For ten years, I organised other people’s knowledge in media libraries, playing my part to perfection: the nice girl, the capable one, the one who never makes waves. Inside, it was the opposite. I was hypersensitive, flooded by other people’s emotions, angry with my mother and convinced that someone, somewhere, would eventually set me free from all of it.

This is the story of how, through the people I met, the practices I took up and an unexpected exit from the civil service, I learned to take care of my own emotional chaos, and ended up making it my work: supporting people who sense, as I once did, that an emotion is steering their life a little too hard, when another way of living is possible.

Subscribe now

For as long as I can remember, I learned to stand up straight within the rules: to say yes to keep people happy, never to put a foot wrong, to be the nice one among my siblings… Later came the rules of society and of a public institution: ten years in the service of media libraries, holding collections, readers and teams together.

I was so good at keeping to those rules that I was soon put in charge of a library in Brittany. On the surface, nothing was wrong.

And yet something in me kept telling me I was here for something else, to help more people. That I wasn’t quite where I belonged.

Even as a child, people came to me. I was the one they confided in, the one they told what they told no one else, the good friend who knew how to listen and who, more often than not, had an answer. I didn’t go looking for that role: it found me.

I was hypersensitive, like my mother before me, and back then that sensitivity took up far too much room for me to keep ignoring it. I felt other people’s emotions with an almost physical sharpness, to the point of soaking them up as if, for a while, they were mine. And my own emotions, when they rose, rose hard. I think I owe some of that intensity to my star sign: a Scorpio never feels anything by halves.

I also picked up on what others preferred not to see: a lie, a mismatch between words and gestures, something unspoken hanging in a room before anyone had named it. For years I was told I was impressionable, naive. Today I believe the opposite: I already had that discernment as a child. I just wasn’t yet allowed to trust it.

Intensity that is felt relentlessly and never really channelled eventually spills over. In my case, it ended up exploding, one way or another, more than once. I saw it in the people close to me (one day I’ll have to write about it in detail), and I saw it in myself.

The Turning Point

The first turning point was anything but graceful. As a teenager I was angry, and I took that anger out on my mother, the one person who only wanted to love me. My parents’ divorce had already led me to see psychologists, and she had been consulted about me then. In the end she drew a firm line: if it carried on, she would send me to a residential home for girls. I was scared: scared of having to fend for myself, scared of losing what I thought I had. And it was under that threat, uncomfortable as it is to admit now, that I opened my first personal-development books.

The real journey began later, at nineteen, when I left the family nest to live on my own and study in Dijon. I put that new independence straight to work for myself: first a naturopath, then an energy healer. I started investing in my own well-being, not out of passing curiosity, but because I finally wanted to understand this relationship with emotion that had lived in me for as long as I could remember, and to which I was still looking for the keys.

That search went on for years, through my studies and then my working life as a civil servant. I went from one practitioner to the next, keeping what worked for me and leaving the rest. Each step brought something, but none of them ever handed me the key itself.

That key came in 2023. I came across a holistic school based on Qi Gong, which also offered guidance built around the work of Dr Hawkins and an emotional release method. I stayed with it for a year, a year and a half. Everything I had done before had its value, but this was exactly where I found what I had been looking for all along: not one more layer of understanding, but an instruction manual. Knowing, in very practical terms, what to do when an emotion comes up. No longer depending on a weekly appointment to feel better. Learning to take responsibility for managing my own emotions, to recognise my self-sabotage patterns, to release an emotion quickly and cleanly, and, if a wave of heavy fatigue hit without warning, to have a concrete technique to turn it around on the spot and feel my energy come straight back.

It fascinated me, then utterly captivated me. Alongside my job as a librarian, I kept practising, and at last I saw emotional charges leave, really leave, that I thought I had already dealt with years before, with one practitioner or another.

Not by talking about them yet again, but by facing the emotion itself: by walking through a few private hells, you could say, and coming out freer and lighter. Some memories that still weighed on me stopped affecting me at all, as if they had been emptied of their weight. I felt this technique changing me at a deep level, bringing me closer to a state of true love, and teaching me to understand human beings (their patterns, their repetitions) far beyond anything I had learned until then.

Without my looking for it, it became a kind of gift: being able to name precisely the emotion moving through a body, and to see straight away, just by watching someone, what is blocked and how to release it. For me, it happens with an almost natural ease.

Then, in July 2025, it called me. I resigned from the civil service, even though I had my dream job and was happy in it. I hadn’t seen it coming when I took the post; it came all at once, from within.

I had to leave; I had to change. I went to Dubai to train for four months before coming back to France.

That is where the concept of Emotional Sovereignty (Souveraineté Émotionnelle) was born.

Taking back mastery of your inner world (your thoughts, emotions, beliefs and assumptions) so you can shed everything that stops you from creating what you truly want, beyond an old identity. It spoke to me because I had lived it: the small deaths of my ego, the parts of myself I’d had to let go of even though they had served me for a long time, because those old versions of me could no longer take me where I wanted to go. The gap between the life I was living and the one I was heading towards had grown too wide for me to carry on as before.

Confirmation came from yet another direction. One day a friend drew up my birth chart. I believe in astrology, and there it was in black and white: I was here to help people move through their emotions, to explain, as simply and rationally as possible, how an emotion works, how you free yourself from it, what methods exist and what to do when resistance stops you from letting go of what needs to go. It said I was here to support others through grief, through separation, through everything that is hard and everything that is traumatic.

I feel able to do it because I have been through some very difficult times myself, times I had no choice but to face. That is precisely what made me want to support others, and above all to give them a safe space where they can finally let go of what they need to let go of, cry the tears they need to cry, and above all free themselves from it for good so they can move on.

What I Know Today

Here is what I know now that I didn’t know then: emotions are the foundation of everything. They are what allow us to connect deeply with one another. Freeing yourself from so-called negative emotions isn’t just about easing a passing bout of unease: it means freeing yourself from your ego and from the story you have been telling yourself for years, so that you can reconnect with something more spiritual within you, your soul, and find unity and harmony with others again.

Because when you feel low, when negative thoughts keep coming back, it is usually linked to wounds of the ego, to what are called engrams: the deep traces left by past experiences.

When I worked in media libraries, I spent ten years organising other people’s knowledge before realising that my own still needed sorting out. For a long time, on my personal-development journey, I lacked leadership: I kept waiting for someone else to set me free, convinced that they had all the answers and that, somehow, they would save me. Working on my emotions took me further still, into my beliefs about myself, into self-love, confidence and self-esteem.

My leadership grew as I took more responsibility for my own life.

There was still one last step to take, though: putting it into practice. I have always been one of those people who love to study, read and dig deeper: classic good-student syndrome. But piling up information wasn’t enough. Something in me resisted going to look, concretely, at what was happening inside my body.

My life didn’t change until I put things into practice. It took blow after blow from life (blows I now call gifts) before I finally woke up fully.

Then one day I made up my mind: I had nothing to lose, so I might as well do the exercises rather than turn the page. That is exactly how I came through.

I’m still training today, and I’ve understood that change comes from practice, not from intellectualising. And emotional work, for its part, has to go through the body. An emotion is energy in motion: it is there to be lived, and we are here to experience the whole range (sadness, anger, guilt, pride, arrogance) without having to defend ourselves against it.

Resistance doesn’t come from the emotion itself, but from the judgement we pass on feeling it. And an emotion that is fully welcomed carries a message: it is precisely by allowing it to exist that, strangely enough, it ends up disappearing.

The problem is that our society doesn’t prepare us for this. It pushes us to do, do, do, rather than connect with our inner selves, and teaches us little or nothing about how to welcome an emotion. That is my role: to re-educate, to pass on emotional intelligence. Because looking after your emotions means being willing to look inside, even when it’s uncomfortable, and in return it makes you more compassionate, better able to understand others, slower to judge and react. If everyone took this path, society itself would become more conscious and freer. But it remains a choice, and it is each person’s to make.

For my part, I knew I wanted to be free on the inside, and therefore on the outside too. The two always go hand in hand.

That is how Emotional Sovereignty was born: not as a brand name, but as an exact description of what I had been missing, and of what I now wanted to make possible for others, from the child who doesn’t yet have the words to the leader who has learned not to need them any more.

Why I’m Telling You This

I’m not telling you this to claim I’ve been through something you never have, or that I now know what you should do. I’m telling you because I know what it costs to let an emotion make your decisions for you, and what it takes to bring it back to its proper role: to inform, not to govern.

If you recognise yourself in this story, in the moment you felt an emotion running your life without asking your permission, and in the quieter moment when you began to take back the reins, then what I’m building here is for you too.

What you feel should no longer decide for you.

Leave a comment

By Marie Guillan, guide in Emotional Sovereignty ( )

This journey doesn’t end with this story. It continues in what Marie is building today: a practice and a method, with the ambition of making this language of emotions accessible to everyone, from children to leaders.

If what you’ve just read resonates with you, catch Marie Guillan’s live sessions on her Substack.

More about Marie Guillan

Subscribe now

Share

The Aligned Shift is an editorial space for those who feel the Shift, and for those they walk with. On Substack, the journey begins with Correspondences: stories, perspectives and conversations that help us share, connect and understand, together, what shapes our lives.

From Inner Storm to Emotional Sovereignty