Why So Many Women Live in Chaos — And Can’t Get Out of It

Chaos isn’t random. If you repeatedly end up broke, constantly arguing with people, or drowning in everyday demands, that often points to recurring trauma patterns from the past. When you grew up with instability — parents fighting, people vanishing, sudden outbursts of rage — your nervous system learned to expect that turbulence. As an adult, even when you crave steadiness and work to create it, you can feel pulled back into that whirlpool of disorder. That doesn’t mean you’re doomed, but unless you break the cycle, chaos can quietly become what runs your life. For many women, instability doesn’t limit itself to one corner of life — it shows up everywhere: relationships riddled with conflict or swinging between hot and cold; money that never feels reliable; jobs that leave you exhausted; and a daily scramble where no matter how much you accomplish, you never quite catch up. You might be able to get organized for a short time — the home looks neat, the bills are current, you feel competent at work — and then things slip back into disarray. The harder you try to force order, the more drained you become. You might label yourself lazy, but this is different. It’s a pattern of violent spikes of intensity followed by a low where, instead of relief, you’re left with a knot of dread, waiting for the next thing to go wrong. Without noticing, you drift back into that same chaos loop at home, at work, in relationships. You may sincerely dislike the chaos and believe it’s something that just happens to you, yet in subtle ways you contribute to it. Whatever the surface causes appear to be, the shared factor running through those apparent coincidences is you. Of course, it’s not your fault what happened to you as a child, and childhood trauma commonly produces adult chaos. But as an adult, you are the one who can change how it affects your life. Facing that truth is difficult. Many people never move beyond blaming others and circumstances for the constant drama. If you truly want the chaos to shift, you must focus on the present and look for the roles you play — that’s the only domain you can directly influence. In my adult life I’ve gone through three or four periods I call trauma storms — times when so many terrible things hit at once that you can’t keep it together and life unravels. They nearly always included the end of a relationship and often a medical crisis. Once I was attacked on the street, had my heart broken, and lost my mother within a few months. Another time I endured a brutal, draining two-year graduate program that felt like hazing, then the sudden death of a boyfriend, followed by a diagnosis of Graves’ disease requiring radioactive iodine therapy and rapid hair loss — all of it compressed into about a month. I can think of four such cycles — nearly unbearable stretches I mostly have to force myself to recall, because I’ve blocked much of the pain. What I remember sharply, though, is that after each eruption of trauma I landed in what many would call a dark night of the soul. I thought you were meant to have only one; I had several. I grieved, I felt isolated, I was hopeless about the future. Yet after a few months, each of those bleak aftermaths transformed into something else: joyful, creative, intensely productive periods — some of the best years of my life. The sadness that follows trauma is like a withdrawal from chaos; when it ends, it strips away that false, adrenaline-fueled energy, leaving you depleted for a while. But in that still, almost monastic emptiness there can come clarity, genuine vitality, and the inner strength to take the next steps. A huge portion of my personal growth happened during those post-trauma seasons. The danger, for someone raised the way I was, is that the periods of rebuilding and flourishing can begin to feel flat. An inner emptiness accumulates until you develop a strange blind spot: everything looks fine, but you miss feeling anything, your warning system blunts, and before long chaos creeps back in. At first it feels vivid and real — a little turmoil can feel exciting, like it’s reconnecting you to the world or like coming home — but ultimately it sours. And if new trauma arrives from outside, like an injury or a death, it can dismantle the progress you’ve made and restart the whole cycle. What I finally understood is a paradox: chaos feels powerful. The urgency, motion, and drama masquerade as fuel, but it’s counterfeit — it consumes the same reserves you could have used to build something lasting. When you start swapping that fake energy for genuine order, boredom doesn’t follow; instead comes insight, focus, clarity, and a creativity you didn’t know you had. When life runs smoothly, forward motion accelerates. But climbing from wreckage to that sweet spot of stability is grueling. That’s why so many women remain in chaos — not because they prefer it, but because they’re so drained by it that the shaky, ready-made rush chaos offers seems easier than pursuing the real, harder energy of order. It’s like choosing candy when you need protein: pleasurable briefly, then leaving you empty. You can feel stuck. A helpful first step to begin imagining a healthier future is an exercise I call One Year to Heal: picture that you must overhaul your life and have exactly one year to do it — what would you change? Healing is ongoing, of course, but this practice helps you tap the wisdom you already carry about what you need. I provide instructions for this exercise in a free PDF; the link is in the top line of the description below this video. So how does chaos infiltrate your life? Some women take on everyone else’s burdens — siblings, partners, co-workers — because saying no feels intolerable, and they keep agreeing until their own life collapses. Others stay in relationships that are thrilling but unstable: the roller coaster feels like passion, yet it devours the energy that could have built genuine love and trust — and leaving seems unbearable. Financial chaos can be its own addiction: under-earning, overspending, rescuing others, ignoring bills — it produces a constant crisis mode that feels alive even as it drains your future. Then there’s avoidance: hours lost to scrolling, excessive research, or polishing trivial details to dodge the single task that would actually move you forward. The problem doesn’t disappear — it waits and grows. Sabotage can be even more subtle: you finally get a good chance and procrastinate until it’s gone, or you instigate a fight just as things begin to settle. Anything to return to the familiar. All of these behaviors burn the same resources — your energy, confidence, and attention. The moment you stop feeding them, that energy is liberated for the life you actually want to create. How do you cut off the counterfeit fuel and reclaim that power? Go directly after the behaviors that sustain the chaos. First: end drama with people who live in it. If someone constantly provokes conflict, keeps you guessing, or drags you into their crises, stop engaging. Leave the conversation, stop answering, and if necessary end the relationship. Nothing will change while chaotic people keep dictating your emotional bandwidth. Second: get brutally honest about money. Gather every bill, every balance, every overdue notice. Add it all up. Don’t hide from the total. If you can’t settle everything today, at least confront the number and write a precise plan for next steps — whether that means canceling a subscription, calling a creditor, or cutting off someone financially draining you. Third: bring one area of your life into complete order. Pick a single domain — your kitchen, your desk, your inbox — and keep going until it’s entirely finished. No piles left for later, no “good enough for now” band-aids. Completing one whole area will free energy that naturally spills into the rest of your life. Fourth: face what you’ve been avoiding at work. Make that call, finish that project, admit what’s late, clear the backlog. Even if it takes a weekend, every hour you evade these tasks lets chaos grow; every one you finish is like setting down a weight you didn’t know you were carrying. Fifth: stop hiding behind frantic busyness. Scan your day: what’s the single task you keep postponing while you run in circles with easier jobs? Do the hardest one first. When you break the shield of constant busywork, the rest of your effort starts to matter. These are not minor adjustments — each intervention removes a key piece of the cycle that traps women in chaos and frees the energy they’ve been bleeding away for years. If you want a more intensive intervention to stop the wheel-spinning and open up your mind to what actually matters next, the most powerful toolkit I’ve found is a set of routines I call the daily practice. It’s deceptively simple: done twice a day, it can shift how your life feels. It’s easy to learn; I’ll put a link to it in the second row of the description below if you want to try it now. Enrolling in my daily practice course also includes invitations to weekly free Zoom sessions where we practice together and I answer questions to help you master the techniques. Here’s something counterintuitive for those raised in chaotic households: order is not the enemy of freedom. That idea feels true — order sounds constricting — but real freedom comes from order. Strip away the drama, wasted money, clutter, avoidance, and what remains is not dullness but energy, focus, and time to create and improve things. So many women underestimate their own strength because it’s been consumed by constant crisis management. The moment you stop feeding chaos, that strength rushes back, and life shifts from merely surviving storms to actively building what you want. You don’t escape chaos by wishing it away or waiting for a savior; you escape it by cutting off its fuel: the drama, debt, avoidance, indecision, and clutter. Choose one area and end the cycle — not halfway, not later, but now. When you do, you’ll feel the difference immediately: the pressure eases, the noise subsides, and the energy you’ve been wasting returns to your body and mind, powering steady forward movement every day. That’s the real exit from chaos — not luck, not rescue, but deliberate actions that free you one firm step at a time. If you like this video, there’s another one you’ll enjoy right here, and I hope to see you soon. Decluttering, by the way, is a potent re-regulation technique: you may know you should declutter but feel powerless to do it, and leaving it undone makes other problems in your life a little worse.