Meta description: Collective disruption is making millions of people question who they are. But the anxiety running beneath it isn’t new — it’s old. Here’s what Root Cause Therapy reveals about what’s actually happening.

I’ve been noticing something lately.

People come in saying they feel lost. Like they used to know who they were and now, somehow, they’re not so sure. And these aren’t people who are falling apart on the surface. Many of them are running successful businesses, raising families, doing all the things that are supposed to make a life feel meaningful.

They just can’t shake the feeling that something is very wrong.

I used to think this was a personal thing. A product of a particular life stage or a particular set of circumstances. But over the past couple of years, I’ve been hearing the same thing too often for it to be a coincidence.

Something is happening collectively. And I think we need to talk about it.

The world feels destabilising right now. There’s a reason for that.

We’re living through a period of real, significant disruption. The economy. The job market. Politics. Technology. The way we form relationships and build community. Almost every structure most of us grew up believing was stable has, in some form or another, shifted.

AI is changing what many people do for work, and threatening to change it further. The cost of living has squeezed a generation out of the security their parents took for granted. Social media has created a kind of hyper-connected loneliness that nobody quite has the language for. And politically, it often feels like the world has forgotten how to hold complexity.

That’s a lot. And yes, it’s genuinely destabilising.

But here’s what I keep coming back to in my work: this level of anxiety is not proportionate to the external circumstances alone.

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The trigger isn’t the wound.

When people describe feeling like they’ve lost their sense of self, they talk as if it started recently. “It’s been since the pandemic.” “It’s been since I changed careers.” “It’s been since everything got so uncertain.”

But when we actually go deeper in a session, what we find is almost always the same: the current disruption has landed on top of something that was already there.

A wound about worth. About safety. About belonging. About whether they were allowed to take up space, have needs, or trust the world.

These wounds didn’t start in 2020, or last year, or whenever the external instability hit. They started much earlier. In childhood, usually. In those formative years when the nervous system was learning what the world was like, whether it was safe, and what was required of them to be loved.

The collective instability isn’t creating new wounds. It’s waking up old ones.

The body doesn’t know it’s not still back then

Part of what makes this so hard is that when we were children, we genuinely had no control. We were little. We depended on our caregivers and the authority figures around us for our actual survival. That’s not a failing. That’s just the reality of being human and small.

But the nervous system remembers.

In my book, I talk about what I call body time travel. When the body encounters something that feels unsafe or uncontrollable, it doesn’t stay in the present. It goes back. It collapses into the felt experience of being that small child who had no power, no say, and no way out. The adult mind might understand the situation clearly, but the body is responding from a completely different moment in time.

This is why, when wars break out, when the economy contracts, when a government makes a decision that feels threatening, so many people don’t just feel worried. They feel small. Helpless. Like they have no sovereignty over their own lives.

Because in their nervous system, they don’t. Not yet.

They are still, in some essential way, looking at the world the way a child looks at a parent. Waiting for the authority to tell them it’s safe. Waiting for the systems to hold. Relying on something outside themselves for permission to feel okay. And when those systems crack, the fear that surfaces isn’t just about the current situation. It’s the original fear. The one from long before.

When someone resolves what is held in those early experiences, something shifts that goes far beyond their relationship with their past. They stop needing external authority to tell them they’re safe. They stop needing the world to behave a certain way before they can access their own sense of self.

The creativity comes back. The sense of agency comes back. They can look at governments and economic forces and social systems and see them clearly, without the charge of the old wound. They are no longer relating to authority the way they related to their parents. And that changes everything.

That is what real healing looks like. Not just feeling better. But stepping into who you actually are, fully, in a way that the chaos outside can no longer take from you.

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Why this matters for practitioners

If you work with people, you’re seeing this. Clients who have done years of therapy but feel like they’re back at square one. High-achieving people who can’t explain why they feel so anxious. People who look strong on the outside but wake up at 3am with a quiet dread they can’t name.

They’re not broken. They’re not failing at their healing. They’re experiencing what happens when unresolved early experiences meet a world that feels genuinely unsafe.

And this is where so many conventional approaches hit their ceiling.

Talk therapy is valuable. Mindfulness practices help. But when someone’s nervous system is in a chronic state of threat, and that state is rooted in something that happened at age 4 or 7 or 12, talking about what’s happening now can only go so far.

The wound is in the body. It’s in the unconscious. It’s in those unprocessed memories that still fire the same neurological alarm every time the world feels unpredictable.

What Root-Cause Therapy actually does 

This is why I created Root-Cause Therapy.

RCT uses a combination of somatic awareness, breathwork, regression, and timeline work to follow a presenting symptom back to its source. Not to relive the past, but to actually complete what got interrupted. The unprocessed emotion that got frozen in the body at the time of the original experience.

When we find that root, and allow the body to finally process it, the presenting symptoms often shift in ways that years of surface-level work haven’t managed to touch.

The person who came in feeling lost, unmoored, like they don’t know who they are anymore. That’s not just an existential crisis. That’s usually a very young part of themselves, still in a very real state of threat, still trying to navigate a world that felt unsafe. Once that part gets to complete what it couldn’t complete at the time, something settles. Deeply.

I’ve watched it happen enough times that it still surprises me.

The identity question is actually a wound question

When people say “I don’t know who I am anymore,” they almost never mean it literally. What they mean is: the strategies they’ve been using to feel safe in the world have stopped working. The roles, the achievements, the relationships, the image they’ve built of themselves. None of it feels like enough anymore.

And underneath all of that is almost always a question they’ve been carrying since childhood: am I enough? Am I safe? Will I be loved if I’m honest about who I actually am?

These are not 2026 questions. But right now, in this climate, they’re getting louder.

If you’re a practitioner, this is where your work becomes vital

The need for genuine, root-level healing has never been greater. Clients are arriving with more complexity, more accumulated pain, more exhaustion from trying to manage symptoms without ever addressing their source.

Learning how to work at that level changes everything about what’s possible in a session.

Root-Cause Therapy Practitioner Training teaches exactly that. How to find the root. How to work with the body. How to safely guide someone through the process of completing what their nervous system has been holding onto for years. The training is built for practitioners who want to offer something that creates lasting change rather than temporary relief.

No prior qualifications are required. Just an empathic heart, lived experience and a genuine desire to help people heal at the level where real change actually happens. Or, it could be the groundbreaking tool to be added to your current healing/coaching business.

If that’s the kind of work you want to do, I’d love to see you in the training and supportive community.

You can find out more about the RCT Practitioner Training here - https://www.thecentreforhealing.com/root-cause-therapy-certification-1

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Melissa Hiemann is the co-founder of The Centre for Healing and the creator of Root Cause Therapy. She trains practitioners, coaches and therapists globally through the RCT Practitioner Certification.

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