Not Broken. Responding.
What our bodies already know about the culture we're living inside of
I’m broken.
Two words, said quietly, usually. Sometimes to a therapist and sometimes to our partners. And every now and then, in the mirror at the end of the day that was too long and too much.
When clients share this with me, I can feel the pain behind the words, and I worry about the mind accepting it as fact. I worry about it calcifying. About us beginning to relate to ourselves the same way we relate to the things that break. With suspicion. And the quiet conviction that we can’t quite be trusted and can’t quite be whole.
But I know that the body always tells us something different. It knows what the mind misses, negates, and turns away from.
A tree bending in the wind is still a tree. A plant wilting in the August heat is still alive, still reaching towards. The response to hard conditions is evidence of life, and our bodies work in the same way.
The exhaustion and the tightness in our chests are our bodies communicating with us. Reporting, often accurately and consistently, to us that underneath a life that looks fine from the outside are hollow feelings that are out of alignment with how we want to live.
We know that we’re wired for safety. And for connection and attunement. We desire the kind of presence that tells another person’s nervous system you’re not alone here. It’s a biological requirement as fundamental to life as sleep and air.
When these are absent long enough, our bodies shift into survival mode. The lie we’ve been told by the culture is that this is what resilience looks like.
We built a culture that measures our worth in productivity. Performing connection on screens while avoiding it in the same rooms. Parents are handed impossible standards, partners are supposed to need less from each other, and all of us should be moving faster towards success.
And we talk about every solution that’s available to us except for the most important one.
Each other.
Our bodies aren’t lying to us when anxiety shows up alongside disconnection. When our relationships feel almost-but-not-quite. They’ve been screaming at us the whole time that these conditions don’t hold.
But we can change the conditions. By finally listening.
Instead of asking what’s wrong with me, ask what conditions have I been living inside of, and what does my body actually need instead?
Our bodies already know the answer to that question. They’ve always known, but we were just taught to explain it away as weakness, oversensitivity, neediness, and dysfunction.
We’re living, responsive, rooted, still-becoming human beings. Our bodies bend, they signal. We move toward safety when safety is present and away from harm when it isn’t.
This keeps us whole, not broken.
Our culture is the accumulation of how we meet each other. The small, ordinary moments that don’t feel like they’re building anything at all.
Our bodies know where we’re building and where we aren’t.
They’ve been keeping track the whole time.
—Tawny
Yes. Every single behavior makes sense to the nervous system.
The body is always responding to something. Sometimes it is responding to current conditions that are not actually holding. And sometimes it is responding to an old condition that became a nervous system imprint.
The body learned a prediction: this is not safe, I am not held, my needs are too much, connection will disappear.
That is not dysfunction. It is physiology.
And if the pattern is being generated there, that is where it has to resolve.