When a child isnt chosen by their own parents. Prioritized by their own parents how can they truly believe that some stranger out in the world will chose them. Sounded like an far fetch, sci-fi kind of concept.

I didnt know that I had these kind of beliefs. They were just always there like a low hum vibrating under the surface poisoning my relationships.

Those subconscious beliefs showed up in ways like future tripping every possible scenario catastrophically. Preparing myself for the worst outcome, so nothing could touch me. I had already lived it, processed it and let it go.

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I became hyper-independent, i turned inward to my own resources, to my own will and strength and fought tooth and nail my way through. I ignored my fears, my weaknesses, nobody ever really helped when I needed them so I learned to distrust others and rely only on myself.

So I’d be labeled Ice Queen, avoidant, a fighter, ruthless, fierce, you get the point…

There comes a time when you dont want to be called a fighter anymore. There’s a time when all you want to do is lay down the armour. Theres come time when you yearn to be so incredy deeply met that your fucking bones ache.

And how does one begin to let love it when all its ever done is hurt you? Betray you? Abandon you? Not chose you.

How? The psychological world will tell you this is a much better question to ask than why.

And it’s what I’ve been unraveling for years. I am guinea pig number one in my own wreckage.

From a decade of my own burning and rebuilding I can safely say that it boils down to these six things I kept coming back to:

1. Giving up my idealized image of myself as superior and super-competent and begin to see myself as an ordinary human. What a wild concept. Which meant tracking my weaknesses and needs rather than just my strengths and capacities.

2. Honoring the limitations of my body which meant measuring what I am not capable of, rather than only what I am capable of.

3. Allow buried emotions like fear, grief, shame and sadness be brought to the surface and released. And most importantly, be held and accepted in that expression not feeling like I am too intense or too angry or too loud.

4. My adrenals were completely shot from living in a constant revved up state so learning to down regulate my system. Which allowed me to finish my days with a full tank instead of running on fumes.

5. Asking for support and trusting that my people would show up. Once again feel safe trusting and needing others, especially when I was in need and at a low point.

6. And whole heartedly believing that I am not bad or evil. Realizing that I am fundamentally good and through that, seeing the infinite goodness in others.

if you weren't the strong one anymore, who would you be?

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The more interesting one is this: why is one tiny gland connected to the same system that decides whether your body feels safe enough to open, not just during sex, but anywhere in your life?

That question changed how I do this work. It’s also most of what your sex ed class skipped.

I remember walking into Home Ec, all of us squeamish and joking to cover it. My teacher gave the whole subject two classes. Two. That’s two hours, total, on something that runs most of an adult life. Here’s how you put a condom on a banana. Use protection. Here’s how a baby is made. That was it. It failed almost everyone. All of it rooted in the same shame and secrecy.

Most of what I actually know about this anatomy, I learned not from a textbook but from sitting next to men who had no idea what was happening inside their own bodies. I learned, first, that none of them had been given the map. I learned, second, that almost none of them had been told the map even existed.

If you’ve read the guide I created, you already know why receiving matters more than speed. This is the part underneath that: the anatomy, the research, the actual mechanism. The part nobody had the information, or the nerve, to teach you.

What the prostate is, at the level that matters

Here’s the first thing they left out entirely.

A walnut-sized gland sitting roughly two inches inside the rectum. It contributes most of the fluid in your ejaculate. It is one of the most densely innervated structures in your pelvis, which is part of why touch here registers as so much more than physical.

Some in this field connect it directly to the vagus nerve, the body’s long parasympathetic highway running from the brainstem through the heart, lungs, gut, and into the pelvis. In other words, the same system that helps you digest your dinner also helps your body decide whether it’s safe enough to relax. I want to be straight with you about the wiring part: it isn’t settled science. What is well documented, session after session, is what happens when this gland comes back online, meaning simply that it becomes something you can actually feel again. Sleep deepens. Reactivity drops. The jaw releases. The low-grade tension that’s been sitting in the lower belly for years often lessens, sometimes for the first time in decades. I can’t give you the precise mechanism. I can tell you it’s consistent enough, across enough men, that I stopped being surprised by it years ago.

The actual mapping of the gland, how to find it, the different areas, the surrounding landmarks, the order in which the body reads them, is something I don’t teach in an essay. Some things require a body in the room. The masterclass is the body in the room.

None of this anatomy is the destination. It’s the doorway back to the same question this whole piece keeps circling: can you let yourself receive.

The two muscles that gate it

They didn’t mention this part either.

The anal sphincter is two muscles, not one. This is the single most important piece of anatomy in this essay.

The external sphincter is voluntary. You can squeeze it on command. You have been training it your entire life without knowing it.

The internal sphincter is involuntary. It’s controlled by the part of your nervous system you can’t consciously direct, the same one running your heartbeat and digestion without you ever giving it instructions. You cannot touch it with your will. It opens only when your body has decided you are safe.

One muscle obeys you. One doesn’t. That’s enough to know for now.

This is the structural fact that makes prostate work what it is.

The internal sphincter doesn’t negotiate and it doesn’t lie. It’s the most honest narrator your body has, even when what it says isn’t what you want to hear.

It reads your body’s safety signals second by second, and it decides on its own whether the conditions are met to open. You cannot fool it. You can only meet the conditions.

For the men I work with, this is often the first piece of information they comprehend differently than expected. They have spent a lifetime being told that surrender is a choice, that you simply decide to relax. You don’t decide to surrender. Your body grants it once the environment has earned it.

You can create the environment. The body does the surrender.

Sphincter Law, per Ina May Gaskin

This one isn’t even controversial. It’s just never taught.

Ina May Gaskin is a midwife. In her work with women in labor, she articulated rules about how sphincters actually behave. The rules apply to every sphincter in the body, the anus, the bladder, the throat.

Almost no one is ever taught Sphincter Law. It is the operating manual most adults never received.

• Sphincters open best in privacy.

• Without time limits.

• They are not under voluntary control.

• They do not respond well to demands or commands.

• They DO respond well to praise.

• High adrenaline prevents opening.

• Laughter facilitates opening.

Read those lines twice. Now think about the conditions under which you have been having sex for the last twenty years.

Most of us have been having sex inside conditions that violate every rule on the list. We have been in a hurry. We have been performing for an audience of two. We have been demanding things of our bodies: get hard, stay hard, come, do not come yet, come now. We have been in elevated states of adrenaline disguised as arousal. We have not, by any reasonable measure, been laughing.

The bodies in those bedrooms have been doing exactly what Sphincter Law predicts. They have been contracting.

Contracting like that isn’t a failure of will, just the most predictable thing a body does under those conditions.

What I have watched, numerous times

A few patterns I can name.

Most men in their forties think the problem is hormonal. Sometimes it is. Most of the time, it isn't. Their bodies have spent decades running businesses, raising children, carrying responsibility, and pushing through. By the time they reach me, that history is often written into their pelvis. Changing testosterone doesn't change that history. Learning how to let go sometimes changes far more than they expected.

Most men in their fifties are looking for something to “fix” in the sex life with their long-term partner. Often what they find is that nothing needed fixing. The script had simply worn thin. There was an entire other half of their bodies that had never been activated, and it had been waiting. When it activates, the relationship reorganizes around it: more affection that isn’t just a prelude to sex, more honesty about what each of them actually wants, less chasing a feeling and more feeling what's already there. Partners notice within a few weeks. Underneath all of it, this is still the same conversation as receiving.

Men of any age who come because a partner asked them to, a podcast sparked something, a book landed at the right moment, or a conversation stayed with them, are often surprised to discover that what they're looking for has very little to do with technique and everything to do with a kind of presence their partner has been asking for, maybe for years, without ever having the words for it.

The men who do the deepest work, in my experience, are often the ones who are exhausted from spending a lifetime striving, proving, or holding everything together. The relief, when it arrives, is structural, not just sexual. The body that has been bracing for thirty years stops bracing. That changes the way it moves through every room it walks into for the rest of its life.

This is the part that cannot be taught in an essay. This is the part I work with men on inside the container.

What gets retrieved

The men who do this work, really do it, slowly, in container, almost always say a version of the same thing afterward.

Some part of them came back online.

For some it’s sensation. The pelvis, which had been disconnected for years, starts to report back. For some it’s emotion. The grief, the rage, the longing they’ve been carrying. None of it metaphor. It gets a place to surface. For some it’s creativity. Projects they had quietly rescheduled until they fell off the calendar resurface. Visions return.

One idea from the somatic sexology tradition, more poetic than clinical, names what the prostate seems to hold: “unbirthed dreams.” Goals, visions, businesses, conversations a man set down because the cost of carrying them was too high at the time. The body holds them. The pelvis holds them. The prostate, in particular, seems to be where they wait.

I can’t tell you whether this is literal or metaphorical. I can tell you it’s consistent. It’s what the men I work with describe. It’s what their partners describe.

It’s also part of why this work changes things that have nothing to do with sex.

A short note on the research

Here’s where sex ed really failed you, specifically.

Almost all of this has been documented in the somatic sexology literature for decades.

Jack Morin, who wrote Anal Pleasure and Health and is the closest thing this field has to a foundational text, ran a study on 143 participants. Seventy-one percent of the men who received structured anal-pleasure work learned to enjoy it within eight weeks. Another twelve percent within four months. Eighty-three percent total.

This is one of the highest success rates documented for any form of somatic intervention. And it sits in a book most men have never been told exists.

The medical literature on this goes back further than most people assume, written mostly by doctors who only saw the body once something had already gone wrong. Chester Maynard, Joseph Kramer, Katie Sarra, Ellen Heed, Barbara Carrellas: the teachers in this tradition have been writing about this for decades. The research isn’t new. The cultural conversation around it has been.

A reading list is found at the bottom of this essay.

Sensory-motor amnesia

Nobody taught you this term, and almost nobody teaches the idea behind it either.

There’s a term, coined by the founder of Hanna Somatics, for what happens to a region of the body when you stop paying attention to it.

It’s called sensory-motor amnesia.

The pathways that once connected your awareness to that region go silent from disuse. In plain terms: you stop feeling places you stop paying attention to. You forget there’s anything to feel there at all.

For most men, the entire pelvic interior has been inside that amnesia for thirty or forty years. They haven’t been told it’s there. They haven’t been given the map. They haven’t been told what to listen for, what to expect, or what to do with what surfaces when sensation begins to return.

The body remembers what attention restores. The pathways rebuild. The signal comes back. That numbness isn’t absence so much as a body waiting to be invited back.

This is what I’m undoing, one essay and one container at a time.

What’s next

If you’ve read this far, the next two doors are open.

→ Complimentary Strategy Session
You’ll understand what's getting in the way of the sex, relationship, and life you want. You'll leave with a clearer picture of what's happening, whether we end up working together or not. If the six-month program is the right next step, I'll tell you. If it isn't, I'll tell you that too.

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Reading list

• Anal Pleasure and Health by Jack Morin

• Ecstasy is Necessary by Barbara Carrellas

• The Polyvagal Theory by Stephen Porges,

• A Headache in the Pelvis by David Wise and Rodney Anderson

• Gods in Every Man by Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D.

• How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett

A note: this essay is educational and not a substitute for medical advice. If you have prostatitis, an active rectal infection, recent pelvic-region surgery, or any condition that contraindicates internal pelvic touch, speak with a qualified medical provider before exploring this work.

He said it the way men say things like that, kind of brushed it off, almost embarrassed by the matter-of-fact of it. Like naming the loneliness out loud made it worse somehow. Like he had expected that by this point in his life, with a woman like this, he wouldn’t be sitting across from someone like me saying that word.

We spent some time in it and what eventually surfaced was this: he had spent years being impeccable. Showing up for all the doctor appointments. Providing a steady and stable income. He had given her the best version of himself, meaning the most cautious version, the version with the rough edges filed down and the uncertain parts kept private, and she had loved that version back as faithfully as she could. And it just wasn’t enough. She really did try. But you can only love what’s fully accessible to you.

I think about that man often when I see how much effort goes into the pretending of being okay.

Not okay like lying. Most of the men I work with are not liars. They are men who have become genuinely skilled at presenting a version of themselves that functions well in the world, and they have confused the skill with the self. The compartmentalizing feels like strength. And in many ways it is strength. But it is also armor and it keeps out the very thing it is desperate for.

Here is what I have watched, over and over, in this work.

And then he wonders why the love he gets doesn’t land the way he hoped.

It’s not a mystery. You get back a reflection of what you put forward. Give someone the curated version and she loves the curated version. That love is real. It just cannot penetrate the parts of you that were never in the room.

And I want to be careful here, because I am not saying the solution is confession. I am not talking about unloading everything on her or replacing the management with an absence of discernment. That’s not it either. What I’m pointing to is different. It’s the habit of editing yourself not because something is private but because you have decided, before you even tried, that the real version of you is not what she actually wants.

That’s the calculation I’m interested in.

Because that calculation, made unconsciously, made constantly, made so many times it stops feeling like a choice, is what keeps the distance in place. And at some point the distance becomes the relationship. Not because anything went wrong. Because nothing ever got close enough to go wrong.

There is no technique that solves this. I want to be honest about that, because I work in a space full of men who have read the books and tried the frameworks and are still ending up in the same place three relationships later, and what I notice is that the frameworks mostly help you perform understanding without requiring you to change what you are willing to be seen doing. You can become fluent in the language of vulnerability without once being actually vulnerable. The fluency is still management. The window dressing on the wall.

What changes things is the willingness to be in the room as the actual entire self. Not the performance of depth but the presence of it. Not the story about the hard thing but the face you make when you say it. The uncertainty that lives in you when you don’t know how she’ll respond and you say it anyway.

That is the field. The place where you either meet each other or you don’t.

Most men have never been there, not really, and I don’t mean that as criticism. I mean that no one taught them that this was the requirement. They were taught to be impressive, to provide, to protect. To need just a little bit, if at all. And then they find themselves in a relationship that looks exactly right from the outside and feels, on the inside, like a room with a locked door they have never opened.

She can feel that door. She may not have words for it. But something in her knows she is not quite getting the real one, and so what she gives back is calibrated to match what she received. A kind of love. Not the thing he is hungry for.

The trade-off is the trade-off. We can be loved as completely as we are seen. That has always been the deal. There is no version of this that goes around it.

Did you experience “a kind of love” what happened when you realized you were only partially showing up?

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She listened. She was present and asked questions proving her genuine curiosity. He felt the opening happen all the way down.

Six months later, they were in an argument about something insignificant. She was stating all the ways he hurt her and then, when he didn’t concede fast enough, she brought it in. His father. The silence. That silence. The thing she now knew about how he was shaped. As proof of his pattern. His damage.

His chest collapsed inwards.

This is the thing I have watched happen to a lot of men, and I am going to tell you plainly what it does.

He does not stop loving her. He does not decide she is a cruel person. What happens is much more subtle than that. He might not consciously think about it again, but his body remembers it. It remembers what it cost him to open honestly and not be met there. And then the next time he begins to drop his guard, there is a half-second delay that wasn’t there before. A scan A small calculation that runs before he speaks. Is this safe to say? Could this be used? He doesn’t know he’s doing it. But the territory between them has changed shape.

I have sat with men who cannot tell you when they stopped talking. They can tell you they used to be different. They can tell you the relationship feels like living behind glass. They cannot tell you the moment the glass went up.

This is not about whether she meant it as a weapon. That is a different conversation and not the one I’m interested in here.

What I am interested in is what happens inside a man when the thing he offered with his hands gets picked up as a tool. Because the response is not anger, not usually. The response is calibration. He becomes more selective about what he reveals. More cautious. He learns to offer only the portion of himself that cannot be used. He becomes, to use a word I never used to use until I watched this pattern enough times, curated.

And the woman on the other side of it, she feels him pull back. She says he’s closed off. She says she can’t get to him. She starts to push. He controls the push. The gap widens on both sides.

The work I actually see needs to happen is different.

It starts inside him. Not with her, not with the relationship, not with a framework for better communication. Inside him. He needs to be able to feel the moment the calibration starts. The half-second. The calculation before he speaks. Most men have never been shown how to locate that moment, so it runs without them. It is a reflex so old it feels like character. Feels like who they are.

Once he can feel it, he has a choice. Before that, he doesn’t.

The second part is reading the room without leaning into optimism or distrust, simply seeing what’s in front of you. Every relationship has a different tolerance for vulnerability. Every person has a different way of holding what they’re given. Some people hold it and give it back to you, eventually, as something that belongs to you. Some people hold it and don’t know what to do with it. Some people hold it delicately until they are frightened, and then they stop being delicate. A man who has been burned learns to assume the worst. The work is learning to read what is actually true about this particular person, in this particular season.

What he meant was this: she was trying. She was putting in effort. She cared. And at the same time, there were moments where he didn’t feel safe with her. Both were true at once.

It wasn’t a simple story of good or bad. It was a messy overlap of care and impact, effort and harm.

And at some point, he had to stop arguing with reality and decide what that combination meant for him.

That decision was his to make, and no one else could make it for him.

That is the work. Not becoming impervious or so well-regulated that nothing can get through to you. Learning to feel the calibration, to read who you are really with, and to decide from inside yourself what you are willing to risk.

The glass doesn’t have to be permanent. But it doesn’t come down because someone tells you vulnerability is good for you.

It comes down when you trust your own ability to feel the difference.

When has your vulnerability been weaponized against you?

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Not the red pill men, though they are a symptom of it. Not the men going to plant medicine ceremonies, purging all their darkness in one solid go, though they are a symptom of it too. Something underneath both of those. A particular kind of disorientation that camouflages behind the veneer of having figured it out.

I’ve been sitting with men for nearly a decade, in sessions and in group work and in the specific silence that comes after a man says something he’s never said out loud before. And what I keep seeing, across wildly different men, different ages and backgrounds and relationship histories, is the same contraction. The same moment where the possibility of substantial love is within arms length, and something in him retracts, respectfully or not, and he labels it whatever sounds most reasonable: boundaries, independence, not being ready, she wasn’t the one.

What he doesn’t have language for is the shape of what just happened in his body. And without that language, the pattern runs. And runs. And runs. You get the picture…

What many men were taught, modeled and handed down about masculinity and women leaves them disconnected from themselves, from intimacy, and from the relationships they inevitably want.

The warrior’s path, in Castaneda’s terms, is the practice of seeing past the description. Meeting what is actually there. Not defending the story. Not running from the sensation. Staying, and perceiving, and acting from what is real rather than from what the habituated mind insists is happening.

Most men I work with are not warriors. They are men who would very much like to be, who feel the pull of it, who have read enough or sat with enough of themselves to know that something is off, but who have never been shown what meeting reality in the body actually requires. They have been given frameworks. Maps. Approaches. And maps are useful until the terrain is unfamiliar, and then they are just paper in the hand of a man who is lost.

What I kept running into, throughout these years, was the question of what women can offer in this that men cannot offer each other. This is not a popular question. The men’s work world has spent thirty years building containers that are men only, for good reason. But the Gilgamesh story is older than all of it, and Enkidu is not transformed by a warrior. He is transformed by the sacred prostitute. She does not challenge him. She does not teach him. She welcomes him from his animal life into his human one, through the body, through presence, through something that is not combat or competition or the proving of anything.

The sacred prostitute in the ancient temple was not a sexual transaction. She was an initiation. The stranger who came to the temple left with something he could not have assembled himself. The image of the feminine carried inward, the internal witness that enables a man to relate to his own emotions, to touch the emotional substance of another. The man who goes through life without that image, as Qualls-Corbett writes, experiences a fundamental split between the spiritual and sensual aspects of love. And that split is exactly what I watch in men every day. Kind-hearted men, and still, men who are walking around with half of themselves inaccessible.

The work I kept returning to, over and over, was this: what would it look like to build something that closes that split. Not the part where men learn to speak better, though that matters. Not the part where men regulate their reactivity, though that matters too. The part that is deeper, older, and more taboo to name: men being seen by women who are not in relationship with them, not bewitched by them, not afraid of them, not using them. Women who are, in the language of that older world, in service to something larger than the personal. Witnessing from that place.

I don’t know of anyone building this. They say to build what you want to see in the world, and this is what I’ve been imagining, shaping, creating, and pouring love into for the past year.

Now it’s finally starting to take form. A curriculum, yes, and language for the patterns, and all the work of the relational body under pressure. But beneath that, a mechanism that most men in their lives have never had access to: a women’s panel. Women from the somatic and embodiment world who read what’s between the lines in a man’s behavior and feed it back to him, not from entanglement or agenda, but from precision. The stranger walking into the temple, and being seen.

I’ll write more about the panel in a few weeks. For now I want to name what I actually think is happening, before I describe what I’m trying to do about it.

Simply put, most men are operating inside a description of what it means to be a man in relation to women that is so old and so total they can barely see the edges of it. And most of what is offered to them, in the market of men’s growth, either confirms the description or offers a new one to replace it.

I’m interested in something else. The moment when the description stops, and the man turns, and he sees what is actually there.

That’s where this work lives. That’s why I came back.

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This is the move I have watched men make for years.

I’m not naming it to shame it. I’m naming it because no one usually does, not plainly, not without the verdict already in the sentence. Most conversations about men who go cold end with a verdict about what kind of man that makes him. What I’m more interested in is what’s happening in the seconds before the door closes.

There’s an old story that keeps coming back to me. The Fisher King. He was a king whose wound couldn’t be named, only carried. His kingdom went barren around him, the land going dry and grey in precise proportion to the thing he wouldn’t let anyone near. He still ruled. He still showed up in his function. But the wound was there and it ran everything, quietly, from the inside. The story’s strange gift is this: the only cure wasn’t treatment or technique. It was a question. One young knight, Percival, rides into the Grail Castle and sees the King suffering and simply asks, “What ails thee?” That’s it. That’s the medicine. Not the right answer. The right question, asked by someone who could bear to hear the answer.

Most men have a wound like this. Sometimes it’s the first time a father went quiet instead of saying something. Sometimes it’s the moment a boy learned that what he felt wasn’t the point. The wound doesn’t stay as a wound. It learns to protect itself. It becomes the cold. It becomes the deflection. It becomes the counter-attack when she tells him something didn’t land right.

What I notice, watching it from close up, is that the move almost always costs him more than it costs her. She comes back from it, usually. She names what happened, or she doesn’t, and either way she files it, another data point about the temperature of the room. But something in him closes a little further each time. The door he closes when he goes cold is his own.

She asked him something simple. She said something hurt. And his body heard it as an indictment of his entire character. The heat rose in his chest because that’s what the wound does, it reads a small impact as a catastrophic one, and then it moves fast, reflexively, toward defense. The counter-attack is not cruelty. It’s a survival move learned so early it doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels like the only available exit.

But she’s not the enemy in the room. She’s the person who asked the question Percival asked. She said, in her own way, “What ails thee?” And the king went cold, leveled a counter-charge, and called it a draw.

The land goes a little more barren.

What I’ve spent years watching is the gap between a man who can receive impact and one who can’t. The man who can hear her without the blood leaving his face is not a man without feelings. He has the same heat in his chest. The same reflex toward the door. What’s different is he knows what the door costs. He can feel his hand on it. He can, sometimes, choose not to close it.

That’s the work. Not getting rid of the reflex. Not performing calm. Learning to stand at the threshold, heat in the chest, door in hand, and stay long enough to hear the rest of what she’s saying.

It doesn’t take a castle and a Grail quest. It takes thirty seconds in the right direction.

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From the outside, I looked fine. From the inside, I felt far away.

Disconnection didn’t show up for me as obvious numbness at first. It was subtler than that. It was the way my days moved too fast for my body to catch up. The way I could talk about my feelings with clarity, and still not actually feel them. The way I’d notice I was clenching my jaw was only when my teeth started to hurt. The way hunger would hit like an emergency because I’d forgotten to eat again.

And if you’d asked me back then what I needed, I would’ve answered from my head. I was full of insight. I could name patterns. I could explain the “why.”

But there was a missing piece: I wasn’t living inside myself.

I think the first moment I realized I needed to reconnect was embarrassingly ordinary. Someone asked me a simple question - “What do you want?” - and my system short-circuited. I didn’t have an answer that wasn’t a performance. I didn’t have an answer that wasn’t shaped by what would keep the peace, what would make sense, what would be easiest for everyone else.

I remember feeling this quiet panic, like... there’s a me in here somewhere, and I can’t reach her.

That was the moment I stopped treating disconnection like a quirky personality trait and started seeing it for what it was: a protective strategy. A brilliant one, honestly. My body learned that it was safer to leave than to feel. Safer to manage than to need. Safer to merge with the moment than to take up space inside it.

And then one day, that strategy stopped working.

Not because it was wrong. Because I was ready for something else.

Coming back wasn’t a lightning bolt. It was a slow, tender re-entry. Less like “fixing myself,” more like learning how to inhabit my own life again, one sensation, one breath, one honest moment at a time.

A Few words on the collaboration

Writing this with Dominique felt like sitting across from someone who speaks the same language, just with a different rhythm.

Our conversations kept circling the same truth from two angles: she names the pattern with such precision, and I keep listening for the lived experience underneath it - the quiet ways women leave themselves and the quiet ways they return.

This piece felt like weaving. Her clarity, my tenderness. Her directness, my devotion to the slow body. Somewhere in the middle, something whole emerged.

And honestly, co-creating it reminded me why I love this work: because reconnection isn’t a concept. It’s a homecoming. And when two people are willing to hold the same subject with care, the reader can feel that.

When your body became background noise

You know that feeling when someone asks how you are, and you pause? Not because you don’t want to answer, but because you genuinely don’t know?

You’ve been moving so fast, doing so much, taking care of everyone and everything, that you lost track of yourself somewhere along the way.

You’re here. Physically present. Going through the motions. But when you try to locate yourself inside your own experience, there’s just... nothing. Or numbness. Or a vague sense that you should be feeling something, but you can’t quite reach it.

That disconnection didn’t happen overnight. It was built, piece by piece, every time you overrode what your body was telling you. Every time you pushed through exhaustion. Every time you chose what looked right over what felt right. Every time you abandoned yourself to keep someone else comfortable.

And now? Now you’re so far from yourself you don’t even know where to start looking.

Connection with yourself starts in your body. Not in your thoughts about your body. Not in your judgments or your plans to fix it. In the actual felt sense of being inside your skin right now.

But most of us learned early that our body’s signals were inconvenient. That hunger should wait. That tiredness should be pushed through. That pain should be ignored. That emotions should be managed, controlled, and kept quiet.

So we learned to disconnect. To live from the neck up. To treat our body like a vehicle we’re driving rather than the home we’re living in.

Your body has been trying to tell you things for years. Tightness in your chest when you’re around certain people. Exhaustion that won’t lift no matter how much you sleep. That pit in your stomach when you’re about to say yes to something you mean no to.

But you’ve gotten so good at not listening that the signals have faded into white noise. Your body gave up trying to get your attention because you made it clear you weren’t available to hear it.

Reconnection means learning to listen again. To turn the volume back up. To treat those signals as valuable information instead of inconvenient interruptions.

The slow return

For me, somatic work wasn’t this big “healing journey” moment. It was more like... I needed a way back to myself that didn’t involve another workbook or another late-night spiral trying to figure it all out.

It felt like getting closer.

Closer to what my body was already saying before my brain jumped in with commentary.
Closer to that split-second moment where I’d usually override myself and keep going anyway.
Closer to the part of me that actually knew what I felt - before I talked myself out of it.

And I’ll be honest, I used to think being connected to yourself meant you’d feel calm all the time. Like if I was really in my body, I’d be grounded and regulated and... kind of softly glowing? 🙃

But that’s not how it went.

Sometimes being connected felt like my hands shaking a little.
Or heat in my chest.
Or tears showing up with no storyline attached.
Or this sharp edge of anger that I’d been calling “anxiety” for years because anger felt too risky to name.

So yeah - connection isn’t a vibe.

It’s contact.

Somatic work helped me get something I couldn’t “understand” my way into: my body wasn’t being dramatic. It was being straight with me.

And the reason I couldn’t access myself wasn’t because I wasn’t self-aware. I was very self-aware. The issue was that my nervous system learned, a long time ago, that it was safer to leave the room the second things got intense.

So we didn’t start with anything fancy.

We started small. Like... almost laughably small.

Feeling my feet on the floor before answering someone.
Noticing my breath without trying to fix it.
Putting a hand on my belly and letting it soften one millimeter, literally one.
Naming what was there in plain language: tight. buzzing. hollow. warm. heavy.

That’s the thing about coming back. It’s not glamorous. It’s private. It’s these tiny moments where you choose to stay with yourself instead of disappearing.

And then there was a turning point for me, when I realized that feeling something isn’t the same as drowning in it.

Because I genuinely thought if I let myself feel, I’d get swallowed. Like I’d open the door and everything would rush in and I wouldn’t be able to function.

But it wasn’t like that.

When I let sensation move, it moved.
When I let emotion have air, it shifted.
When I stopped trying to control the wave, it passed.

The biggest change wasn’t that I became more emotional.

It’s that I became more available.

More available to my own signals.
More available to the truth of a yes.
More available to the discomfort of a no.
More available to that quiet inner knowing you can’t access when you’re rushing, performing, or trying to keep everyone comfortable.

And that kind of availability changes everything.

Because when you’re connected with yourself, you stop bargaining with your own truth.
You stop needing a crisis to prove you’re allowed to have a boundary.
You stop treating your needs like an inconvenience.

You don’t become hard.

You just get clear.

Your nervous system holds the map back

When you’ve been disconnected for a long time, thinking your way back doesn’t work. You can’t logic yourself into feeling. You can’t understand your way into presence.

You have to come back through your body. Through your nervous system. Through the very thing you’ve been avoiding.

This is where people get stuck. They want a connection to feel good immediately. They want the calm, the clarity, the sense of being home in themselves. But reconnection often feels uncomfortable first. Because you’re finally feeling everything you’ve been pushing away.

The grief you never processed. The anger you’ve been calling anxiety. The exhaustion you’ve been covering with coffee and productivity. The loneliness that’s been there even when you’re surrounded by people.

Your nervous system has been holding all of it. Storing it in your shoulders, your jaw, your chest, your belly. And when you finally slow down enough to listen, it all starts coming up.

This is why so many people run back to disconnection. Because feeling everything you’ve been avoiding is overwhelming. It’s easier to stay numb than to sit with the waves of emotion that surface when you finally stop moving.

But here’s what nobody tells you. Those waves pass. The emotion that feels endless when you’re avoiding it? It moves through in minutes when you actually let it.

Your body knows how to release. It knows how to regulate. It’s been waiting for you to stop interfering and just let it do what it’s designed to do.

The practice of coming home

Reconnection isn’t a one-time event. It’s a practice. A choice you make again and again.

It looks like pausing before you answer someone and actually checking in with yourself first. What do I actually feel about this? What does my body want to say?

It looks like putting your hand on your chest when anxiety rises and breathing with it instead of trying to think your way out of it.

It looks like noticing when you’re about to override a boundary and stopping. Choosing yourself even when it’s uncomfortable.

It looks like letting yourself cry in the middle of the day instead of saving it for later. Shaking out tension instead of holding it in your shoulders. Saying the thing you’ve been swallowing.

Small moments. Repeated over time. Teaching your body that it’s safe to speak. That you’re finally listening. That you’re not abandoning yourself anymore.

What connection actually feels like

Being connected with yourself feels like this:

You can hear your own inner voice without it competing with everyone else’s.
You can sense your yes and your no before you explain them.
You can feel your grief without turning it into a problem to solve.
You can stand inside your own life without leaving every time something gets uncomfortable.

It doesn’t mean you’re never triggered or that you’re always confident or that you stop wanting connection.

It simply means you stop disappearing to keep it.

And once you have that kind of connection, even in small moments, your relationships change, because you’re no longer asking other people to be your compass.

You’re still kind and open, but you’re anchored.

If you’ve been detached for a long time, I want to say this:

Start where you are.
Not where you think you “should” be.

Try this, right now, as you read:

Let your eyes soften.
Feel the weight of your body supported by whatever is holding you.
Place one hand somewhere that feels neutral - chest, belly, throat, even your shoulder.
And ask yourself: “What’s here?”

Not, “What’s wrong with me?”
Not, “What should I do?”
Just: “What’s here?”

Then wait for a response that is sensation-based, not story-based.

Maybe you notice tightness, emptiness, warmth, or nothing at all.

All of it counts.

If you notice nothing, that’s also information. That’s where you begin.

Connection is something you practice.
A relationship you rebuild with yourself, one tiny return at a time.

And every time you come back, every time you pause, every time you listen, you’re teaching your body something new:

I’m here. I’m not leaving you anymore.

Final words

If you’re reading this and realizing how far you’ve drifted from yourself, you’re not broken. You’re just human. You did what you had to do to survive. And now you get to learn something different.

Coming back to yourself takes time. Takes patience. Takes willingness to feel uncomfortable while your nervous system remembers what safety actually feels like.

But you don’t have to do it perfectly. You just have to start. One breath. One pause. One moment of actually feeling what’s here instead of pushing it away.

Your body has been waiting. And it will meet you exactly where you are.

If you want a gentle way to understand how your nervous system learned to disconnect, you can explore your archetype here: www.dominiqueceara.com/quiz

If this moved something in you, let it be small and real. One breath. One pause. One true check-in before your next yes.

And Dominique - the way you name the pattern without shaming the person is its own kind of medicine. I’m grateful we made this together.

That spring break we decided it would be a good idea to save money by driving 26 hours straight to Miami. Four people packed up in a 1992 blue Lumina. We rotated sleeping upright while someone else drove. Truly our smartest moment.

8 days later we stumbled back into the apartment completely exhausted, ready to sleep in my own bed for a good 14 hour stretch. Little did I know, there would be a guest waiting for me. I opened my bedroom door, walked to my bed, and there was a pile of walnuts on my pillow.

Yes… walnuts.

Some backstory: for weeks before this, every single morning at precisely 5AM, I would hear scratching in my wall. Grawing. Chewing. It was always the same time. Like clockwork. I’d wake up, throw a decorative pillow at the radiator, roll over, and go back to sleep. Thirty minutes later, it would start again. Maintenance did nothing. Classic.

So when I saw the walnuts, I lost my marbles.

I remember the blood rushing to my head. I was furious and disgusted and so tired I could barely think straight. In my mind I immediately went to: now I have to strip my bed, carry everything to the laundromat (which was not in the building), I’m probably going to get bitten, get rabies, die. Super duper rational.

I stomped down to the rental office and told them I was going to sue them, call my mom, stop paying rent, and that this was not the last they would hear from me.

Turns out squirrels had chewed a hole from the outside of the building straight through the wall and were hoarding walnuts and building a nest on my pillow.

Fantastic.

I think about this story a lot when I talk about emotional fluency.

Because nothing about that situation was subtle. My nervous system went from baseline to full survival mode in about three seconds flat. There was no space between stimulus and reaction. Just immediate rage, panic, and catastrophic thinking.

Emotional fluency simply put is being able to move between different emotional states. It’s becoming aware of the energy in your body when you’re experiencing big emotional events and then granularly taking stock of each step you take to get back to baseline. From a dysregulated nervous system back to regulated.

I help women learn to trust themselves so they stop repeating the same patterns in relationships.

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The Practice ↓

In practice, this looks really simple.

Imagine a moment that brought up a big emotion. Anger, shame, embarrassment. It can also be something positive, like being wildly in love or excited for a new vacation. We’re just looking for a level of intensity around 7. The goal is never to go so high that you go offline. When we go into extremes we lose the ability to stay present with our experience. When you’re disconnected from yourself you’re unable to gather the data necessary to build your own unique self regulation handy-dandy tool kit.

Begin by noticing where that emotion shows up in your body. Focus your attention on the physical aspect. Chest, throat, belly, jaw, tingling, shortness of breath. Let yourself feel it fully for a moment.

Then practice coming back to baseline.

For some people that’s breath. For others it’s touch, movement, opening their eyes, orienting to the room, feeling their feet on the floor. There’s no right way. Different things work for different nervous systems.

What matters is noticing what actually helps you return to yourself.

And writing that down. Step by step.

I could look like:
1. I placed my hand on my heart.
2. I took longer inhales and exhales of 6 seconds each, three times.
3. I felt my feet on the ground.
4. I glanced at the grass outside and the sky above.

That’s how you build your regulation toolkit. The point isn’t to avoid big emotions, honey, you’re human. The point is to use them as data and notice how your body moves in and out of them.

And just to be clear, I had none of that wisdom when I found walnuts on my pillow.

This is Part 2 of my Not-Abstract Somatic Series. If you want more simple practices here is Part 1.

What was the silliest thing you did in college to save money?

I’ll go first: I opened several credit cards for free pizza and subs. (I closed them all immediately though!)

I want to read yours below!

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When I was a little girl, my grandma was meticulous. Like, meticulous meticulous.

She loved a clean house. The kind of grandma who, if guests were coming over, would make us go into our rooms and organize our closet, as if the guests were going to walk past the living room, bypass the array of pastries, coffee and donuts and head straight into your bedroom and start opening drawers. Like, “Hi nice to meet you, can I check your pajama drawer situation?” It was that kinda vibe.

I love my grandma. I really do. I learned so much from that woman. She’s honestly the one who instilled most of the values I have today. But she had this thing she would do about every month.

She’d come into our rooms and dump the dresser drawers onto the ground. Every single one. And the thing is, she didn’t even check if it was messy. It wasn’t like, “Oh wow, this drawer is a disaster.” It was more like… no matter how organized it seemed to be, you still had to go through it.

I had to pick out what didn’t fit anymore, what had holes, what I didn’t want. And then I’d neatly fold everything, categorize it, stack it, make it all make sense again.

And I get it. I actually appreciate that part of her. The minimalism. The “don’t keep things that don’t belong.” But I’ve been thinking lately… what if you didn’t have to get rid of anything just because you can’t justify it?

What if you could keep everything you want.

Like, I want that green boa I got from my friend’s 7th birthday party. I want it because it’s ridiculous and fun and it makes no sense. And also because it absolutely could have come in handy during my best friend’s Mardi Gras-themed bachelorette party years later.

And it’s not about hoarding. Or just keeping everything “just in case.” It’s something else. It’s not being forced to edit yourself before you’ve even been able to see what’s really all the way down there in the tiny corners of your longing.

This is what I notice with so many women: their desires don’t get to exist in the room as-is. They’re immediately negotiated. Immediately organized. Immediately filtered through practicality, guilt, timing, who they might disappoint, whether it’s “too much,” whether they’re “allowed,” whether it’s embarrassing, whether it’s realistic.

Use this before you respond to a text, commit to plans or talk yourself into “sure.”

Grab this Free 8 minute Yes/No check-in

The I Want Practice ↓

So one of the first practices I do with clients when we begin our work together is an “I want” list.

And it’s exactly what it sounds like. You just write down what you want. All of it. No explanations. No filtering. No “but I shouldn’t want that.” No “that’s not possible.” No “I don’t even know why I want it.” No trying to be a good, reasonable, acceptable, cookie-cutter person.

You’re not committing to anything. You’re not making a plan. You’re not setting goals. You’re literally just dumping the drawers onto the floor and letting everything be seen.

Give yourself 5-7 minutes and just write. Let your stream of conciousness guide you.

You want a rainbow colored G-wagon. Put it on the list. You want to a career that fills you with purpose. Put it on the list. You want fresh flowers on your coffee table and for the radio to play 2000’s rap every time you get in the car. Put it on the list. Then read it out loud. Extra credit if you film yourself.

Then simply notice. Notice the habitual thoughts, the flood of emotions, pockets of tension or warmth in your body. A lot can come up from this “simple” exercise. Our thoughts and our words have an incredible amount of power over us.

How does it feel to not have your wants filtered into something palatable? You’re just being allowed to have them.

Later, sure, we can sort. We can choose. We can decide what’s true, what’s next, what matters most. But first? Nothing gets thrown away. Nothing gets explained away. Nothing gets folded into a neat little pile so that the random guests can come over, peak in and categorize it.

First, it all gets to come out.

Even the green boa.

What’s your #1 I want right now?

I’ll go first: I want to build a community of women that support other women.

I want to read your wants below!

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And before your brain fills in the blanks, no one was hurt along the way. The kids were at their dad’s house. This wasn’t some scary thing. It was just… real and loud and so utterly human. And honestly? I want to normalize it.

Because how many times were we told as children, teenagers or adults to “just suck it up”? I’m so done with that advice. Actually, if you think about it, no one, and I mean no one, ever asked for that advice. It just got handed out like it was the ultimate truth. Like erasing your feelings was maturity. Like pushing it down was a symbol of strength.

But when you’ve gone almost your entire life being the “good kid,” caring about everyone else’s problems but your own, keeping the peace, being non-confrontational… what happens?

Everything you’ve pushed down lives inside of you.

It doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t get processed. It just sits there. It festers. And then it comes out in explosions of anger, resentment that feels like it eats you from the inside out and this kind of inner confusion that can leave you spiraling for days. That’s the part people don’t talk about. They see the “tantrum” and judge it like it came out of nowhere but they didn’t see the years of pushing. They didn’t see the years of turning a blind eye so nobody else had to feel uncomfortable.

I know this feeling because I lived it.

I was the living, breathing textbook definition of the good-girl, the people pleaser, the overgiver, the chameleon-in-every-situation person. Everyone saw me as the most confident person in the room but inside I was empty. I was voted “Best All Around” in high school. What a facade to have to live up to. And don’t even get me started on the petrified feeling of being found out, that you’re a total and utter fraud. That underneath this ever-so curated and fragile mask, you don’t actually know who you are or what you want, you just know how to read the room and become whatever gets you connection. The shame that feels so big inside it’s as if it seeps through your pores. Or about sharing your world with the meanest inner critic who judges you for just about everything and deems it a “failure.”

If you’re rebuilding yourself after divorce or separation, this is what we do in 1:1: build self-trust, hold boundaries without guilt, and stay you in connection.

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I felt like I was a hamster on a wheel with no way out. Just running and running, waiting until I might slip, trying to be good enough, agreeable enough, easy enough, helpful enough… and then being confused about why I was exhausted, resentful and secretly furious.

That was up until I started getting clear on my boundaries. Up until I started connecting to the core of my own body. Up until I started getting clear on what a yes, a no and a not-yet actually feels like in my own body. Up until I started prioritizing self care in a real way like 3 meals/day, breaks, hobbies scheduled in the calendar. And up until I started expressing my feelings instead of packaging them up into something more “acceptable.”

And yes. Sometimes that looks like a temper tantrum at 6:54pm on a Monday.

But here’s what I want to say about that: it felt like I cleaned out a lot of old gunk that was getting in the way of my joy. Getting in the way of me showing up for myself. Getting in the way of me believing in myself. Like something in me finally got to have a voice without being corrected, managed or talked out of existing.

So friends, if you read this and thought, “oh… that’s me,” I want you to know you’re not crazy. You don’t have multiple personality disorder. You’re likely just full. Full of everything you’ve been trying to be brave about, quiet about, easy about.

And I’m not inviting you to blow up your life. I’m not inviting you to scream at your partner or your kids or your coworkers. I’m inviting you to stop abandoning yourself in the name of being good. What is “good” anyway???

So this is your permission slip, cue your 4 year old self flailing, screaming, pouting temper tantrum. In a way that doesn’t hurt anyone. In a way that finally lets your body feel what it’s been carrying. In a way that says: I’m allowed to take up space in my own life. I’m allowed to exist. I’m allowed to express. I’m allowed to have big feelings. I’M ALLOWED.

Because sometimes the most grown-up thing you can do is express your feelings and let them move through you… instead of pushing them down and calling that “strength.” I mean isn’t this exactly what we’re teaching our kids?

Where in your life did you feel like you had to be the “good girl?”

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And I keep thinking:
This is what relational grief feels like.

When you didn’t ask for your life to change — but, honey it does

In the story, the woman slips (or is pushed — the text holds both possibilities) through the broken floor of her old world and finds herself suspended between what was and what will be. She lands only because the birds create a living net beneath her, and the turtle rises to hold her weight. (page 40)

That image — the soft landing she didn’t know she needed — feels so familiar to the women I support.

The end of a relationship can feel like that fall.

Everything that once felt stable gives way.
The mind tries to grasp meaning.
The body braces for impact.

And yet, there you are… in a life you never asked for, trying to find ground again.

The earth begins with a handful of soil

When Sky Woman arrives on the turtle’s back, there is no land. No structure. No map. Just ocean in every direction.
She believes she might die there until the sea creatures try, one by one, to dive for a bit of earth.
It’s the small, tired muskrat, nearly losing his life, who returns holding a single crumb of soil. (page 40–41)

From that tiny piece of earth, she begins again.
She walks in circles. She plants what she carried.
She grows a world from almost nothing.

This is how women rebuild after heartbreak.

Not all at once.
Not through force or urgency.
But through the smallest, most tender things:

A meal you actually taste.
A morning when you wake up excited for the day.
A moment where you place a hand on your chest and feel like you’ve got yourself.
A tiny boundary that wasn’t possible before.

We rebuild the way Sky Woman did:
By tending to whatever small piece of ground we can reach.

Creation comes from presence not certainty

One of the most beautiful teachings in this story is that new life emerges not from knowing, but from staying with what’s here.
Sky Woman doesn’t have a plan.
She simply walks the earth in circles — the same direction the sun moves — allowing the land to grow under her feet. (page 41)

This is somatic wisdom.

In seasons of rupture, your system doesn’t need you to figure everything out.

It needs you to:
stay close,
move slowly,
listen inward,
and let the next piece of ground appear as you walk.

The twins: the straight mind and the crooked mind

Later in the myth, the twins represent two ways of being inside all humans — not “good” and “evil,” but the straight mind and the crooked mind (page 42).

The part of us that moves clearly, truthfully.
And the part that moves sideways, through fear, defensiveness, impulse.

In relational grief, both parts show up.

You might feel decisive one moment and lost the next.
Strong one hour and crumbling the hour after.
Clear about your boundaries… until you’re not.

Nothing is wrong with this.

It’s just your inner world trying to reorganize itself after rupture, just like the world being formed in the story.

Both parts belong.
Both have something to teach you.
Both are part of how you become who you’re becoming.

So here’s the truth I wish someone had told me

You don’t need to rebuild your whole life at once.
You don’t need to “move on.”
You don’t need to know the ending.
You don’t need to be only strong, only wise, only grounded.

You just need your handful of soil —
your one small thing to tend to today.

And you need a turtle to rest on
(a friend, a therapist, a practice, a breath)
while your world reshapes itself.

When your whole life falls through the floor… who do you rest on?

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If this feels like your season…

If you’re in your own falling-through-the-sky moment,
If the ground beneath you still feels unsettled,
If you’re rebuilding slowly, in circles, from what little you were able to carry —

This is the exact work I hold women through.

You don’t have to navigate this alone.
You can land here with me.

But the body?
The body is always telling the truth in real time.

These questions don’t ask you to justify the past.
They ask you to tell the truth about right now.

Read slowly.
Feel each question.
Let your body answer before your mind interrupts.

1. Does my body feel safer when I imagine leaving… or staying?

We’re not going into full analyzation, Sherlock Holmes mode here.
Just notice: expansion or collapse.

2. When I’m with them, do I feel more like myself… or less?

If you’re performing, pretending, or shrinking — your body already knows.

3. Is my nervous system in a chronic state of waiting, watching or bracing?

Hypervigilance isn’t “crazy.”
It’s clarity.

4. Do I minimize my needs to keep the peace?

Peacekeeping often means quiet self-abandonment.

5. Are repairs actually happening?

Not promises.
Not potential.
Behaviors. Actions.

6. If nothing changed in the next 6 months, how does my body respond?

Your fear answers one way.
Your body answers another.

7. Do I feel emotionally nourished… or emotionally starved?

Honesty lives in sensation.

8. Am I endlessly trying to be “understandable”… while he stays unavailable?

One-sided emotional labor is a nervous system drain.

9. Does this relationship support who I’m becoming… or pull me away from her?

Your future self has opinions.

10. When I imagine the relationship ending, what’s the sensation?

Relief or panic?
Relief is information.
Panic is too — but often points to attachment wounds, not relational health.

What This Checklist Is Not

It’s not a scorecard.
It’s not a test.
It’s not meant to rush you into a decision.

It’s a mirror, a way to reconnect with the wisdom your body has been carrying for months (or years).

This is where clarity begins.

If You Want to Explore This With Support

This is the exact space I hold with women in 1:1 sessions — helping you slow down, feel what’s true, and rebuild the self-trust that gets shaken after relational rupture.

If your body softened reading this, you can work with me here.

With you as you piece things back together,
Amanda x

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Most women don’t Google “Should I divorce?” because they want a yes or a no.
They Google it because something in their body already knows…and their mind is terrified to catch up.

Let’s be honest:
If Google could scan your retinas, assess your cortisol, and spit out a happiness score like a cosmic report card, it would probably look you dead in the eye and say,
“Sweetheart… pack your bag,”
you wouldn’t still be scrolling at 2 AM.

When you’re in a relationship that feels confusing — where the story keeps looping, the promises don’t match the patterns, and you can feel yourself slowly disappearing, the most honest thing you can do isn’t dissecting the past.

Because honey, if replaying the PowerPoint of what happened in 2021 actually helped, you’d be in Bali right now.
With clear skin.
And a relaxed pelvic floor.

The clarity comes from pausing long enough to feel:
“What is true in my body right now?”

This is where somatic work becomes powerful not because it gives you answers, but because it helps you hear the ones that have been waiting.

Your answers.
Your truth.

Because you are the only one who carries the full picture of your internal world.
Not a guru.
Not a therapist.
Not anyone who tries to position themselves as having more authority over your life than you do.

And I won’t let you slip out of that truth.

Here, we do not hand our power away.
We do not outsource our choices.
We do not give someone else the final say on our path.

You are an oracle — your body, your wisdom, your knowing.
And anyone who ever suggested otherwise was speaking from their own fear, not your truth.

You’ve always had the wisdom.
Somatic work helps you clean out the pipes — all the gunk, all the noise — so your inner oracle can speak without interruption.

Why You Feel Stuck: The Language Problem

Most women use language that keeps them suspended in limbo — Olympic-level mental gymnastics that even Simone Biles would clap for:

• “Maybe I’m overreacting.”

• “Maybe it will get better.”

• “It wasn’t always like this.”

• “We’ve been through worse.”

This is past-focused language.
And it keeps your nervous system spiraling in place.

Somatic clarity is present-focused:

• “What happens in my body when I’m with him today?”

• “Does my system soften… or tighten?”

• “Do I feel emotionally safe right now?”

• “Am I expanding toward this relationship… or contracting away?”

The present is where the truth lives.
The body is where the truth speaks.
The brain? The brain loves hypotheticals and chaos — it’s not the best witness.

An Honest Truth About Safety

Women’s primary relational need is safety — emotional, psychological, and physical.

And when safety is ruptured (especially through betrayal or emotional infidelity), the body registers it as a threat. Not a symbolic one, an actual stress response.

This is why you can say,

“I want to stay,”
while your body packs a suitcase in the corner like,
“Okay sure sparky but… we’re leaving on Tuesday.”

Trust isn’t a thought.
It’s a felt sense.

And that truth you keep circling back to, even when you try not to?

“I don’t trust you every day — and no one is actively repairing that — so my body keeps telling me to leave.”

Most women try to override this with logic, loyalty, hope, or tenderness.
(And let’s be honest: hope can turn into a full-time unpaid internship.)

But the nervous system is honest.
It doesn’t lie.
And it doesn’t negotiate with unmet needs.

We can rebuild trust — but only when two people show up consistently.
If the rupture keeps happening or is minimized, your body won’t settle.

Coming Friday: The Somatic Checklist (Part Two)

Instead of stuffing everything into one post, I’m releasing the Somatic Checklist: Stay or Leave? as its own piece on Friday.

It will walk you through ten embodied questions that help you feel your way into clarity — without spiraling, bargaining, or abandoning yourself.

Think of today as the groundwork.
Friday is where we go deeper.

If You Want Support in the Meantime

This is the exact season I support women through — the confusion, the looping, the shame, the fear of choosing “wrong,” the somatic signals no one ever taught you how to trust.

If you felt seen reading this, that’s usually the sign you’re ready for support.
You can explore working with me 1:1 here.

What’s the one truth your body has been trying to tell you lately even if your mind keeps arguing with it?

(Your answer might be the beginning of your clarity.)

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With you as you piece things back together,
Amanda x

Before we begin, I want to say this clearly:
Part of why I write these newsletters is to offer real nervous system education, not the standardized, strategy-heavy “just do this” approach that dominates the wellness world.
A lot of people are already in a vulnerable place, and those one-size-fits-all “fixes” can create even more pressure, self-doubt and shame. F*ck a shame-based society. Seriously, let’s burn it to the ground.

Real nervous system regulation is highly individual. My self regulation tools will vary immensely compared to yours. We each have our own unique lived experiences that influence our tools.

Your body’s responses, patterns, protective strategies and thresholds are uniquely yours.

So this practice is not a formula. It’s an invitation.

If you want to try a shortened version right now, here’s a softer way in:

1. Bring to mind a small moment that carries shame.

Not the biggest one just something manageable enough to explore for a few breaths.

2. Notice where you feel this in your body.

Does it tighten your chest?
Drop your stomach?
Heat your face?
Constrict your throat?
You might try to analyze it, that’s okay, just notice that you are analyzing it and come back to the feeling, sense it.

Reminder: this is a practice like everything in life. Some days you might not feel anything, that’s okay. We are rewiring our patterns, slowly. If we try to go too fast, too soon, we may find ourselves in that crunchy shame spiral. “Why can’t I focus on my body, why am I in my mind again?” this perpetuates the same cycle. Invite in compassion for yourself and gentleness, imagine if you were learning to play a new instrument, you’re not able to play a full song yet. Give yourself the grace you would a small child, a beginner, a friend.

3. Make a mental and physical note of how shame manifests for you.

Ask: How does my body try to protect me in this moment?
Shame is often the nervous system’s attempt to pull you back into safety, not evidence that you “failed.”

4. Transition yourself out of the experience & track the steps you took to return to regulation.

Even if it was tiny like a deeper breath, placing your hand on your heart, an affirmation, or a pause.
Let your system follow the movement from activation → regulation.

That tracking is the beginning of deactivating shame,
helping your body complete the loop instead of staying trapped in it.

This work is even more powerful in a relational setting with a practitioner because together you can build a personalized toolkit for:

• how shame shows up in your body

• how you move from activation back into safety

• the sensory anchors that help you return to yourself faster and more compassionately

We’re not erasing shame.
We’re disarming it and teaching your system what safety actually feels like again.

If you’d like to explore this in a supported space, you’re welcome to book a discovery call with me.

What is personal is universal, odds are if you’re feeling it so is someone else. Share this post with someone who might need it today.

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Did anything shift for you after trying this? I’d love to hear in the comments.

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• “Was the divorce my fault?”

• “Did I make a mistake leaving?”

• “Why couldn’t I make it work?”

This is the secret search spiral that millions of women sit in every night.
And the shame that follows? It’s devastating.

Here’s the first truth you need to hear:
You’re not hysterical for asking these questions. You’re human. You’re hurting. And you’re trying to make sense of something that ruptured your world.

But something deeper is happening beneath the shame and almost no one talks about it.

When Guilt Becomes the Ground You Walk On

In my own story, guilt wasn’t fleeting.
It lived in my bones.

I blamed myself for the breakdown and ultimate destruction of my marriage.
I told myself, “I must be the problem.” “This is my fault.” “I should have done more therapy.” “Why can’t I just be happy?”

I didn’t have clear answers.
I couldn’t explain why I didn’t feel like fighting in the ways he wanted me to.
And in the absence of answers, my mind filled the silence with blame.

But the surprising reality is…
Shame isn’t proof that you did something wrong.
Shame is often times a trauma response. It’s your body trying to create control in a moment where you had none.

What most women don’t realize is…
Self-blame feels safer than accepting the truth that sometimes relationships end because they stop being livable for both people, even when love is present.

This is where the cognitive gap begins:
Most women believe guilt is evidence.
But the research on relational dissolution shows something very different.

What women believe:

“If I feel this guilty, I must have caused the breakup.”

What trauma literature + somatic research actually shows:

Guilt is often a protective mechanism, not a factual reflection of events.
It’s your nervous system trying to make meaning in chaos.

Why this matters now:

Because women are walking away from relationships feeling like failures not because they failed, but because no one taught them what somatic guilt really is.

Resolution comes later in this post. Stay with me.

The Invisible Weight of Shame

Shame peeks its head in like fog rolling in without warning…“you should have tried harder. “You should have known how to fix this.” “you should have been more patient, more loving, more flexible…”

But here’s the deeper cultural pattern interrupt:

Women are conditioned to believe that relational success = self-worth.
So when a relationship ends, the nervous system interprets it as a personal collapse.

This isn’t psychology.
This is sociology, patriarchy, attachment, and somatics colliding inside a single moment of rupture.

Somatic Truth:

Your body often blames you because it’s trying to protect you.

Taking the blame → creates a false sense of control.
And control feels safer than powerlessness.

This is called faux responsibility in parts work.
And it shows up heavily in women healing from divorce and heartbreak.

From Self-Blame to Somatic Safety

As a somatic coach working with women in relational grief, I see the same cycle over and over:

Self-blame isn’t a thought — it’s a bodily state.
Your nervous system speaks in sensation, not logic.

Here are practices I use with clients (and use myself):

• Body Focusing: Notice what your body needs, not your mind.

• Deactivating Shame: Track and notice where shame lives in your body without trying to fix it/dissipate it/disperse it.

  (be on the lookout for this practice I’ll upload it on Friday)

These aren’t solutions. These are not one-size-fits all.
They’re openings, maybe pockets of tension where self-blame begins to loosen its grip.

Small insight → somatic awareness.
Medium insight → understanding the pattern.
Big revelation → shame was never yours to carry alone.

Did You Make a Mistake? Or Did You Make a Brave Choice?

Here’s the reframe:

Most women think they need certainty to move forward.
But in relational endings, certainty is a myth.

Your choice may have been:

• painful and necessary

• heartbreaking and honest

• confusing and courageous

The identity collapse is real.
But so is the rebirth that follows.

You were never the entire problem. It takes TWO to tango, sista.
You were the one choosing truth. You were the pattern disruptor.

And if you’re still asking “What if it was my fault?” try asking:

What was I trying to survive?
Who did I believe I had to be?
What part of me was finally trying to get into alignment?

This is the status upgrade:
Rainbow colored glasses off. Clarity on… or loading (that’s f*ing progress too)

We are entering a season where women are done internalizing blame and are choosing somatic truth over cultural conditioning.
The next decade of healing will be body-led, not shame-led. PRAISE BE.

If this spoke to you, share it with someone who’s spiraling at 2AM.
Or tell me in the comments:

What’s the hardest part of self-blame in your healing journey right now?

Leave a comment

Your story will help another woman feel less alone. What’s personal is universal.

with you, right in the real of it,
Amanda x

This restoration requires an approach that respects the sacredness of boundaries, the intelligence of the body, and the complexity of human desire — without collapsing into pathologization or romanticizing violation. This is especially true when the betrayal has come from those in positions of care or power, as explored in Peter Rutter’s groundbreaking work Sex in the Forbidden Zone (1991).

The Ethics of Betrayal and the Disruption of Erotic Integrity

Sexual trauma, particularly when perpetrated by therapists, clergy, teachers, or other caregivers, violates not only bodily sovereignty but also psychic trust. Rutter (1991) asserts that the most devastating aspect of this kind of betrayal is that it occurs under the guise of safety. The person being harmed often does not have access to their “no” — because the very conditions that allow for a boundary have been strategically dismantled.

“There is no consent where there is unequal power, and where the trusted space is hijacked for personal gratification.” — Rutter, Sex in the Forbidden Zone

This betrayal splits the psyche: one part may still seek connection with the abuser or carry shame, while another becomes hyper-defensive, protective, or numb. Here, Internal Family Systems (IFS) becomes a vital healing path — not as theory, but as a lived, embodied re-integration of these exiled parts.

The Healing Intelligence of the Body

Susan McConnell’s work in Somatic Internal Family Systems Therapy offers a compassionate framework for working with trauma that lives in the body. Using awareness, breath, resonance, movement, and touch, the therapy allows survivors to slowly differentiate between protector parts, wounded exiles, and the Self — not as a mental construct but as a felt experience.

Survivors often report, “I feel broken,” when in fact, as McConnell notes, they are experiencing the internal disorganization of a system that was overwhelmed. With gentle presence, the body reveals what was frozen, suppressed, or too overwhelming to be known.

Reclaiming Erotic Imagination and Pleasure

A core wound of sexual trauma is the collapse or distortion of one’s erotic nature. Jack Morin, in The Erotic Mind, reminds us that eroticism is not confined to sex. It is the fuel of aliveness, creativity, and connection. Trauma can interrupt this current, but it does not eliminate it.

Healing includes differentiating erotic charge from trauma reenactment, a distinction Haule (2015) insists therapists must master. The survivor must come to know their desire, not as dangerous or shameful, but as sacred. This is not about restoring “function,” but restoring wholeness.

“Erotic healing begins when desire no longer serves survival, but vitality.” — Morin, The Erotic Mind

Consent and Boundaries as Sacred Practices

Consent is not a checkbox. It is a relational practice—moment to moment, embodied, evolving. Dr. Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent invites survivors and practitioners alike to explore the nuanced differences between giving, receiving, taking, and allowing.

In trauma healing, these distinctions matter. A survivor may “allow” touch but feel nothing — or feel flooded afterward. Learning to track one’s inner yes/no/maybe is a reclamation of power. Martin’s approach helps restore agency and clarity, especially for those who learned to override their boundaries to stay safe. Let’s illuminate your unique somatic recognition of these together.

The Role of Somatic Coaching in Rebuilding Capacity

Richard Strozzi-Heckler, in The Art of Somatic Coaching, describes trauma recovery as a process of “embodying new declarations” — learning to inhabit a different posture, breath, and presence that aligns with one’s true commitments.

Coaching, in this sense, is not motivational cheerleading. It is body-based transformation. Survivors who begin to reclaim their boundaries, voice, and erotic energy often report a shift in how they stand, breathe, and move through space. This is not metaphor — it’s neuromuscular reality.

Conclusion

Tending the wounds of sexual trauma requires more than talking — it requires listening. Not just to the story, but to the breath, the body, and the erotic self waiting to reawaken. As Haule writes, “The erotic is not dangerous in itself. It is how we meet it — or misuse it — that makes the difference.”

To heal is to reclaim the body’s dignity, the heart’s truth, and the sacredness of boundaries. It is not a return to who one was, but a courageous emergence into who one is becoming — whole, sovereign, and vibrantly alive.

Feel it to Heal it is written by Amanda James, Certified Somatic & Embodied Intimacy Practitioner . This is general guidance. For deeper 1:1 support ↓

DISCOVERY CALL

References

• Haule, J. R. (2015). The Love Cure: Therapy Erotic and Sexual. Spring Journal Books.

• Rutter, P. (1991). Sex in the Forbidden Zone: When Therapists, Clergy, Teachers and other Men in Power Betray Women’s Trust. Ballantine Books.

• McConnell, S. (2021). Somatic Internal Family Systems Therapy: Awareness, Breath, Resonance, Movement and Touch in Practice. North Atlantic Books.

• Morin, J. (1995). The Erotic Mind: Unlocking the Inner Sources of Passion and Fulfillment. Harper Perennial.

• Martin, B. (2017). The Art of Giving and Receiving: The Wheel of Consent Workbook. Betty Martin, Inc.

• Strozzi-Heckler, R. (2014). The Art of Somatic Coaching: Embodying Skillful Action, Wisdom, and Compassion. North Atlantic Books.

I’ll never forget the first time I watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The colors. The stylized sets. The dry, deliberate dialogue. It felt like poetry—odd, funny, melancholic, and strangely raw. I was mesmerized. That film sent me tumbling down a Wes Anderson rabbit hole. But nothing impacted me as deeply as The Darjeeling Limited.

Three estranged brothers. One train across India. A father recently passed. A mother who disappeared into an ashram.

They don’t speak much about the grief that’s driving them forward but you feel it in every awkward silence. In every clumsy prayer. In every attempt to control what can’t be controlled.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was watching something that would live in my bones for decades.

There’s something quietly profound underneath it all…

The Darjeeling Limited isn’t just quirky or beautiful or sad—it’s a mirror for unresolved family dynamics. A map for grief. A sacred spiral of healing disguised as a train ride.

Back then, I saw myself in Peter, played by Adrien Brody—the middle sibling, always on the move, always slightly out of place. Gripping a pair of their late father’s sunglasses like a lifeline. Escaping forward instead of sitting with what hurts.

Through the eldest brother, I recognized the mother in my sister. The planner. The caregiver. The one who packed the bandages while the rest of us bled out quietly.

And now, nearly 20 years later, I return to this film and I see the deeper layers.

Because what once felt like drama, now feels like ceremony. Every stop on that train? A reckoning. Every argument? A cry for connection. Every silence? A prayer. Every loss—especially the sudden death of the young boy in the river—feels like a soul-level wake-up call. A reminder that life is fragile, and healing doesn’t wait for permission.

As Jack says near the end of the film:
"I wonder if the three of us would’ve been friends in real life. Not as brothers, but as people."

That line has always stayed with me.

Would I still be close with my siblings if we hadn’t shared such a tangled past? Maybe not. But maybe that’s not the point.

Healing unfolds in relationship in the ruptures and in the returns.

Life keeps moving—relationships shift, new babies arrive, beloved ones pass, and in between it all, we’re just trying to find each other again. To understand where we came from and what still binds us together.

What memory of love do you return to, even when the world feels heavy?

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In the seasons of great transition—losses, births, heartbreaks—we’re offered portals. Invitations to reconnect not only with ourselves but with the ones who were there from the beginning.

Me and my siblings… we couldn’t be more different.
Different cities. Different lives. Different spiritual languages. But beneath it all? We're tethered by something timeless. A shared devotion. A deep, ferocious love.

We didn’t have the easiest childhood—not by any means. But we hugged each other. We said “I love you” every single day. And that means something. It still means something.

I hold on to that.

I carry it into my motherhood. Into the way I show up for my daughters. Into the way I hold my friends when they fall apart. Into the way I touch—gently, with presence, with reverence.

Because touch is medicine. Connection is survival. And love… love is the anchor we come back to, time and time again.

Even when the past feels like a shadow stretching too far. Even when the weight of what we endured feels too much to bear. I remember those I love you’s. The warmth of my brother’s hand. The presence of my sister’s eyes. We had each other when no one else was there. And that made all the difference.

I know I wouldn’t be the woman I am today without them.

So if you’re in a season of change, or estrangement, or longing, let this be your reminder:

Let love guide you.

Let love be your north star, your homecoming, your soft place to land.

Who helped you survive when you were still learning how to care for yourself?

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That question landed in my body like a soft thunder. It came through during a quiet moment of reflection, as I was studying power dynamics, practitioner ethics, and the right use of power in healing relationships.

And suddenly, I could feel it all — the unspoken stories, the somatic memories, the subtle ways I’ve spent years avoiding my own power. Not just because I feared being hurt again… but because I feared hurting someone else.

I realized:
I’ve spent much of my life fearing power. Not just being overpowered — but also becoming the one in power.

This is where the “aha” moment came in:

If we felt powerless during critical moments of our early lives — especially in childhood — we may subconsciously reject power altogether.

We may confuse leadership with control.
Presence with pressure.
Guidance with dominance.
We may even resent power, not because it’s inherently harmful — but because it reminds us of the very systems that silenced us.

When I look back, I see the ways I bypassed my own inner knowing in the presence of someone in a power role.
Whether it was in psychotherapy, education, medical spaces, or even spiritual communities…
I learned to doubt myself.
To freeze.
To assume they must know better.

So of course, when it came time for me to take up space — to lead, to charge for my services, to guide others — something in me hesitated.

There was a quiet, unspoken fear:
If I step into my full power, someone else might abandon their own.
And I would never want to be the cause of that.

But let me be very clear: this wasn’t me being a sweet girl trying not to hurt anyone.
This wasn’t kindness.
This was an unconscious pattern rooted in trauma.
A somatic reflex to power that said: It’s safer to stay small.
I didn’t realize I was doing it — but in avoiding power, I was doing a massive disservice to myself.

Because in trying to protect others from power… I kept abandoning my own.

Here’s what I’m learning:

Avoiding power doesn’t make us safer.
It makes us fragmented.
It keeps us from trusting our voice, our gifts, our leadership.
We give away or undervalue our work.
We silence our intuition.
We play small, call it humble, and wonder why we feel unfulfilled.

I didn’t want to be seen as “better than” —
Because I had witnessed how power was misused.
I saw how it could be cold. Controlling. Disconnected.
And somewhere along the way, I decided: I will not be like that.

But by avoiding power, I also avoided being truly present.
Truly embodied.
Truly responsible for the impact I’m here to have.

ready to feel again?
to rebuild trust with your body?
to live from intention, not just survival.

BOOK A FREE CALL

What if power could feel different?
What if it didn’t have to mean being on a pedestal or behind a wall?

What if power, when fully embodied, feels like presence?
Like devotion?
Like clarity that holds, but never clings?

Power doesn’t have to mean dominance.
It doesn’t have to mean being the loudest voice in the room.
Power — in its most sacred form — is the rooted knowing that I can trust myself here.

That I can show up, take up space, speak, charge, offer, guide —
Without collapsing.
Without controlling.
Without abandoning myself or others.

This reflection has changed the way I see my past.
The times I gave away my energy.
The years I undercharged, or didn’t charge at all.
The subtle shame I carried for not honoring the value of my work.

And beneath that shame…
There was anger.
Resentment.
Grief.

Grief for the ways I wasn’t protected.
Resentment for those who misused their positions.
And anger at how I internalized all of it,
Choosing to play small so I wouldn’t be “too much.”

But the truth is — we are meant to grow into our power.
We are meant to lead.
To speak.
To honor the value of our gifts.
To shine.

Not from a place of hierarchy, but from wholeness.
Not to overpower — but to walk with.
And in that space between, I find the truth:
That my power, when rooted in presence, is a gift.
Not a threat.

May this be a gentle remembering that power — when rooted in love and integrity — is nourishing. And safe.

with love,
Amanda x

Have you ever withheld your voice, gift, or presence out of fear of being “too much” or “above” others?

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Not a trim. Not a reshape. I’m talking chop it off. A bob. A real one. My hair’s been trailing halfway down my back for years now, growing with me through seasons of grief, rebirth, motherhood, separation and becoming. But recently, I’ve felt something stirring deep in my body, a message that says: It’s time.

And this time, I want it to mean something.

I’ve always been someone who lives outside the lines. My life, my work, the way I parent, the way I love—it doesn’t fit into conventional boxes. I’m a somatic practitioner. I’m a sexological bodyworker (in training). A phrase that, for most people, doesn’t even register. It’s the kind of work that lives in the shadows of social acceptance but for me, it’s where the medicine is. The sacred, the wild, the truth. I’ve spent years choosing the winding path over the straight one. Choosing embodiment over performance. Choosing depth over approval.

I know, I know, cutting my hair into a bob shouldn’t feel radical. But it does.

Because in this moment, it isn’t just about hair. It’s about voice. About visibility. About crossing into a new season of my life where I no longer need to be palatable, pleasing or passive. And why shouldn’t we make rituals out of big statements? Why shouldn’t we treat the scissors like magical tools and the cut like a spell?

I know the fashion language. My background is in it. I know how our emotional weather shows up in what we wear, how we style ourselves, how we move through the world. I’ve even taught it—forecasting trends based on mood shifts, global tensions, collective desire. But this isn’t a trend for me. This is a threshold.

My Co–Star app told me in December, “Cut your hair. It’ll grow back.” It felt like a birthday gift from the universe. An echo of permission I didn’t know I needed.

And now I’m seeing bobs everywhere. I’m haunted by them. Tantalized. Teased. It’s like the future version of me is waving at me from across the veil, already living the life that haircut stands for.

When I told my daughters, “Mommy’s going to cut her hair,” they say, “No, don’t. You won’t be pretty anymore.” My heart sank. We’ve had this conversation many times what beauty really is, where it lives, what it isn’t. And still, I know this moment matters.

Maybe that’s why I need to do it. To show them that women don’t owe anyone beauty. That change is allowed. That becoming new versions of ourselves doesn’t mean we’re lost—it means we’re listening.

I’ve realized I’m not afraid of the haircut itself. I’m afraid of what it means. That I really am different now. That the version of me I’ve been outgrowing is finally ready to be laid to rest.

So I might make it into a ritual. A small ceremony. Maybe I’ll bury a lock of my hair, say a prayer and let the earth hold the woman I used to be.

Because this isn’t a crisis. It’s a rebirth.

And I want to honor it as such. So yeah, hair is everything.

Share a moment that felt like a declaration of your becoming ↓

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