaborated with Claude AI to write this piece. I bring the clinical knowledge, lived experience, and therapeutic insights; Claude helps me structure my thinking and translate complex concepts into readable prose.