Sometimes the patterns that shape our lives began long before we had words.
Many of us live under the weight of agreements we never meant to make. These “contracts” often begin in childhood, and they continue to shape our relationships and choices long into adulthood. This story offers a glimpse into how acknowledging one of these hidden contracts opened a door to peace.
A new client came to our work carrying the weight of old patterns she couldn’t quite name. She was already doing deep trauma work with her therapist, but in coaching she wanted to explore the frustrating and heartbreaking patterns that kept repeating in her life, and could not be overcome.
As we slowed down and listened to what was underneath, something surprising came forward: a contract her child-self had taken on. It wasn’t written or spoken. It lived in her body, formed before she could even talk: “I will absorb all the pain and stress of my dear ones so they don’t have to suffer, so they can be completely with me.”
That pre-verbal contract would manifest in adulthood as:
- Empathic overextension: Feeling others’ emotions as her own, even before they speak.
- Emotional caretaking: Attracting relationships where she becomes the stabilizer or healer.
- Chronic fatigue or overwhelm: Because she continually carries energetic weight that isn’t hers.
- Difficulty receiving love: Because love is unconsciously equated with loss or responsibility.
That vow of love — innocent and impossible — had shaped her entire way of being. She had grown into someone exquisitely sensitive to the needs of others, often feeling their distress before they did. It had made her deeply compassionate, but also quietly exhausted.
As we stayed with that question, another layer revealed itself to me. In my own awareness, I felt a deep sense of loss, and terror, something was being torn away forcibly, and a current of terror as though I were touching the child-self of her grandmother — a pre-verbal fear that had never been soothed. (Her grandmother had passed on many years ago.)
When I voiced what I was sensing, my client suddenly remembered: her grandmother had lived through Auschwitz — watching her family be torn apart, her sister taken away, and surviving only by shutting down everything that felt. So even though they had lived “a good life” in America, and not spoken much about her experience as a child, it still lived, frozen in the bodies and passed on in carrying grief and terror unknowingly.
I experience moments like this not as “knowing” but as the field of consciousness itself responding to the client’s distress and revealing what has been unseen or unknown.
Once we were able to acknowledge and sit in witness of that buried terror – to her grandmother’s consciousness, and her own mother’s, to the field itself – something remarkable happened. There was an immediate lightening and a deep peace that enveloped all of us: my client, me, and the field, and I sensed the parts that were witnessed in the ancestors.
Later, she reported that the week felt much lighter. She felt lighter. The grip of trauma had loosened, and the patterns that had held her for years began to soften.
(note: Some contracts will come back, and take longer time to dissolve completely, but persistent effort pays off. And some might release in one session. )
This is the kind of work coaching can sometimes invite: not fixing, not forcing, but listening to the intelligence of the field — the larger web of relationships and patterns we are part of.
When the unseen is brought into the light, the system itself often knows how to heal.
✨ Reflection Prompt: What subtle contracts might you still be carrying — ones you never chose consciously, but that have shaped how you move through the world?
(*Shared with permission, and slight changes. And a special thank you for allowing me to share this experience*)
* A Note on “Field Sensing” When I say I “felt” her grandmother’s terror, I’m not talking about a supernatural ability. For me, field sensing is the capacity to attune to the subtle field of consciousness that surrounds and connects us. It’s something I’ve cultivated over decades of spiritual practice, and it shows up in coaching as a deep listening that goes beyond words. Different traditions might call this intuition, resonance, or presence. I simply experience it as part of our shared human capacity: when we become still and attentive, the field often responds, especially to distress, for it IS Compassion. And reveals what has been unseen or unknown. Naming these impressions gently isn’t about diagnosing or “reading minds.” It’s about offering what arises in a spirit of curiosity and compassion — so the client can feel seen, test whether it resonates, and, if it does, use that insight to release old patterns.