If I was starting over on a therapy and wellness journey, I would start with a really good private blood test.

This is the story of how I came to believe my very treatable health issues were energy issues and triggers.

I work in somatic coaching, so I have spent a lot of years around the other ways in to “doing the work” as people often say.

In most cases, you start with the story of your childhood and then you move on to labeling and sorting your parents, kids, friends and spouse. You build a web of stories with causes and effects. When you get upset you look for a reason. When life doesn’t go your way, you see it as a problem to solve.

I think most people stop here. They spend their life deciding who is healthy and who is toxic in any given scenario. Then move forward creating rules they call boundaries and condemnations they call standing up for themselves to keep out the people they deem to be bad.

But maybe, like I did, you go deeper.

Asking questions like why your energy drops out of your body after a fight, why your stomach tenses up when someone is talking to you in a certain way, why you cannot come back once you are already going.

You learn a new language. Trauma response, stored pain, energy blocks, trigger.

You pick up new ways of thinking too. Like, this is what the body physiologically looks like after a trigger, and you just need to relax, and you need to do work on yourself.

It’s not all wrong. The work of repairing the relationship your body has with pain, stress and memory is valuable work but it can create other problems too.

The last year of my life was a total reset.

I had a personal crisis, a bunch of weird relational moments, another business that took off faster than I was ready for and then I got married, and then I had some time to reflect on what happened. Not just what happened in the last year, but what happened in the last ten years. Maybe even in the last 20.

Did I get, as I would say, a little blue pilled or a little man-hating in ways that actually drew in men who couldn’t really show up for me. Yes.

I think man-hating therapy culture actually attracts men who will play some kind of a weird game, a pretending game, follow rules, agree to behave and be sorted.

I have been looking back across who made those rules. What parts of what I picked up in the past few decades have been me? What parts of my early life I want to return to?

The wellness industry is very good at teaching you to pick people apart, and then to pick yourself apart, and then to treat the picking as the path forward toward buying ways to solve those problems.

I had to work my way out of that in order to re-create my relationships.

The man-hating phase and the labeling language that I have had to let go of would not be the thing I would change first.

If I was starting over on a wellness journey, or a path-to-me journey, or whatever we call it, I would start with a blood test.

Something really interesting happened to me over the past few years. I realized I was severely anemic. Anemic to the bone. My iron was never tested through three births. You have to be anemic for some time in the U.S. for your iron to be tested because it has to start to impact other more standard tests.

My ferritin levels were so low for so long that it finally showed up in other ways. I requested an iron panel. You have to remember, otherwise I am super healthy. So I wouldn’t have seen it. I drink tons of water and I don’t eat any sugar, my BMI is stellar.

So I didn’t know that I was anemic. I wasn’t researching what was causing it either.

When I did my first iron infusion to treat anemia, a lot of the things that I was told in traditional therapy were trauma responses magically went away.

The way I thought I was getting triggered: I would get upset, and then I’d have this emotional drop, where I couldn’t come back from it. It was like I was riding down a hill. Once I was on it I was on it. There was no climbing back while I was still going down. I just had to wait until I got to the bottom, and then do more work on why I was the kind of person who went down hills.

What if I knew a large part of it was due to anemia, not because of my trauma, not because I am some label but because of a really treatable issue?

This isn’t really about anemia or my health journey it’s about perception and story. It’s about how easy it is to start re-organizing your entire life in a way that won’t solve anything.

How much of my perception of my reality was changed through therapy stories? How much of yours is being changed?

What if I had just started my wellness journey with a full blood test. A really good one that checks 200 markers. You just buy it yourself, you spend a couple hundred bucks each time, and you create a baseline. Then of course now we have AI, and so with the data I knew to go in asking certain questions.

How dangerous is it to think that you’re just triggered? Or you have a label like autism or ADHD or depression. Or that your partner does. When there is another problem going on.

I have spent a lot of time evaluating everything, and two things have happened for me lately.

I have brought back more of my religious beliefs. Not spiritual but actual ancient texts. My husband and I study the intersection of Christianity, Buddhism and more modern frameworks. What these texts give me are a feeling of not being responsible for everything, but being responsible for how I interplay with the circumstances offered to me by a force outside of my control.

A faith that things are the way they are, and there are lots of things I can’t change, but I’m only responsible for how I interplay with them.

When trials show up I find myself leaning towards older ideas again. Like love needs to be tested. Faith needs to be tested. Not seeing everything as my fault, but also not being the victim of it.

I am in a period of that.

Second, I am going to spend my next year answering my questions.

Who made the rules, what was me, what was sold to me in a very expensive vocabulary? What did I toss out as toxic that I need to go find again?

I am going to pull back the veil a little bit. You can expect lots more new things here, and of course on Medium.

This is where I’m at.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I have a women’s class on somatic faith starting soon email me for details:
christina @christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

I keep seeing the same story. Someone does the work as we like to say. Therapy, a retreat, a teacher, reconnection with their religion, a book they finally read the right way at the right time. Something in them cracks open and for a while the crack is the whole world. There’s a mistake made here - they move in.

You know them. Everything is now above them or beneath them. Their parent’s are toxic. Food is evil. The friend who used to complain about her commute as her main conversation topic is now explaining how she’s “unavailable for low vibrations.” The man who found a men’s group is suddenly too evolved for his own family’s Thanksgiving table. It’s more often than not new age or therapy that this happens in but it can even be culty workouts - the yoga or cross-fit families.

Spaciousness doesn’t mean automatic freedom. It’s more like the possibility of freedom. But so often people simply create a new ceiling and a new floor, and they built a room between the two, and they start living there full time.

This is a lonely address.

From that room, the people who haven’t cracked open look small and slow and a little embarrassing, the way your hometown looks small when you are in your 20’s and comparing it to a TV show.

And because the room is so lonely, it is porous.

The same opening that lets in God or consciousness or internal awareness… also lets in the man selling a twelve week program to fix your nervous system for four thousand dollars, and the teacher who starts hinting that your resistance is proof you need more of her. The partner that threatens to leave you and simultaneously tells you how special you are to the point of total confusion. The therapist that turns you on everyone by helping you label them to the point your own issues become invisible to you.

Grifters don’t kick down doors.

They walk through the ones you left open. Grifters in their own minds, are just in the right place at the right time. They believe on some level they are selling you what you need, which is why the incursion is so easy to miss.

Every tradition that has lasted more than a generation has a story about this exact hallway.

The people wandering after Egypt got impatient waiting on the mountain and melted their jewelry into a calf, because forty days of not knowing felt worse than the certainty of something to worship, even a false one.

The man in the desert was offered kingdoms in the space between his vision and his ministry.

The Buddhists have a name for the false peace that shows up right when you start meditating seriously, a state so pleasant you mistake it for arrival and stop walking.

The Sufis warn about the nafs dressing up as the soul once you get close enough to something real, so that your own ego starts speaking in the voice of your teacher.

Nobody who actually walked this road forgot to mention the hallway.

Awakening is real. I believe there are many paths to conscious living - none of them cause you to look down on anyone else. None of them push you into casual sex or a fake sense of power either. Those are just traps of the hallway.

The hallway was never the house. It was a small, natural landing between two flights of stairs. A grief. A short winter.

You were supposed to be there for a few weeks. Long enough to lose your grip on the old floor and find your footing on the next one. Not long enough to hang curtains.

The falling away is only unbearable if nothing is coming to replace it fast enough.

When the thing you actually asked for is moving toward you at the speed it’s supposed to move, you don’t have time to stand still and get grifted, you’re too busy meeting the new one. That’s how the current under things moves when it isn’t being fought. Quick, almost rude in its speed. It can be disorienting. You are vulnerable.

The disorientation people describe, the stuckness, the slow rot of a false sense of superiority… none of that is transformation.

It’s a detour, mistaken for the destination.

And this internet wellness and therapy culture is built to keep you on the landing. It needs you disoriented and reaching and annoyed and burnt-out, because a person who is reaching will buy almost anything you hand them. Sex sold back to you as liberation, money sold back to you as safety, status sold back to you as belonging, youth sold back to you in a $200 jar.

Even the word freedom gets repackaged and sold to you as one more thing to acquire, one more program, one more identity to graduate into, when the whole appeal of freedom was supposed to be that it can’t be bought. You end up enslaved to the idea of being unenslaved.

It’s the oldest trick there is. It’s in every ancient text we know of.

The people I know who got through the landing fastest weren’t the ones who intellectualized it or reveled in it.

They were the ones who kept walking even while they were disoriented, who treated the crack in the floor as a place to step over, not move into.

They didn’t announce their evolution.

They just kept living, sometimes badly and unevenly, until the next floor showed up under their feet.

Nobody throws a party for the version of you that didn’t stall out on the stairs.

But that’s the one who made it home.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

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We talk about identity so much that the word has stopped meaning anything.

Who are you? How do you find out? What is authentic?

To make it harder, if you were a kid who just didn’t fit… the one who sat at the edge of the joke you didn’t comprehend… you can spend the rest of your life doing a kind of math.

Figuring out the midpoint between what other people want and whatever you actually are. Your identity is sort of a weird compromise. So you aren’t ever exactly what other people want and you aren’t anything natural to you either.

That might be the greatest trap of all.

Not any single bad decision, just the long arithmetic of trying to figure it out.

The most useful thing I know about building an identity is that it has to leave room for other people.

Most identity culture does the opposite. It sells you a new avatar and calls it a self.

Here is what I mean.

People get mildly successful doing things they don’t resonate with. A dating tactic, a relational construct, something that wasn’t their idea of a life when they first tried it, but it kind of worked.

They met someone through it. They made some money. That felt like success. It was success, in the narrow sense.

But success in a container you can’t hold long term creates a kind of split.

You did well with a method. The method got you somewhere.

And underneath that is a separate question: does it bring you the kind of life you actually want, or does it just narrow you, niche you down, and leave you inside a hustle you now have to keep feeding. Things you don’t want to do feel like a hustle.

Eventually you tear the whole thing down and start over, instead of carrying something forward. Your life feels like a series of stall outs.

I think the most authentic version of a person is also the most relatable one.

Not despite being specific. Because of it. People can disagree with you and still recognize you. You don’t read as hard of a threat when you really are “located” in what you look like externally and internally.

That’s kind of who she is, they think. That’s been true of her a long time.

Authenticity doesn’t provoke the way a borrowed opinion does.

In my own life, the more I moved toward a set of values that actually felt like mine (so hard to do in the red-flag age), built from every version of myself I’d already been, the less friction I got back. People didn’t need to agree. My partner didn’t even need to always agree.

They just stopped being confused.

Giving up the thing that kind of works is hard, because it works. Because you don’t have a back up. Because it forces a liminal space. People tend to avoid those in-between spaces.

Following what’s right for other people gives you less resistance than the truth does, at first. Prescribed methods work, if they don’t you can blame the person that gave them to you. Our lives are full of therapy frameworks and business models that keep us out of that dark hallway to ourselves.

For years I used Meta for my coaching business and felt awful about it the entire time. I’d quit for six months, come back, try to make reels in a way that didn’t feel like a performance. I hired an assistant to do it for me.

It never worked.

I got a reel to a million views a few times and still didn’t want to be the person who made it. There was a simpler tell underneath all of it: I wouldn’t buy something like what I sell from someone popular on Instagram. So why did I think anyone would buy from me that way? Why had I convinced myself that I had to become famous on a platform that I believe is fundamentally dangerous and addictive?

Recently I took it all down.

The Facebook page, the Instagram account with the followers I’d built up over years. Deleted a body of work. What’s left is Medium, this Substack, and a YouTube account that gets fed video interviews from time to time.

I felt so relieved when I did it. I felt empowered to make a lot of other changes in both businesses at the same time. I wondered what had held me back so long? Why had I put so much energy into methods that were draining and probably bringing in the wrong type of clients?

I think because I know not being on Meta means fewer people will see any of this. That was the trade. In dating that meant shifting from being appealing to almost all men, to being just right for only one.

I know this shift so well by now.

Somewhere there’s still a version of me, awkward, fifteen years old, at the edge of the joke I don’t understand, doing the math on what everyone else wants. She’s not going anywhere.

I just stopped asking her for the answers.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

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I don’t know what my religion is.

I know I believe in God.

That part has never moved. But the label wanders.

My partner is a Zen Buddhist priest. We practice Ashtanga yoga together.

I was baptized Christian. I have a 20 year old AA in practical ministry from a Christian college. For real.

When I’m in a desperate position, on my knees in the real sense, the Christian words come back first. They were the door I walked through. Judaism is a close second. A lot of my clients are Jewish. Some of my clients are fundamentalist Christians. Others are atheists, agnostics, Hindus...

I have come to believe it does not much matter which door you walk through. Only that you walk through one that feels right to you.

That took me years to settle with. For a long time I thought supporting someone through a faith I didn’t share was a kind of lie. Maybe I was told that it was.

It isn’t.

I can hold someone’s belief system for them with both hands and not need it to be mine. If a client or a close friend can’t accept that, if they need me to share their exact lens or it’s a dealbreaker, that’s a hard spot for them to be in. I think it’s a very lonely spot. I think it’s a spot they won’t find much expansion inside of long term.

It is not hard for me. I can stand inside someone’s faith and help them use it. That’s really the key right - living your values.

Here is what I think God is.

God is the belief that you have support.

That there is something outside of you that wants good things for you.

And under that, the more important part: A belief in some from of God creates a knowing that you are not God. You do not have absolute control.

Isn’t that a relief?

Prayer in that scenario is an exhale.

A moment where you sit with a reality where you did the best you could with what you could see, and the rest is not yours to carry.

That is not a spiritual bypass.

It is the whole basis for being trustworthy. It is the basis for being ethical. A person who thinks they are running the entire machine is so dangerous.

A person who knows they aren’t can take their own responsibility and loosen their grip on the rest.

Voltaire spent his life taking a hammer to the Church, to organized religion, to superstition. He still wrote that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. At the end, refusing to sign a profession of Catholic faith, he wrote his own line instead.

“I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.”

A great skeptic kept God.

People with no framework where they can believe in something beyond themselves don’t get off easy. They take too much. It all lands on them. Every failure becomes a verdict on their character.

There is no God to hand the rest to, so they hold all of it, and it flattens them.

Finding hope and purpose beyond yourself sounds like this:

I did the best I could with what I could see at the time. I said the thing that needed saying even when it was crunchy and embarrassing to say it. I made the business move that made sense from where I was standing. Some of what came after was just God. Some of it was never mine.

It’s easy to believe in God when the news is good.

Getting pregnant with a child you deeply desired. The thing you wanted showing up at the door. It is harder when you went after something that looked like it was on your menu, you reached for it in good faith, and it simply was not for you. No lesson attached. No redemption arc. Just: not yours. When you can get there and mean it, you are free. You stop fighting the current of your own life.

This is all why I want a bigger frame and I want you to consider finding your own. I don’t mean guides and angels floating around you like ambient staff. That is not it. I mean an omniscient thing with intention. A purpose. A universal consciousness that is going somewhere. Tradition or not - it doesn’t matter.

The guides-and-vibes version has no power in it and nowhere to go. What holds a person up is the sense that there is a larger will, and that you live inside it instead of running it.

A religion, on top of that, hands you a framework, which is its own gift - assuming it’s one that you feel like you can move inside of. Structure. Language. Practices worn smooth by thousands of years of other people needing them. You don’t have to build the cathedral yourself in the dark.

Either route works though.

We have the whole record of human history on this. Every culture built a ladder to God. That is not proof of any single doctrine. It is a lot of evidence that the belief itself, in support, in meaning, in a will larger than your own, is standard equipment for being a person.

Consider believing in God. Consider picking a religion. Not because I can prove which one is true. Because you were not built to carry all of it alone.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

The popular answer to burnout is always some form of self focus.

Protect your energy. Fill your cup. Journal. Go to a retreat.

Leave.

The prescription always includes more of something.

More spa days. More time alone. More hobbies. More friends. More.

The prescription often includes new things.

New people. New products. New actions. New systems. New city.

It sometimes includes bringing back old things.

Old routines. Old connections. Old habits. Old places.
Memories re-written and used like blankets.

As if the cup were the problem and not what we keep pouring into it.

Some of the most powerful times in my life happened when I put a limit on changing anything.

Not austerity as punishment.

Just a wall between me and the plethora of things I do when I don’t want to feel discomfort.

Which is purchase. Scroll. Add to cart. Book something. Phone a friend. Start a hobby. Plan. Execute. Re-invent. Hide. Find a rabbit hole.

Do something that cuts out everyone but yourself or creates a mental exit from your current reality.

The transaction as a way to feel like I did something without doing the one thing that actually matters, which is being in my life as it is today.

Feeling. Embodying. Being. Staying in the room.

Which is inherently uncomfortable and bumpy.

I have made my daily embodiment practices so small, so minute, so un-detailed that they barely qualify as practices.

No elaborate morning routine.

No journaling myself into story.

No 45-minute meditation that I could use as evidence I was doing the work that day.

Just the smallest possible contact with myself, a hundred times a day.

Just noticing. Just the breath that was already happening. Just laying in bed an extra minute until that feeling of drowning passes.

Just being with the feeling I was already having before I reached for the phone or the kayak.

The freedom I found there had nothing to do with selfishness, which has caused me to question almost everything that is spewed out of the self-improvement industry.

It was finding something to trust that isn’t my own obnoxious, self-focused thoughts that saved me.

To me, embodiment, is letting the world be something I’m inside of instead of something I’m managing in my head.

There is a stream.

I keep coming back to this word because nothing else fits. A stream of life where you just aren’t in resistance to things. Where you aren’t bracing. Where the discipline, if you want to call it that, is only the discipline of not adding. Not adding a story. Not adding a fix. Not adding a purchase. Not adding something you need. Not adding a spiritual explanation for why the thing happened.

Saying, “I am really disappointed and sad about it.” Then nothing.

That kind of sentence, said honestly to yourself while you stay in your life, changes something in the body. It stops the resistance.

All resistance is self-created. Feelings come from inside of us, they don’t happen to us.

Resistance is unnecessary. Which is a wild thing to say in a culture full of verbose boundary setting and constant relational negotiation. We actually think something is wrong if there isn’t pushing or pulling to get what we “need”.

What if we don’t “need” anything?

So much of modern self-help ends up becoming a contribution to difficulty. All of our talking and venting and doing is just the thing we layer on top of the thing that is already hard enough.

There is such an ease when you surrender to reality.

When you stop fighting what is for you and what isn’t. When you watch things die and be born without trying to intervene. When you stop defending yourself and start figuring out what it means to be yourself.

None of this requires anything from you.

The stream does not require you to be better. It doesn’t require a new habit. It doesn’t thrive on tons of pricey self care. It doesn’t require more money or more me time or more willpower.

It requires you to stop adding.

You can’t sell this to people. Although I wish I could because it’s all we really need to hear.

It’s the only message that is necessary.

But you cannot convince someone to move forward, no matter how much you care about them. It just doesn’t work like that. If you try to sell your partner or your co-workers or in my case your clients on this kind of orientation the selling itself will create resistance.

The only way we can get them to take it is to go fully into it ourselves and be a living invitation.

They can choose to come or not come.

That is their right and their timing. We do not get to decide when someone else is ready to stop creating resistance.

We barely get to decide it for ourselves.

So the practice got smaller.

The practice became my own life, lived without yelling. Lived without adding. And some people moved closer. And some didn’t.

I cannot convince you of the stream.

I can only be in it. And you can tell. People can always tell. The body knows when it is near someone who isn’t in resistance. It relaxes. It says oh, maybe I don’t have to fight today either.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

There is a breaking that has to happen in order for sex to mean almost nothing. An emotional muzzle needs to be applied in order to stomach your partner looking at thousands of other bodies online. The death is so invisible, because it is so normalized. The one that makes it okay to get excited about someone and just let it drift off. To be bombarded with social images of your new lover with their past lovers. To take in a long, accusatory text and just keep working. To accept the unrelenting feedback and direct confrontation, even in friendships, that is part of modern therapized relating.

All of it drizzled with confusing news stories, mostly untrue, pepper spraying us with fear hourly.

People don’t talk about this.

They perform and normalize the breaking instead — follow the advice of influencers online who seem to have figured out how to walk away from pretty much anything feeling clean.

We hear slang like I don’t catch feelings and I know what this is and they were toxic and I didn’t need that job anyways then lie awake wondering why we are anxious spiraling over some small thing at work.

I have worked with women and men who have done it — who have genuinely shut their emotions down.

In some ways that works for them.

They’re disciplined. Productive. They date logically, check boxes and decide how to feel. They’re very good at this. Life is easier for them than it is for me. My feelings can still bury me at times.

And when I sit with them, something just isn’t there anymore.

They don’t know how they feel about the person sitting across from them at dinner. They have to think about it. They have to decide how they want to feel when they tell a story. The answer to what they want is accessed through the mind, not the body.

Sometimes on my hardest days, the ones my partner says something that I can’t shake. The ones where my mom-guilt becomes such a burden. I also wish I could free myself from caring.

But trust me, you might think you want to be like them. You don’t.

When a woman comes to me embarrassed because she got attached to someone who wasn’t offering her much. I do not see a woman who doesn’t value herself.

I see a woman who is still whole.

A woman who didn’t trade away the part of herself that makes a relationship possible in order to make indifference easier. Who had sex with someone and let it mean something, even when she knew it probably shouldn’t. Who wanted him to want more, even when she could see clearly that he couldn’t give it.

That wanting is not pathetic. It is not a wound. It is not the thing you need to fix before you can date as the healed version of yourself.

This tenderness is all your power.

Everything that makes you magnetic — the way you make people feel seen, the way you remember and curate — lives in the same place. You cannot surgically remove the part that gets hurt and leave the rest intact.

It is one thing. You cut the nerve and you cut the feeling, all of it, in every direction.

The content will not help you with this. The reels, the podcasts, the videos of women explaining how they stopped giving so much and the ones priming men to get value from body counts — pay attention to who’s making them. Mostly single. Mostly influencing from the absence of any relationships. They have figured out how to want nothing, and they are very good at teaching you to want nothing, and if you follow their advice long enough you will get their life.

When you are unhappy in any area of life you want to be told that your problem can be fixed in the mind. You want to be told how to numb so you can stop suffering. You want to be given specific instructions on how to never feel hurt again.

But relationships are rather hurtful at times.

The most popular relational advice assumes you do not feel. It is primed to people who live in their head. If you haven’t silenced yourself in this very specific way, it will make you feel like the problem. Like you are too open, too permeable. Like you need to harden. Like caring is blind spot.

It isn’t. It is just rare now.

Wanting someone who can’t quite meet you, feeling something you don’t want to feel, ashamed that something small moved you — only means this:

You didn’t break yourself. You stayed open. The world is organized to reward closure. Closure gets you through the day. Closure gets you into the next bed. Closure lets you move on quickly when your marriage is still dead and swipe right again when you are single and not lie awake.

But closure is also what you’re left with.

A very quiet absence of something huge that used to be there.

The practice is not learning to want less. The practice is learning to hold what you feel without following it around.

You can notice attachment forming and not act on it. You can feel the pull toward someone who cannot meet you and stay exactly where you are. You can hear an unconscious story where you are dropped into someone’s past relationship or past sexual encounters and just be in ache of it. You can be incredible dissappointed and just sit in it.

You can let it move through you — the wanting, the tenderness, the small grief of not knowing what will come next — and come out the other side still yourself.

That is different from shutting it down.

That is different from performing detachment until you actually believe it. Feeling your feelings and letting them complete, which takes ninety seconds if you don’t resist them and a lifetime of leaking them out sideways if you do.

The goal is not to stop feeling. The goal is to feel without it controlling you.

You are not of this time. Wear that with pride. Also know most people aren’t, they are just pretending. It will catch up with them sooner or later.

Your sensitivity is not a malfunction.

It is the thing that will make you an extraordinary partner, parent and friend. It is the thing that makes you present with your children in a way that will matter to them for the rest of their lives. It is the thing that makes sex worth having instead of just a transaction you complete and move on from.

Carry it. Protect it. Be with the pain of it. Be with the joy of it. Stop letting it get fed by people who cannot meet it just because it is hungry.

But do not kill it.

You will want it later.

And the people who gave it away are already starting to feel the cost.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

Not caring feels so much like rest.

After years of caring about everything at once, the body wants to put something down, and the more tired you are the harder it is to choose that thing well. So you put it all down.

Which I believe is how a lot of marriages end.

There is a popular video aimed at middle aged women. A video so popular that it is now a book. The We Do Not Care Club went, as they say, viral. You have probably seen it, or one of the forty versions of it. A woman lists the things she no longer cares about. Pretty much everything. Wearing a bra. Eating certain kinds of foods. What anyone thinks of her. Some funny. Some darker.

The comments on these posts are full of women agreeing. Saying me too, me neither, welcome, finally. It has the warmth of a best friend’s confession and the structure of a recruitment drive.

I understand why it resonates.

There was a time it would have resonated with me too.

And I wonder. Are we all really so exhausted by daily life? Is it that hard to eat more protein and less chips? Are the school’s weekly emails and our partner’s lack of care when handling laundry as heavy as they feel? Are the things the club has quit all that hard?

I don’t think so.

I think we are tired from carrying anger.

Modern women are commanded to be angry. If you aren’t angry about something you have very little to talk about in most women’s friend circles.

Anger has become part of being female.

Anger is not a useless emotion. It is information. When it comes from within you, it tells you a line has been crossed.

But a lot of our collective anger does not come from within.

It comes from online.

This really bothers me. I often challenge female clients to get off of all social media, the news, and take a break from negative friends, even for just a week. Close down all external influences and do some embodiment practices to turn up their inner world.

Guess what?

Often the things they believed were making them angry didn’t bother them much at all. The silent, small things eating up their energy can finally be addressed. I could write for years about how I think a successful modern life is largely about creating a buffer between yourself and everything else.

Especially this messaging to be angry as a form of personal power.

The other aspect is that anger, like all emotions, is meant to move.

You feel it, you let it tell you what it came to tell you, and then it becomes something else. A sentence. A decision. An idea. A desire!

What I see instead is anger held. Socially encouraged to be held. Anger kept in the body so long it goes rotten and cold.

And cold anger does not look like rage. It is confused. It looks like indifference. It looks like a club.

Here is the part that really bothers me about movements like this one.

Every item on the I Do Not Care list is something another woman somewhere is still caring about.

The woman that cares is the joke.

The woman who still makes the food. The woman who still notices. The woman that still nuzzles into her husband’s chest and does her hair before carpool. The obnoxious mom with the color coded calendar.

She sucks. We collectively hate her.

The list makes caring itself look naive, look stupid, look like something you have not yet been beaten out of.

I care about a lot of things now that no one taught me to care about.

I was not raised to think about what energy moves through a house, or what it costs a body to be spoken to a certain way, or what goes into the food before the food goes into a child. I had to learn all of it late and on purpose.

This morning, before my first call, I made bone broth. Not because I am virtuous. Because I have decided that how things feel in my home is mine to tend, and tending is the work, and the work is the point.

Ritualized living matters to me. It has paid off too. I am healthier and happier at 44 than at any other time in my life.

That is what caring actually is. It is not a mood. It is labor.

Caring is the decision to stay responsible for the texture of your own life.

What unsettles me is how quickly this became aspirational. It was not like this when my children were small. The women around me then had hobbies and opinions and things they were building. We chatted about books, careers and recipes.

It was not embarrassing to care. They were not performing how little was left in them. Somewhere that flipped. Now the flex is depletion. Now the woman with nothing left wins.

And the women I watch say this are not, by any visible measure, women in crisis.

They are angry all the time. I have started asking myself, angry at what? And what is their anger doing other than boiling them alive? Is it creating action?

Often the answer is the news. A grief delivered to them hourly by a screen, about events they cannot touch, kept fresh on purpose because their attention is the product.

There is an idea I keep close, that some structures survive only by feeding on the energy of the people caught inside them.

They do not want you happy and they do not want you destroyed. They want you reactive. Angry is reactive.

Not caring is also reactive. (Read that ten times.)

Both keep the body tight, both keep producing the one thing the structure eats. Liberation is supposed to feel like more of your life in your hands. Hands that can create new forms of connection. Permanent low anger does not feel like that. It feels like a body that has forgotten it is allowed to set the screen down.

Some of this gets folded into perimenopause now, which is its own complicated thing.

The body does change. The rage some women describe is real and hormonal and deserves care. But I notice how fast a real bodily transition became a market, and how the marketing rarely sells you back your capacity. It sells you permission to expect less of yourself.

I am not arguing for the old arrangement of being female. No matter how much the red pill bros want it back - it’s not coming. That version earned the burnout.

I am arguing for re-invention that comes from joy and creativity.

Women can not redefine themselves by caring about nothing while angry ranting about what they don’t have. That’s not the answer.

It is caring about fewer things, on purpose, and out loud. So other women can experience what a life being created with no script feels like.

I still care.

I care what goes in the food and what moves through the house and how my voice lands on the people who live with me. I care about my body as a place I have to live for a long time, not a thing I have given up on. I care about my purpose in the world. I care about how people receive me. Caring is not naive. It is not something done to you.

It is the most reliable evidence that you are still the one steering.

The I Do Not Care Club and everything like it has the better marketing. It always will.

Surrender is easy to sell.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

This week on Medium I wrote about a night I did not drown my partner in my disappointment. A call I had wanted did not happen the way I had pictured it. I felt the size of the feeling. I did not make him feel it with me.

What I did not say in the essay, because the essay was about men and the bigger picture I write about on that platform, was where I put the feeling instead.

I put it in my body. I held it there. I let it be exactly as big as it was, and I asked it what it was actually about. I didn’t always know how to do that.

This is the move I want to talk to you about. Once a month on Substack I offer my paid subscribers a practice similar to the ones available in my $27 memberships. It’s a somatic meditation that can create fast change in your life! Scroll down if you are subscriber for the recording.

We live in a culture that treats disappointment like an ending.

A thing to solve, or to numb, or to text our way out of, or to spin into a story about what someone else did wrong. We have religious frames for avoiding it. Energetic frames for avoiding it. Cultural frames for avoiding it.

Some of us pick fights with our partners specifically so we do not have to feel disappointed in them.

It feels safer to be in an active conflict than to be disappointed.

It is not safer. It is just more engaging.

The reason disappointment is hard is that it is information about what you wanted but didn’t get.

It is information about your desire. Most of us were taught somewhere along the way that wanting something is dangerous, embarrassing, selfish, or naive. So when the wanting shows up in the body as disappointment, we route around it.

But underneath every disappointment is a desire that did not get met.

Just like underneath every flash of jealousy is a desire to be adored, to be enough, to be chosen without comparison.

Underneath every wave of anger is a desire for things to be restored.

Even revenge, if you go far enough underneath it, is usually a desire for things to be put into balance or as my shamanic teacher’s call it “right relationship".

There is no human feeling, if you sit with it long enough, that is not information about something you want.

So the practice is this:

The next time you feel really disappointed, before you text the person who caused it, before you pull away, before you write a brilliant therapy story about what they did, before you call someone to ratify your version, see if you can do something different.

Find it in the body. Breathe into where it lives. Move what wants to move. Make a sound if a sound wants to come out. It might sound weird but just let the body know you are not going to abandon the feeling this time. Let your brain know that you are not under attack.

Then ask the disappointment what desire it is information about.

Desire is not a list. It is a feeling in the body. It does not arrive with an agenda. It just arrives. Some of my favorite teacher’s would say desire is assigned to you. You aren’t really the author of it, you are just the receiver. I deeply resonate with that idea.

Sit with the answer.

The most powerful way to communicate disappointment is to communicate desire.

When you communicate disappointment, the person on the other side hears blame. When you communicate desire, with your body, your words, your energy, the world around you reorganizes.

I am not promising you will get the thing you wanted. Sometimes embodied disappointment does initiate an ending. I am promising you will know what you wanted, and that the knowing changes you, which changes everything around you.

This is the practice underneath the essay. It is the practice I keep coming back to when I cannot find another way through. Find the link below.

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I used to think my relationships would get better when other people got better at understanding me. When they finally saw what I saw.

When they admitted what I already knew was true.

I thought clarity was the fix. To be fair, I was told that. I was taught that if I could just make someone understand my perspective, the whole thing would settle.

It didn’t settle. It never settled. Because what I was actually doing was challenging other people’s reality. Not my reality. Theirs. I was arguing with how they saw things. How they interpreted what happened. What they believed about themselves and about me and about life I guess.

And the more I argued it the more entrenched everything became. Through trying to be seen, I doubled down on what I didn’t want.

I was probably an extreme case of this.

It was very easy to move me into a position of proving I wasn’t wrong in a romantic connection and sometimes even at work. I could be pulled into that stance faster than almost anything else. And once I was there I couldn’t leave. I would stay in that posture for days. Weeks.

I would build a case in my head like I was preparing for cross examination and I would not rest until I delivered it. The delivery never helped.

What it did was guarantee that every intimate relationship I had functioned primarily as a warning system.

People warning me. Me warning them. Everyone watching each other for signs of danger and calling it connection. If you look online at modern therapy-like connection you will see that I didn’t invent this. I was told this way of relating would keep me safe.

Which is such an odd part of modern culture when you step back far enough to see it.

We warn each other constantly.

We call it love. We call it looking out for you. We call it just being real (I hate that term). But what it actually is, if you are honest about it, is a refusal to believe in the other person’s ability to navigate their own life.

And it goes both directions.

It is normalized to not believe in people, to evaluate and label them until there is no human left.

It is ordinary to prescribe some way of living that is “healthy” and label some other way, not your way, a “red flag.” We have an entire vocabulary for what is acceptable attachment and what is disordered attachment and we freely apply it to every person we meet like a screening tool.

Which completely obliterates your own ability to do then only thing that matters - feel and listen to yourself.

This shows up on both sides of the political landscape.

The conservative version tells you what a good person looks like. The progressive version tells you what a healed person looks like. They run on the same operating system.

Someone else knows better than you do about your own life. Someone else has the rule book and you need to fit inside it or you are broken or you are unsafe or you are bad or you are possibly worst of all… not doing the work.

And we all know this isn’t true.

We know our grandparents got married during war after one date. We know arranged marriages have a high likelihood of success. We know people who never married and are genuinely happy. We know couples that broke every rule in the book and built something real and lasting. We know others that sat on a yoga mat, meditated and let a therapist arbitrate every conflict and lost it all.

We know that the only thing that works inside each connection is a new set of rules. Every single time.

There has never been a formula.

Believing there is a formula is the thing that keeps you from finding out what actually works between you and another person.

So I stopped arguing other people’s reality. I stopped correcting. I stopped warning. I stopped building a case. That was the first thing.

The second thing I did was incorporate my trauma instead of labeling it. You have to do this.

I threw out attachment labels. I threw out words like codependent. I stopped diagnosing how I attach to people and started just watching it. Just letting it happen. Letting the pattern exist without immediately categorizing it as something clinical that needed to be fixed before I was allowed to be in a relationship. As something sinful that I needed to repent for.

I just let myself be.

What happened next was not what any book told me would happen. What happened was I found people willing to play with me in my actual personality. Not the cleaned up version. Not the faux consistent one either. Not the one who had done enough therapy to present as securely attached - whatever that means. The real one. The one who feels things at full volume and sometimes can’t turn it down and sometimes doesn’t want to.

You cannot integrate and mature all parts of yourself if they are not allowed to be seen.

That is the whole trick. That is the gatekept thing keeping everyone stuck and out of relationships that work. They tell you to heal in private and show up whole. But you cannot heal what you are hiding. You cannot integrate what is locked in a room getting sicker by the minute. The parts that need the most attention are the ones that need a witness. A person. Someone sitting across from you who does not flinch.

Finally, you cannot erase yourself. You might want to. I wanted to. I wanted to mentally override how I felt and install some better, green flag operating system. Something easier and more compliant. Something that didn’t need so much or feel so raw about things that other people seemed to move through without breaking stride.

But how you feel will still run the show, even if you pretend it doesn’t. Especially if you pretend it doesn’t.

Your emotions and energy will run life from underneath if you won’t let them run it from the front. This will show up as resentment or withdrawal or perfectionism or control or child-like resistance.

It will find a way to the surface. It always finds a way.

I bet you know this. I bet you have experience this. I bet you are realizing that everyone, including you, is just integrating human beingness.

Being with your emotions, especially the ones that are raw and untamed, is the only way to stop swinging back and forth your whole life. From failure to huge unsustainable highs. From collapse to performance. From falling apart to holding it all together so tightly that no one can breathe.

That pendulum does not stop until you sit with what is actually there.

Not what you think should be there.

Not what you wish was there.

What is actually there.

The ugly stuff.

The stuff you are embarrassed by.

The needs you think make you weak.

The reactions you think make you too much.

You have to find the ugliest parts of yourself and love the fuck out of them.

Especially when other people don’t. Not theoretically. Not as a caption. Not as a thing you say in therapy and then go home and white knuckle through the evening. Actually love them. Let them breathe. Let them take up space. Let them mature. Let them be visible to the people you are building something with.

That is when it changes. That is when all of it changes.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

We are entitled.

I keep coming back to this. The way we move through our lives expecting them to feel good. Expecting resolution. Expecting that if something is hard, if we are dropping the ball on our responsibilities, the reason must be outside of us. The kids. The work. The partner. The weather. The government. Scary AI. Something.

Anything but the simple fact that we are the ones living this life and we are not, at the moment, willing to sit with what it asks.

The machine feeds us this.

It tells us that any friction is a sign something is wrong. That if we just optimize, identify the right outer obstacle, swap the right input, tell it like it is, say no more often - life will smooth out. So we go looking. We go looking for the thing to blame. The thing to fix. The thing outside of us that is the reason. We rarely find it. Or we find it and the relief lasts a week and then we are back, looking again.

I read something today about how everything human is holy. I sat with it. If the human is holy, then everything that comes from being human is also holy. The anger. The jealousy. The charges. The protection. The wanting. The needing. The reaching for someone. All of it.

We are working very hard to delete this. To become chill. To become cool. To become detached. To be self-regulated, as they say, at all times. To not be too much. To not need too much. To not feel too much in any direction that makes other people uncomfortable. We call this growth, but growth has positive relationship evidence.

We are not growing. We are erasing.

We are avoiding our collective initiations.

If you want relationships at all, you are going to have to come back. To the body that wants and feels and protects and reaches in messy ways. To the part of you that is not chill and fake green-flag.

You are going to have to stop trying to rub yourself out of existence.

You are going to have to go down into the sludge of your own emotional world and stop looking for any outer cause. Especially when you are 100% sure that your partner or your boss is at fault.

You’ll have to stand naked in front of everyone and yourself.

Repeating: This is it. This is who I am. This is all I am.

That is the sentence.

I have tried to think my way out of being human.

My clients have tried.

We have all tried to spiritualize our way out, therapize our way out, optimize our way out, divorce our way out.

None of it works. You come back. You always come back. To the wanting. To the needing. To the charge. To the part of you that is messy and inconvenient and alive.

Make some peace with your human.

She is holy too.
He is holy too.

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I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

There is a version of coaching that is mostly about clarity.

You come in, you name what you want, and then you work toward it. I don’t like the title ‘coach’ - but I like that part. Goals and purpose.

Except almost no one who sits across from me believes they are confused about what they want. They can tell me, in specific and sometimes beautiful language, exactly what they are looking for. In a partner. In a career. In a life.

The problem is not the articulation. The problem is the field.

I use that word loosely — field — to mean something like the sum of your energetic attention.

Not your stated values. Not your vision board. Not what you wish you wanted. Not what therapy culture told you was a green flag. Not the words you use in a coaching session.

The field of your life is made of where you actually put your time and attention. What you look at when no one is watching. Who gets the most alive version of you at a party. What you reach for when you are tired or scared or bored. The field is the total of your real investments, and it doesn’t care at all what you say you want.

Often, my job in coaching is to find the difference between what someone says they want and where all of their energetic attention is going. In that gap is the problem.

I watch this most clearly in dating. A woman comes in and tells me exactly what she is looking for in a partner. He is stable. He has integrity. He holds his boundaries. He shows up in a clean way. She is specific and she is serious and I believe her. And then she meets men who are exactly that, and something goes flat. They don’t activate her. They don’t hold her attention the way the other kind does — the kind that requires her constant interpretation, her constant forgiveness, her constant hoping. She doesn’t call those men good. She calls them boring.

Meanwhile, she is pouring her best hours into someone who meets NONE of her stated criteria, and she cannot understand why she keeps arriving at the same place.

I watch the same pattern in male clients. He says he wants a real relationship. A woman who is grounded, who challenges him, who shows up with substance. And he does want that, somewhere. But where his eyes go at a party, what he follows online, what gets his body going — that tells a different story.

The field around you is being fed constantly, and it is being fed the opposite of what he says he’s building toward.

This is not a moral indictment. Really, it isn’t. Because there isn’t a right way to relate or work. You know that if you look around at real people instead of absorbing internet reels.

Also, it is just physics.

The field produces your life. Not your intentions. Not your goals. Not your oral values. Not your projection of what you deserve in the future. Not the things you would say if someone asked you over dinner what matters to you. The field — that accumulation of actual daily attention — is what the universe interprets as your order. And it fills it.

What makes this hard to coach is that most people cannot see their own field. They are inside it. The attention patterns are invisible because they feel like just living — just how things are — not like choices. The man watching certain content online does not think of it as a vote for the kind of intimacy options he will have. The woman spending four hours in her nervous system over a text from someone who is trash for her does not think of it as an investment.

But it is.

It is all investment.

I have learned to stop asking people what they want too early in the work. I have learned to watch instead. To ask myself: where does this person’s energy go day to day? Where does time disappear?

What makes them feel most alive — and is that thing correlated, in any way, with what they told me they were building?

Sometimes the answer is yes, and we are working with an alignment problem — the person knows what they want, they are just not yet internally resourced to pursue it cleanly.

But sometimes, most of the time, the answer is no.

And then I have a harder question to ask, which is: do you actually want this thing you say you want?

Or do you want to want it, which is different. People spend lifetimes trying to create what they think they should want.

Because the field does not lie. The field shows me your real desires before you have language for them, before you have permission for them, before you have made peace with them.

The correction, when it comes, is not dramatic.

It is not about wanting better things or becoming a better person. It is about paying attention to where your attention goes. That is the whole practice. Noticing the field around you. Deciding, deliberately, what you are feeding. Opening to the somatic discomfort that’s been locking you into this pattern.

Understanding that the life you are creating is not the one you describe. It is the one you are building right now, hour by hour, click by click, conversation by conversation.

You are always voting. The question is whether you know what you are voting for.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

I was having a conversation recently about what I actually think I know about love.

Not what I’ve read.

Not even what I’ve been trained in through different modalities.

But what I think, after coaching for years, after being personally brave in ways most people aren’t, and probably also sometimes selfish in ways most people aren’t either.

Here is what I came up with.

First, the couples I’ve known who are genuinely happy — not online happiness, but the kind where you can feel it in a room — would be absolutely destroyed in most modern therapeutic frameworks.

Codependent, probably. Too merged. Not individuated enough. One of them, has almost certainly given up a version of themselves that all the insta-therapists would have fought hard to preserve. Usually both of them have.

The person they became inside the relationship is not the person they were going in, and that is not a loss. That is the whole point.

We spend enormous amounts of time trying to hold onto ourselves inside big changes. Relationships. Children. Loss. The advice is always some version of: don’t forget who you are. But I’ve never seen someone build a real life with another person by holding onto who they were. The life — the home, the location, the identity — gets made in the giving up. That’s not romantic. That’s just what I’ve observed.

Next, I have noticed that the timing people agonize over doesn’t really matter.

I interviewed a woman on YouTube a few years ago who had been married eleven years. She and her husband had dated on and off for years, culminating in a screaming roadside fight, stayed apart for five years, then found their way back and got married. They had kids and were from my perspective in a really strong connection. But consider how much cultural advice would say they should have never spoken again.

There are also people who marry in a few months or a few weeks of meeting and stay. There’s not a healthy way or a toxic way, only the way that works for the timing and the two people involved. That’s all they are charged with getting right.

What I haven’t ever seen is a pattern that suggests waiting longer produces better outcomes. I bet if you look around your real life you haven’t either.

What I have seen produce worse outcomes: treating solitude as a credential.

There is an entire industry built around becoming so healed, so whole, so free from the need for another person, that you are finally ready to receive love. I find this mostly untrue. Long stretches of deliberate aloneness don’t seem to prepare you for partnership. They train you away from it.

The desire to need someone isn’t something you resolve. It’s something you either let yourself have or you don’t.

Date someone who compliments the person you really are. The real you, the one that exists when no one is watching, not the “better” version you are trying to grow into.

So, if you are an avoidant person, please stop dating anxious people and hoping the right communication rules will fix it. It’s a trap. Find someone who also needs a lot of space. Find someone who can handle a partner who is constantly unsure of the connection.

Similarly, if you need to raise your voice in arguments, find someone who can live with that, not someone you’ll spend years trying not to scare. Your personality is not the problem to be solved. The mismatch is.

Stop trying to become a person you aren’t through connection.

And finally consider what external connections and habits need to be cleaned up if you want a relationship that becomes a family. I’m not making a moral argument. I am not assigning my version of family to you either. I’m making a structural one. The modern day open, porous, highly networked approach to relationships mostly ends in people being alone. You know it does.

Humans expect particular dynamics with our most intimate long term connections. We haven’t changed as much as think we have. To pretend that modern dating rules where online chatting with multiple connections and leaving every door open will result in a family isn’t reality. The couples I really respect, the ones that still touch each other, end up with something fortress-like around their relationship.

What does all of this add up to?

It’s not self-actualization.

The path, as far as I can tell, is narrower and less interesting-sounding than that.

Maybe it’s just acceptance.

Radical, boring, deeply unflattering self-acceptance. Not of your best self. Of your actual one. The one that opens an essay admitting you are selfish sometimes. It’s admitting to being a person who is at times jealous, attaches quickly, needs more than is convenient, moves at the wrong speed, often makes a mess of things in the process of understanding them. That real person.

If you are judging yourself and everyone you meet through rules and fears about what people think and clocks and external advice it probably won’t happen for you.

If you can find someone who accepts you as is — and you can accept them — I think that’s most of it.

I don’t have a better answer. I’ve looked.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

We decided that wanting someone was the illness.

That needing to be held was a disorder with a name.

We built whole languages for not saying the thing.

I statements. Soft startups.

Poised bodies leaning across the table at each other for an hour and a half saying nothing that costs anything.

We are so skilled at the draining tug of war where everyone leaves intact but no one gets what they want.

We call this resolution.

We call this growth.

We go home to the same ache and we journal about it.

Taking space is the nice thing we call dissociation.

Sitting on a phone, working out, spending an hour complaining… just to come back refreshed and get on our same invisible wheel again.

We have decided that jealousy is a character flaw.

That anger belongs in a container.

That caring is co-dependent.

That desire should have no edges, no values, no address, no claim on anyone.

And yet we know that good sex is full of strong preferences and contrast.

We tell people: expand your capacity.

We mean: become roommates.

We mean: ask for nothing real.

Your wife decides she’s a lesbian and the world has rearranged itself.

Open the marriage.

Hold space for her evolution.

Do the work.

Become who she needs you to be.

Your husband disappears every afternoon into a sea of teen-like naked bodies.

You fill the gap with wine and a chat window with your ex and a crew of other women who share divorce lawyer numbers and preach that being angry all the time is a gift to the world.

We are so evolved.

So free.

So open-minded.

We never make a scene.

We let things drift or we burn them so precisely only the parts we didn’t say catch fire.

But, love is not a regulation. And you fucking know it.

Love is the moment the other person reaches behind you and finds the thing you have been hiding from yourself and does not leave you even though it burns them too, at first.

That is the terror of love.

That is what we are managing around.

We have built a whole culture on managing our collective fear of reality and called it emotional intelligence.

The cure is working.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

For a long time I didn’t post photos of myself online.

I had decided the internet didn’t deserve my face, or maybe I had decided my face didn’t deserve the internet. Either way I kept it off. I had a private Facebook where my kids took center stage and occasionally I would appear as their crew.

During the pandemic I left social media entirely for one year. I wanted to recreated the phone free kid and teen years I had enjoyed. It was magical.

What eventually shifted it was practical: if you run an online business, people need to see a human behind it. Especially now, when the default assumption is that everything is a bot. A face is proof of existence. So I started posting mine.

At first it was hard. I did a lot of somatic work to find safety in my own image. That might sound silly to some people but it’s my truth. On some level I didn’t find photos of myself to feel safe. I had even done some very conservative modeling in my 20’s for local magazines. I felt so much internal shame over those photos that at the time I hid them. Sharing them in the last few years also became part of a larger play at owning my physical form.

I am in my forties. I have had three children. I have a pretty average jean size, which shouldn’t matter. But it does to most women and that doesn’t protect me. I am not wearing makeup in most of these photos. I do try to wear makeup but it never really layers the way the YouTube videos seem to say it will. One day!

I even had a cold when I took the one that caused the latest incident.

What happened when I published an essay on Medium that some women disagreed with — not an essay about my body, an essay about men and boys — was that the first move was to question my integrity due to a top that revealed my shoulders. No cleavage. Just my shoulders. The commenter moved into calling my face and eyes seductive in some way she felt I could control.

She called out my use of close ups of my face in my writing. A practice that is super important in the age of AI. One I am sure she would never have a problem with if I as a man. Irony.

It’s funny I had never thought of photos of my face as an attempt at getting male sexual attention. In the age of constant streams of mostly naked women they just felt like, well, photos of my face. Sometimes a tank top or tube top. I work from home, it’s a pretty casual operation. I hardly think about it when I snap a selfie for my writing anymore.

But to this woman my eyes were a threat.

I want to sit with that for a second because I think it contains everything about working through modern female culture.

There is a tax on women who don’t follow the script.

I have watched it operate my entire life and I have paid it and I have sometimes collected it from other women without fully understanding what I was doing.

The script changes depending on the tribe.

But the enforcement mechanism is always the same: your body, your choices, your happiness become the evidence against you. If I say something about men that challenges the dominant narrative in a tribe of women, the quickest available weapon is not a counter-argument. It’s my body. It’s look at her, thinking anyone wants to see her. She should be ashamed.

Next it’s usually questioning if I have a trauma privilege card big enough to have an opinion. I probably do, but it’s not one I would play. My degrees and certifications are after that. Followed finally by challenging my right to get paid for an online business. Making money through creating content as a single mom becomes a crime. If none of that works they will find something else.

I have come to realize when another woman has decided to shame you as a sell-out there is nothing you can do to satisfy her scorn.

It’s shame as punishment for not following the rules she’s being suffocated under.

In the age of the women’s liberation movement. In the year 2026. A woman in her natural state, no filter, air-dried hair, is apparently a provocation that requires correction if she dares to have an idea that might be hard for other women to digest.

I find this more interesting than offensive.

Here is what I’ve learned in the last three years as my work has become more popular and my views have shifted: finding your new tribe almost always means upsetting your current one.

Not with a fight. Just —when you start moving toward women who are genuinely celebratory, then some women in your existing orbit register it as a betrayal. As selling out.

Selling out looks like: saying something middle of the road about men. Being happy with a partner. Not feeling grief about your age. Having a body you don’t apologize for. Holding an opinion that diverges from the one the group requires. Not wanting to bond through complaining.

The women I am trying to find — and trying to coach my clients toward — are not threatened by difference. A different political read on a situation, a different parenting choice, a different relationship structure: these things don’t destabilize them because they have enough of a grasp on themselves that your choices don’t read as an indictment of theirs.

Those women exist. There are more of them than the internet suggests. The internet, as a system, rewards the punitive ones because punishment generates engagement and engagement generates money, and here we are.

My forties feel, strangely, like landing.

Not because everything is resolved. Because I am no longer waiting for permission from the dominant tribe to decide who I am. I’m not ashamed of my body. I’m not haunted by what an ex thinks of me. I’m not performing either youth or wisdom. I am not proud or ashamed of something like divorce or my green eyes. I just exist in my actual life, which is full and specific and occasionally photographed with air-dried hair and no makeup and apparently that is controversial. Or worthy of attack.

I wrote an essay about my son and men and the stories we tell about boys.

Someone responded by telling me my eyes were a problem for them.

It says more about her than me. But it’s a powerful thing to look at adult mean girl culture and stand up against it. To say I don’t need your permission to exist outside of your comfort zone.

If you want to you know how to surround yourself with more powerful women it’s through being willing to stand inside yourself regardless of whether that pleases or displeases your current tribe of female friends.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

There’s something kind of mystical you already know how to do.

Your dog knows how to do it. Your Aunt Martha who binges soap operas in her fluffy chair does too.

You walk into a room and you feel energy — who’s grounded, who’s frantic, who’s performing being okay while something underneath is coiled tight. You know when someone is pulling you and when they are pushing you away too. You’ve always known this. No one taught you. You didn’t need them to.

That’s energy work.

You’re already doing it. With clients in sessions, I just go further.

For years I held a careful line in my practice. Somatic work, yes. Common sense coaching, absolutely.

But the other part — the inner balancing, the energetic clearing, the work with what I call energetic avatars — I kept that quieter. I did it but once someone warmed up and without broadcasting it. I had reasons. I didn’t want to filter out people I would enjoy working with the most at the door. I didn’t want the word energy to make someone close the tab.

I also didn’t want to be associated with the larger community of energy workers. I don’t know that many people who veer into that lane professionally and still have my life. A mom of three, an education business owner, a homeowner — for all accounts a grounded person. A person you could sit next to at the soccer game and not think too much about. I enjoy the structures in my life. I don’t look down on commitment, continuity, community or family.

I just couldn’t see myself inside a title that seemed to make other people so out of touch. The people online calling themselves made up titles like sexual energy alchemists — naked, almost feeling incestuous in their marketing. The travel influencers. The women on the brink of being homeless but selling manifestation courses in some pyramid scheme I still don’t fully understand. The men running huge conferences and big weekend experiences without asking where their clients were after five years or ten.

I don’t want to do work that is a short burst of excitement. I want my clients to cross bridges for the very last time.

This year I stopped keeping this part of my work quiet.

Here’s what changed my mind: results.

I’ve been doing this work with some of my highest-performing clients. People moving serious money. Investors. Entrepreneurs. Doctors. People who are rigorous about what they invest their time in. And what I’ve watched happen — again and again — is that the energetic work gets to something the cognitive work and even the somatic work can’t reach. Not because the cognitive work is wrong.

Because the body holds what the mind has learned to manage around. The body is heavily influenced by energy.

Want an example anyone can relate to? The couple that is just at each other all the time. They can fight about literally anything. The way they talk is charged to a duel. If we can get them both shifted in energy toward each other — if they both take a more neutral or even just a new position — everything starts to come undone. The tightly coiled energy binding they created unravels to reveal the real heart of what they both want underneath. Ideally I think humans in romantic connection do this for themselves with sex, but when that isn’t on the table anymore, I can help them get there in a session.

That one session can be more valuable than years of talk therapy where they exhaustingly communicated and negotiated.

One client walked into a high-stakes legal proceeding a different person than she’d been in every preparation session before it. We hadn’t changed her strategy. We didn’t change anything her legal team advised. We changed what she was broadcasting. Her tone of voice changed. The room responded differently. A six-year court battle — dissolved.

Another was dreading a business conversation — the kind you’ve been circling for months because something about it feels immovable. We worked with the energy around it before he walked in. The conversation opened somewhere it hadn’t been able to open before. It wasn’t even the same terrain he imagined being in.

This is what energy work does.

It shifts the signal you emit before you enter the arena of your life.

Here’s what energy work is not: religious. It’s also not a challenge to your religion.

Though you can find its fingerprints everywhere religion has ever been.

In Kabbalah, the Sefirot are the moods through which infinite divine energy moves into form. Each one corresponds to an aspect of being. The tradition of tikkun is literally the repair and restoration of these moods or flows. Kabbalists have been mapping the energetic body for centuries.

The Christian gifts of the Holy Spirit — wisdom, knowledge, healing, the working of miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits — read differently when you understand energy. Discernment of spirits is exactly what you’re doing when you feel who’s grounded and who’s not. Healing through laying on of hands is energetic transfer. This is not metaphor. This is the text.

In Islamic mysticism, particularly in Sufi practice, baraka — divine blessing, spiritual energy — is understood to move through people, places, lineages. The concept of ruh, the breath of spirit, animates the body not just biologically but energetically.

The subtle body is not a New Age invention. It’s ancient.

What is New Age is the idea that this belongs only to certain people, or certain traditions, or people willing to adopt a particular aesthetic online. It doesn’t belong to a framework or a particular organization. It belongs to the body itself.

The body knows. It has always known.

You know when someone has clean energy without being able to explain why. You know when someone’s energy is heavy or off or predatory or desperate. Some of us are even primed to seek out that darker energy through childhood experiences.

You adjust to energy without thinking about it.

What I do in a session is make that process conscious.

We locate where an emotion lives in the body. We work with what it’s holding. We clear what’s been sitting there — sometimes for years, sometimes for decades — and we let the body reorganize.

It’s not slow work. It is immediate work with clear consequences.

When you go directly to the energetic level, the shifts can be immediate. Not because anything is being forced. Because the body has been waiting for permission to move in a new direction.

This year, for the first time, I’m opening a few spots specifically for this work — intensive, one-on-one sessions combining somatic experiencing, energetic clearing, and work with the emotional imprints shaping outcomes in your life right now.

If something in this piece recognized you, consider following up with me.

Reply here or find me at my website if you want to know more.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

A note before you read: this essay is about cyclical living and the female hormonal cycle specifically. If you’re a man who reads my work — and many of you do — stay with it. What I’m describing has everything to do with the women in your life, and possibly with why certain weeks feel like a different person entirely. Learning to be in relationship with every version of the women in your life can give you an entirely new experience.

There is a week in my cycle where I wake up certain that everything is wrong.

Not anxious. Not spiraling. Certain. The refrigerator is wrong. The business decision I made in spring was wrong. The thing I said yes to last month was wrong. Everything I’ve been tolerating is wrong.

I am usually correct.

For a long time I treated this week like a problem to manage. I’d apologize for being difficult. I’d wait for it to pass. I’d wonder, quietly, whether I was regressing — whether all the work I’d done on myself was dissolving, because here I was again, sad and critical and wanting to burn everything down.

I don’t think that anymore.

After ovulation, estrogen drops. Progesterone rises briefly, then falls. The body is registering, at the hormonal level, that it did not get pregnant. And the entire eco-system starts the work of releasing what it made. Shedding the lining. Clearing the field. Getting ready to begin again.

The body is in a destructive phase.

There’s a subtle energy that arises, it feels like you failed. Which is hard to ignore when you entire external world is always telling you that.

Not young enough. Not thin enough. Too many wrinkles. Too hard. Too soft. This season of your cycle comes in on top of all that constant noise.

The natural response of wanting to burn it all down and remove every annoyance isn’t brokenness.

It’s just what’s happening.

It happens every month whether you name it or not.

For the men reading: what looks like volatility in this phase is usually accuracy. She can see problems clearly that she genuinely couldn’t access last week. Trying to manage her back to the version of herself she was ten days ago is going to cost you both.

I was on a coaching call recently — I was on a nearly identical cycle day as the woman I was speaking with — and I said something I say often: the luteal phase is your most psychic time. Your emotions are hair-trigger. Your tolerance is low. Your dreams get vivid and strange.

And underneath all of that, you can see problems clearly that you couldn’t see last week when you were full of estrogen and momentum and the particular blindness of feeling good. Aiming toward feeling good all the time is an Achilles heel.

The most important part: You’re not supposed to act on what you see. Not yet.

You’re supposed to catalog it. Write it down. Let the low tolerance do what it’s actually for — cutting into whatever is genuinely wrong — and trust that the energy to fix those things will arrive when it’s supposed to. In the reflective phase, solutions start to surface. In the follicular, they begin to bloom. In the ovulatory, you have the aliveness to move.

I don’t know if it’s realistic for every woman to move on a cycle as strictly as I do but I do believe if you are unaware of your biology it controls you. You’ll spend your entire life feeling like something is wrong. You’ll never learn to use your hormones. They are so useful.

But right now you can see. That’s what this week is.

I wrote something for myself during luteal phase that I don’t use any other time of the month: I use the sword of my intolerance to cut deep. I hold my vision.

The women I’ve watched move through their lives with the most power — older, grounded, a little ruthless about their own rhythms — they treat this week like a resource. The crone women who use the moon after their cycles wane.

They record their dreams. They write down everything that’s wrong. They’re indulging darkness because they understand that this information is going to fund the next three weeks of their life, and they won’t have access to it again for a month. It is so valuable to be able to see so clearly.

So when the luteal phase arrives and everything feels like evidence of failure, I stop and ask: what can I see right now that I won’t be able to see next week?

Not in a spiraling way. In a catalog way. What’s actually wrong? Where am I stuck? What have I been tolerating? What do my kids need from me? What does my work need from me? Where am I leaking in my partnership?

Notice it’s not about what is wrong with other people. It’s what do I need to see.

I write it down. I don’t try to fix it. I watch the enormous general feeling of doom distill into two or three specific, solvable things.

Then I wait.

The season passes. My cycle starts. Something quiets. And I still have the list.

I used to dread this week.

Now I catch myself mid-cycle — full of estrogen, moving fast, feeling good — thinking: I wish I could see this clearly right now. I wish had the sharp sword of knowing exactly what to cut.

When there’s something I can’t quite get to the bottom of and I know I’ll have to wait for it.

When you stop fighting the rhythm, you start to want what each phase actually gives you, even the hard ones.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.

Someone wrote to me recently to say they had finished the intellectual content of my subscription curriculum and were now, finally, turning to the embodiment work. Recorded practices that prime the body and the emotions.

I used to look down on this order. I want people to just learn to use the body as a wand. To take in the lessons with a nervous system that’s fully online. But I have come to understand it as often necessary. People need a large amount of logical mindset shifting to get into my work. When you have lived your entire life thinking one way you need a moment to catch up.

They noted, almost as an aside, that they recognized the embodiment work was probably the most important part. Which is a real win for the curriculum in my book. I spent so many years thinking this work couldn’t be self-study and now I have people validating it all the time as possible.

The risk of self-study though is allowing people to intellectualize my content. To believe they understand it without taking them into living it in coaching.

There is a way of approaching self-actualization that looks exactly like pursuing it. You read the books. You do the coursework. You “open up” in talk therapy. You identify what you want, map the obstacles (starting with your poor mom), develop a framework for evaluating your options.

It feels like progress.

In most areas of life, it is progress. The mind is a remarkable instrument and it has solved a great many problems.

Real human desire is not one of them.

I know this from my own life, from the years I spent treating myself as a problem to be worked on. If I could just understand the pattern, I thought. If I could just get clear on what I was really after. I brought real rigor to this. I read carefully and reflected earnestly and came to what felt like conclusions. And then I would find myself exactly where I started, only now with better language for describing why I was stuck.

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Seven years ago I stopped eating sugar. Not dramatically. Not as a resolution. Not to delete my curves.

I just stopped, and then I stayed there, and then at some point my body forgot what it had been so certain it constantly needed.

That forgetting is what interests me.

There’s a rather long tunnel you go through when you remove something your body has organized itself around.

Sugar. Spending. Scrolling. A person. The tunnel is disorienting in a specific way — not painful really, more like the low-grade vertigo of trying to stand still on moving ground. Your reference points are off. You feel vaguely wrong without being able to name why. And then, on the other side of it, something strange happens: the thing stops being interesting. You eat a bite of it at a party and you think, I don’t feel that good.

That’s it. No drama. Just a subtle recalibration.

What I’ve been thinking about is how rarely we talk about what recalibration like that makes possible. So I believe we miss the point of entering those tunnels.

I’m currently not eating carbs. I’ve done cycles of this before, but it was always for a quick fix. I would turn it into its own problem.

What I notice now — more than I did the first few times — is watching my body as a somatic document. Observing myself come down off something.

There’s a clarity that arrives.

Food tastes like something again. My hunger signals have texture and sound. I can feel what my body actually wants, which turns out to be a different thing entirely than what it was loudly insisting it wanted five weeks ago.

People find this unsettling. My not eating certain things or abstaining from media in seasons bothers them in a way that I find more interesting than the change itself. There’s something in that reaction — a kind of ambient guilt, or maybe threat — that tells me we all understand, somewhere underneath, that we’re organized around things that don’t actually satisfy us. And we’d rather not look at it directly.

I think about this a lot with men I coach and pornography. The images that are so available now — bodies that may or may not exist in real life, constructed for a particular kind of instant 2D pleasure — have a way of infecting desire at the source.

Not because desire is fragile, but because appetite is trainable.

What you consume consistently becomes your reference point for what you want. And if your reference point is a curated fiction created to keep you in a hormone loop, you will spend your relational life trying to eat something that was never food.

What would it look like to starve that? To go through the tunnel — the disorientation, the low-grade wrongness — and come out the other side? I think what you’d find is that desire is still there. That it didn’t go anywhere. It just got quieter than the noise.

Here’s what I’ve come to think: desire is only legible after starvation.

Not deprivation as punishment — not white-knuckling it — but the genuine willingness to stop feeding the thing that was never feeding you back, and to wait. To stay in the tunnel long enough for your reference points to shift.

When they do, things taste different. You’re not missing the sugar; you’re tasting the fruit. And the fruit is genuinely, surprisingly sweet.

This is the part that most therapeutic and somatic work skips past. There’s so much attention given to processing, to uncovering, to releasing. Very little to the question of what actually satisfies you — specifically, bodily, in real life. And so people do enormous amounts of inner work and still find themselves lonely in the same ways, drawn to the same unavailable structures, replaying the same past relationships like movies they’ve already seen. The daydream is always of something that happened or that could happen, not something that’s here.

I’ve done this too. Returned to a reconstructed memory of a person or a time and let it fill something that I wasn’t willing to admit was empty. The memory wasn’t satisfying. But it was familiar, and familiarity masquerades as satisfaction so convincingly.

What I know now is that the void is information.

I’m not satisfied is not a problem to be solved by remembering or imagining something better. It’s an arrow pointing toward desire.

Toward the real question, which is: what do I actually want? What would actually fill this?

When you’ve lived in one domain long enough on the other side of that starvation — when you’ve let real desire organize you — something shifts in your influence with other people. You’re not hungry in the way that makes you grab. You’re not performing satisfaction. You’re just actually, quietly, full. And that fullness is magnetic in a way that need never is.

I don’t think this is complicated.

I think it’s slow.

The tunnel takes as long as it takes. But what’s on the other side of it is desire you can actually trust — desire that’s yours, that’s legible, that points somewhere real.

That’s worth the disorientation.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.