Co-authored by Mark Shelvock and Ann Bayly-Bruneel
Every January, the world leans forward and whispers the same familiar instruction: Become something new, as if the calendar change ignites new beginnings and fresh perspectives.
We are urged toward brighter versions of ourselves, as though the self were something to be endlessly polished and perfected. What remains largely invisible is the deeper labor of transformation: the emotional and psycho-somatic work of shedding, undoing, and releasing what no longer belongs to the life that is trying to emerge.
In therapy and in life, meaningful transformation rarely begins with building something new. It begins with unbecoming: the gradual softening and unravelling of identities, beliefs, and adaptive survival strategies. It is the te…
Co-authored by Mark Shelvock and Ann Bayly-Bruneel
Every January, the world leans forward and whispers the same familiar instruction: Become something new, as if the calendar change ignites new beginnings and fresh perspectives.
We are urged toward brighter versions of ourselves, as though the self were something to be endlessly polished and perfected. What remains largely invisible is the deeper labor of transformation: the emotional and psycho-somatic work of shedding, undoing, and releasing what no longer belongs to the life that is trying to emerge.
In therapy and in life, meaningful transformation rarely begins with building something new. It begins with unbecoming: the gradual softening and unravelling of identities, beliefs, and adaptive survival strategies. It is the tender relinquishing of what no longer fits because it never really did and/or it no longer reflects who we are.
Growth Is an Unlearning Process
Most people imagine personal growth as acquisition. Yet human development also requires subtraction: release, space, breath, and a return to a slower, more rooted, and honest rhythm that is etched out of our own authentic belonging.
Unbecoming invites us into the delicate work of questioning the roles we inherited and the stories we learned to tell and inhabit. It asks us to grieve earlier versions of ourselves shaped by social expectations and by conditional, colonial ways of defining safety, belonging, and worth. These are systems that prioritize productivity, obedience, and self-sacrifice over wholeness, and they give rise to familiar identities such as the achiever, the caretaker, the pleaser, the performer, and the rescuer.
This unlearning is necessary and requires an embodied soulful existence as it asks us to deeply listen to our heart, our values, and to question all things that once felt certain. We cannot expand while clinging to restrictive forms and identities that were handed to us. We must dissolve, shed, and undo much of what we have come to accept.
For many, this process unfolds through creative and embodied experience rather than words alone. Art, intentional movement, dream interpretation, and symbolic play offer a kind of psychological and soulful alchemy. Something becomes loosened, something erodes, and something new takes shape. Creation and destruction move together as old meanings and forms dissolve; newness emerges, re-emerges, and fades again.
In our clinical experience, psychotherapy, at its best, works in much the same way. Not as a production line for ‘better behaviour’ or ‘feeling better’ but as a compassionate space where the deeper currents of a person’s life can be held, felt, expressed, reorganized, and remade anew—again and again—without expectation, agenda, or a fixed direction.
In contrast, many institutionalized systems surrounding care have become shaped by speed, productivity, metrics, and outcome targets. Over time, this erodes the very relationships and conditions that make real healing possible.
When personal loss, collective upheaval, or moral exhaustion make it impossible to continue living inside the old structures, we are guided by our grief, heartbreak, and compassionate disruption to break open what once felt stable. Unbecoming reveals both the limits of inherited systems and the deep possibility of more humane and compassionate ways of living and relating to ourselves and each other.
Within the space, something quietly, albeit fiercely, reorganizes. People begin listening more closely to their bodies, their inner rhythms, and their own authority. Old paradigms loosen, and nervous systems soften. A deeper sense of agency and belonging emerges; not as an abstract idea, but as a felt, embodied experience of connection, freedom, and aliveness.
This is the work of unlearning: not becoming someone else, but returning slowly and courageously to what has always been alive beneath the surface.
The Quiet Intelligence of Embodied Life
We often try to change through thought and willpower alone. Yet long before our experiences become conscious thoughts, they are already living in the body: in posture, breath, muscle, rhythm, and sensation. The body is not simply something we inhabit. Rather, soma (the body) is a knowing organism, carrying memory, relationship, and survival.
Across cultures, indigenous traditions, and throughout human history, this embodied knowing has been understood as a primary source of wisdom. Our sense of self is formed not in isolation but through relationship, with others, with community, and with the living world itself. We are shaped by belonging even as each of us carries a singular inner life of imagination and meaning.
Psychological growth asks us to hold both: the intimate details of our inner landscape and the wider horizon of the world we belong to. Stability and change. Light and shadow. Play and depth co-exist with equal validity and equanimity.
This path is not for the faint-hearted. It requires the courage of a lion to remain present with what is messy, unfamiliar, and unfinished. It is exceptionally difficult to tend what is breaking open and to trust the slow work of transformation unfolding beneath the surface.
When the Old Softens and Something New Takes Root
When people lean into the process of unbecoming, the changes are not always immediately visible. Like seeds beneath winter soil, much of the most important transformation happens in the dark, beyond performance or external measurement.
Old patterns compost, and the psyche prepares new ground. People become more attentive to their inner weather; the subtle shifts of grief and hope, fear and longing, fatigue and compassionate renewal.
Growth becomes less about striving toward an ideal and more about tending what is already alive and asking for authentic care. Like soil, the psyche has no rigid borders. What appears on the surface is always connected to vast underground networks of experience and relationship. When we attend to this unconscious terrain, we discover not only personal healing, but renewed connection to ourselves, to one another, and to the larger human story we share.
Unbecoming is never a solitary act. The inner work reshapes the spaces between us. As we tend our own ground, we also cultivate new ways of belonging that are quieter, more spacious, and more humane. Slowly, unseen, the seeds of something different take hold.
This is the co-creation of unbecoming: An unscripted existence and a belonging that grows from the inside out.
Co-authored by Mark Shelvock and Ann Bayly-Bruneel. Ann is a registered psychotherapist, art therapist, and somatic experiencing practitioner with over twenty years of experience in trauma, addiction, and mental health. Together, they practice trauma-responsive psychotherapy in Ontario, Canada, grounded in compassion, depth, and the quiet art of human healing.