Why you feel like a visitor in your own life — and what your nervous system needs
By Abi Beri | Somatic Therapist, Dublin, Naas & Newbridge
[Reading time: 10 minutes]
Do you ever feel like you’re visiting this world rather than living in it?
Like somewhere along the way, you missed the manual that everyone else seems to have — the one that explains how to want the things you’re supposed to want, how to play the games you’re supposed to play, how to feel at home in a life that never quite fits?
If something in you just said “yes” — maybe quietly, maybe with a kind of exhausted relief — then this post is for you.
I’m a somatic therapist working with clients across Ireland — in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, and online. And some of the people I work with don’t come to me with a neat diagnostic label. They come because they carry a weight they can’t quite name. A heaviness that isn’t quite depression. An exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix. A feeling of being fundamentally out of step with the world around them.
Some of them call themselves “old souls.” Not because they necessarily believe in past lives, but because the phrase captures something true about their experience: the sense of having seen through the games everyone else is playing, the difficulty getting excited about things that seem to motivate everyone else, the bone-deep tiredness of being awake in a world that rewards sleepwalking.
If that resonates, I want to offer you something: not a fix, but an understanding. And maybe, permission to stop trying to be different than you are.
What Do We Mean By “Old Soul”?
The phrase “old soul” gets used in different ways. Some people mean it literally — the idea that a soul has incarnated many times and carries the weight of those experiences. Others use it metaphorically — to describe someone who seems wiser, more contemplative, or more world-weary than their years would suggest.
I’m not here to debate metaphysics. What I’m interested in is the experience itself.
When clients in my Dublin, Naas and Newbridge practices describe themselves as old souls, they usually mean some combination of the following: they feel like outsiders looking in, even in familiar situations. They struggle to care about things that seem to matter to everyone else — career advancement, social status, material accumulation. They often feel heavy, tired, or disconnected in ways that don’t fit neatly into categories like depression or anxiety.
They see too clearly. And that clarity comes at a cost.
Here’s what I want to offer: whether or not you believe in literal old souls, there’s a real, somatic experience happening in your body. And that experience has roots — in your nervous system, in your history, sometimes in patterns that stretch back generations.
The Nervous System of Someone Who’s Seen Too Much
Let me put on my somatic therapist hat for a moment.
When I work with people who identify as old souls — or who simply carry that nameless weight — I often see a particular pattern in their nervous system. It’s a pattern that polyvagal theory helps us understand.
Our autonomic nervous system has three main states. The first is ventral vagal — the state of social engagement, connection, safety. When we’re in this state, we feel present, connected, able to meet life’s challenges without being overwhelmed.
The second is sympathetic activation — fight or flight. Heart racing, muscles tensing, energy mobilizing to meet a threat.
The third is dorsal vagal — shutdown, freeze, collapse. This is what happens when the nervous system decides that fighting or fleeing isn’t possible. It’s the mouse going limp in the cat’s mouth. It’s the body’s last-ditch effort to survive by checking out.
Here’s what I’ve observed in many people who carry that “old soul” weight:
They live in a chronic, low-level dorsal vagal state. Not full collapse — they’re still functioning, often quite well on the outside. But there’s a background hum of shutdown. A heaviness in the cells. A sense that life is something to be endured rather than embraced.
And here’s the crucial part: this isn’t a character flaw. It’s often an adaptation.
When a nervous system has been through too much — whether in this lifetime through trauma, chronic stress, or environments that weren’t safe, or perhaps through inherited patterns that science is only beginning to understand — it learns to protect itself by turning down the volume. The world feels like too much, so the system dims its engagement with it.
The exhaustion you feel? The sense of being separate from life? That might be your nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to survive.
The Labels That Both Help and Trap
We live in an age of labels. Depression. Anxiety. ADHD. Complex trauma. Highly sensitive person. Empath.
Don’t get me wrong — labels can be useful. They can help us make sense of experiences that felt chaotic, find communities of people who understand, access support we need.
But labels can also become cages.
I’ve worked with clients who’ve collected diagnoses like they were going to save them. Each one captured something real. And each one failed to capture the whole.
Because here’s the thing: the experience of being an “old soul” — that weight, that not-fitting, that seeing-too-clearly — isn’t a disorder. It isn’t a pathology. It isn’t something broken that needs fixing.
It’s more like an orientation. A way of being in the world that doesn’t match what the world expects.
And that matters, because the approach to healing is different. We’re not trying to fix a broken machine. We’re learning to honour what’s actually here — and to carry it differently.
The Weight of Seeing
Can we talk about clarity for a moment?
One of the things I hear from clients who identify as old souls is that they see through things. They see through the games people play. They see through the social performances. They see through the desperate accumulation of status and stuff that drives so much of modern life.
And they can’t unsee it.
This creates a particular kind of exhaustion. It’s the exhaustion of being awake in a world that rewards sleepwalking. Of sitting in meetings where everyone is pretending the emperor has clothes. Of attending social gatherings where the conversation feels like it’s happening in a language you almost but don’t quite speak.
You learn to smile. Nod along. Play the game just enough to survive. But inside, something is slowly dying.
I don’t say this to be dramatic. I say it because I’ve lived it, and because I sit with people who live it every day in my therapy practice in Dublin, Naas and Newbridge.
Part of the weight you carry is the weight of seeing. And that weight is real. It’s not pessimism. It’s not negativity. It’s the natural consequence of being awake.
The Loneliness Paradox
Here’s one of the cruellest ironies of being this way: you often have a gift for connecting with others — for seeing them, for making them feel understood — while feeling utterly alone yourself.
As a somatic therapist in Ireland, I work with healers, therapists, helpers of all kinds. The wounded healer is such a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s real. So many of us who are drawn to holding space for others are doing it because we know what it’s like to not be held. To not be seen. To carry weight alone.
And there’s a particular loneliness to being the one everyone comes to. You become skilled at attunement, at presence, at meeting others in their depths. But who meets you in yours?
If you recognize this pattern, I want you to know: it’s not a failure of social skills. It’s not that you’re doing connection wrong. It might simply be that the frequency you exist on doesn’t match most people’s. Not better, not worse — just different. The people who tune in, tune in deeply. But most people are listening to other stations.
What Actually Helps
So what do we do with all this? If the weight isn’t something to be fixed, how do we live with it?
Here’s what I’ve learned, both personally and through years of working with clients as a somatic therapist across Ireland:
First, stop pathologizing yourself. You’re not broken. You’re not negative. You’re not failing at happiness. You’re carrying a real weight, and that weight deserves acknowledgment, not shame.
Second, work with the body. The weight you carry isn’t just philosophical — it lives in your tissues, your posture, your breath. Somatic therapy helps because it meets the experience where it actually lives. We can talk about existential exhaustion all day, but until we work with how it feels in the chest, the shoulders, the jaw, something remains stuck.
Third, find your people. They may be few. They may be geographically scattered. They may be people you’ve never met in person. But they exist — others who carry similar weight, who see similarly clearly, who won’t ask you to pretend. Even one person who truly gets it can change everything.
Fourth, honour the glimpses. If you’re waiting for sustained happiness, you may wait forever. But glimpses — moments of genuine presence, of beauty breaking through, of connection that transcends the surface — these are real. And they can be enough. Learning to notice them, to let them land, is its own practice.
Fifth, get support that actually fits. Standard therapy approaches sometimes miss the mark for people who carry this particular weight. “Have you tried gratitude journaling?” can feel like a cruel joke when you’re drowning in existential exhaustion. Find a therapist who gets it — who won’t try to positive-think you out of your actual experience.
A Practice: Being With the Weight
Here’s something you can try right now:
Sit somewhere comfortable. Feel your body’s weight held by whatever surface is beneath you.
And instead of trying to make the heaviness go away… simply acknowledge it.
“I know you’re here. I’m not going to pretend you’re not.”
Notice what happens when you stop fighting it. When you stop trying to fix it or understand it or make it different. Just letting it be here.
Now feel your feet on the ground. Imagine roots extending from your feet into the earth below. The earth has been holding heavy things for billions of years. It can hold yours too.
You don’t have to carry it all yourself.
I’ve created a full guided meditation exploring this practice — what it means to be with the weight rather than against it. It includes a 12-minute somatic journey.
Working Together
If you recognize yourself in these words — if you carry weight you can’t quite name, if you feel like a visitor in your own life, if you’re tired in ways that sleep can’t fix — somatic therapy might help.
Not to make the weight disappear. But to change how you carry it. To work with the nervous system patterns that keep you stuck in chronic low-level shutdown. To find moments of genuine presence even amid the heaviness.
I work with clients in person in Dublin, Naas and Newbridge, and online throughout Ireland and internationally. We go at your pace. We meet you where you actually are. And we don’t pretend you should be different than you are.
You’re not broken. You might just be awake in a world that’s still sleeping. And that’s worth honouring.
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