Why it feels dangerous to stop holding everything together...

Jul 25

even when you know, logically, nothing would actually fall apart

I want to tell you about the moment I noticed it.

I was lying on my mat, my own mat, my own living room, nobody needing anything from me… and I realised my jaw was clenched, my shoulders were somewhere near my ears and my breath was sitting high in my chest like it was waiting for instructions. There was no email, no one was calling my name from another room and nothing was wrong.

And my body was braced anyway.

If you’re the one everyone leans on, you already know this posture. You’ve probably been holding it so long you don’t feel it as holding anymore. It just feels like you.

Here’s what I’ve learned, in my own body and in the bodies of the women I work with: bracing is not a bad habit. It’s not a character flaw or a failure to relax. It’s a nervous system doing its job… a job it was given a long time ago, usually before anyone asked whether you wanted it.

Somewhere along the way, your body learned that things stay okay when you hold them. The family stayed okay because you managed it. The plans happened because you made them happen. People were fine because you checked and your nervous system, which is very good at learning, drew a simple conclusion:

holding = safe. letting go = danger.

Which is why you can’t think your way out of it.

You can know, logically, that nothing would fall apart if you rested or you can journal about it or you can understand the pattern completely, the eldest daughter of it, the good one of it, the reliable one of it and your body will still tighten the moment you try to put anything down. Because the part of you that braces doesn’t speak logic, it speaks sensation. It kept score in your muscles, not your mind.

So when rest feels dangerous, that’s not you being dramatic. That’s your body telling the truth about its own history.

I think this is the piece that gets missed.

We treat the holding like a mindset problem, so we throw mindset solutions at it, affirmations, boundaries scripts, another book about saying no and those things matter but the fear lives underneath the thoughts. It lives in the jaw, the shoulders, the breath that never quite drops into the belly and the body doesn’t release its grip because you argued with it well. It releases when it gets evidence. Small, repeated, felt experiences of letting go and nothing bad happening.

That’s what somatic work actually is.

Not fixing yourself or another performance of being okay. Just giving your body new evidence, slowly, at a pace it can trust.

It might look like nothing from the outside, lying down, breathing, noticing where you’re gripping and softening it by two percent. Two percent doesn’t sound like much until you realise it’s the first time in years your body has been allowed to hold less and the world stayed standing.

Here’s the quiet part: the rage that shows up when no one notices everything you carry? The exhaustion that doesn’t lift after sleep? The strange grief when someone offers to help and you don’t know how to receive it? None of that is dramatic. That’s data and that’s the cost of holding, finally being counted.

You don’t have to put everything down at once. Your body wouldn’t believe you anyway. (lol)

You just need somewhere to practice the first two percent.

I hold a free live class called the unbracing. An hour on zoom, cameras optional, nothing to perform. We work gently with the places your body has been holding jaw, shoulders, breath and give your nervous system a small piece of evidence that letting go is survivable.

The door's open whenever you're ready. You can sign up here and i'll let you know when the next one is.